Milton C. Fisher
No, it wasn’t easy! Not only were some eight decades of random efforts required to unlock the ancient literary treasures pricked into clay tablets (cuneiform writing), and two decades of labor on Egyptian hieroglyphs even after the Rosetta Stone furnished the key, but half a dozen or more scholars of varying backgrounds and nationalities were involved in each case.
We have named (in previous issues), along with J. F. Champollion, T. Young for Egyptian; and with H. C. Rawlinson in his success on Akkadian, G. Fo Grotefend the pioneer of Old Persian. But there were a number of others. So complex were both the cryptographical and the linguistic problems that only a long series of intelligent guesses, plus some trial and error and successive sudden breakthroughs, led to satisfying results.
Hieroglyphs
In the case of the Egyptian hieroglyphs they were faced with decisions on sign values. Some were single phonemes (consonant or vowel), some were syllables, and others ideograms (whole words or concepts) and ‘determinatives’ (indicators of categories – as of ,entity or kind, gender, actions). With Akkadian (and other languages that shared the cuneiform method), cuneiform writing confronted them with choices from among over 300 signs to begin with (which were modified over the
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centuries!), plus three syllable types (CV – consonant/vowel – VC, or CVC), as Well as ideograms and determinatives and the confusing homophones (multiple signs for the same sound) and polyphones (multiple sounds from one sign). HOW did they ever do it?
The brilliant English physicist, Thomas Young, studied a copy of the Rosetta Stone inscription in 1814. He quickly verified work already done on the Demotic words (shorthand hieroglyphic), utilizing the Greek translation text, then began assigning sound values to the hieroglyphic signs in the cartouches – which someone had rightly guessed contained proper names. Personal names of Greek origin had simply been transliterated (spelled in a different alphabet), so he worked out what Professor C. H. Gordon [see box above] calls “the rudimentary foundation of scientific Egyptology.”
Here is how it works. Using the Greek name PTOLEMAIOS (from the Greek section of the Rosetta text) he read in the hieroglyphic section
as well as BERNICE
Note: EGG (=feminizing ‘determinative’)
The very next year, J. W. Banks excavated a granite obelisk at Philae with another Greek name clue – CLEOPATRA, which yielded
(Note that the HAND-sign equals both ‘d’ and ‘t’. This is a poly-phone.)
Meanwhile, Champollion, who until 1821 was hung up on the notion that, except for these foreign name transcriptions, the signs were symbolic rather than phonetic, suddenly saw them as combined: phonetic and ideographic. After he worked out some more classical names and titles -Alexander, Hadrian, Caesar (‘Kaisaros’), and ‘autokrator’ – a helpful breakthrough came with the realization that EGYPTIAN names in cartouche form at the Abu Simbel rock temple were spelled out, just like the foreign ones. These were RAMESES and THOTMES:
Cuneiform
Cuneiform decipherment began with the pioneer work on Old Persian by Georg F. Grotefend, a young high school teacher in Gottingen. He used clues from Silvestre de Sacy’s translation of the royal Pehlevi formulas (Middle Persian) by means of the Greek version of bilingual inscriptions. This yielded phonetic evidence for proper names in trilingual (Old Persian/Elamite/Akkadian) inscriptions, such as the inaccessible mountainside reliefs at Behistun. We saw (Vol. I, No. 2) how Raw1inson managed to work with those.
Henry Rawlinson laboriously worked his way through Old Persian
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syllabary, reading words like
Eventually, he was able to transliterate into Roman letters some equivalent names and common words in the Old Babylonian text, as
that is, King Xerxes (= Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther}. In time, less obvious vocabulary became manageable, such as
Combinations and Alphabets
Thereafter, working always from the known to the unknown still more ancient Near Eastem languages were discovered and deciphered, such as cuneiform and hieroglyphic Hittite and the Canaanite Hebrew cognate, Ugaritic. Because the latter was truly alphabetic, employing thirty simplified cuneiform ‘letters’, three scholars working practically independently were able to achieve similar readings within six months of publication of the original texts.
Now the Ebla cuneiform tablets are being worked upon. So the task goes on, still arduous but with promise of good results in the light of earlier successes.
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