are appallingly complex in
their elaboration. The Assyrians with all their culture, never attained
the stage of analysis which demonstrates that only a few fundamental
sounds are involved in human speech, and hence that it is possible to
express all the niceties of utterance with an alphabet of little more
than a score of letters. Halting just short of this analysis, the
Assyrian ascribed syllabic values to the characters of his script, and
hence, instead of finding twenty odd characters sufficient, he required
about five hundred. There was a further complication in that each one of
these characters had at least two different phonetic values; and there
were other intricacies of usage which, had they been foreknown by
inquirers in the middle of the 19th century, might well have made the
problem of decipherment seem an utterly hopeless one. Fortunately it
chanced that another people, the Persians, had adopted the Assyrian
wedge-shaped stroke as the foundation of a written character, but making
that analysis of which the Assyrians had fallen short, had borrowed only
so many characters as were necessary to represent the alphabetical
sounds. This made the problem of deciphering Persian inscriptions a
relatively easy one. In point of fact this problem had been partially
solved in the early days of the 19th century, thanks to the sagacious
guesses of the German philologist Grotefend. Working with some
inscriptions from Persepolis which were found to contain references to
Darius and Xerxes, Grotefend had established the phonetic values of
certain of the Persian characters, and his successors were perfecting
the discovery just about the time when the new Assyrian finds were made.
It chanced that there existed on the polished surface of a cliff at
Behistun in western Persia a tri-lingual inscription which, according to
Diodorus, had been made by Queen Semiramis of Nineveh, but which, as is
now known, was really the work of King Darius. One of the languages of
this inscription was Persian; another, as it now appeared, was Assyrian,
the language of the newly discovered books from the libraries of
Nineveh. There was reason to suppose that the inscriptions were
identical in meaning; and fortunately it proved, when the inscriptions
were made accessible to investigation through the efforts of Sir Henry
Rawlinson, that the Persian inscription contained a large number of
proper names. It was well known that proper names are usually
transc