Grotefend, Rask, Rawlinson, Westergaard, Lassen, &c. 293 In 1837 Colonel Rawlinson transmitted to the Asiatic Society his translation of the first paragraphs of the Behistun inscription -paragraphs wholly inexplicable according to the systems of Grotefend and St. Martin. By means of M. Burnouf's memoir on the inscriptions at Hamadan, which Colonel Rawlinson received at Teheran in 1838, he found that he had been anticipated in many of the improvements which he had made in the system of M. St. Martin, and with the aid of the "luminous critique" of M. Burnouf, and the examination of the Persepolitan inscriptions, he was soon afterwards enabled to complete. the alphabet which he has employed in his translations of the cuneiform inscriptions published in 1847. Having done every justice to the labours of his predecessors in the memoir on the subject which he drew up in 1839,* Colonel Rawlinson justly claims to have been the first "to present to the world a literal and correct grammatical translation of nearly 200 lines (since augmented to about 400) of cuneiform writing, a memorial of the time of Darius Hystaspes." From his lettered seclusion at Baghdad, where Colonel Rawlinson was carrying on these interesting researches, he was suddenly called to an important office in Afghanistan, where he remained till December 1843, when he found himself again at Baghdad, eager to resume the fascinating studies, from which he had been removed at the call of his country. From Mr. Westergaard, the celebrated Scanscrit scholar, who had visited Persia in 1843, he obtained several new inscriptions from Persepolis, from which he derived much assistance in his subsequent inquiries. Jacquet and Beer had, in 1837-8, discovered two new characters, and Professor Lassen had, from the inscriptions given to him by Westergaard, published the whole series, with an amended text and revised translation. Colonel Rawlinson's translations had been already completed when he received Professor Lassen's work, and they are published in his celebrated memoir "On Cuneiform Inscriptions," illustrated with eight large engravings of the inscriptions themselves, occupying the whole of the tenth volume of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Colonel Rawlinson has since published "A Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylonia and Assyria, including Readings of the Inscriptions on the Nimroud Obelisk, and a brief notice of the ancient Kings of Nineveh and Babylon."† In order that the discoveries of his predecessors in this inquiry * Published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. x. pp. 2-13 : 1847. This interesting little volume, of 84 pages, was published separately in 1850, but now forms Art. x. p. 401, of part 2d, vol, x. of the Journal above referred to. may be appreciated in this country, Colonel Rawlinson concludes his memoir with a comparative table of the Persian cuneiform alphabet according to the different systems of interpretation. The following is a list of the different systems :→ 1824. Grotefend, from Heeren's Researches. 1826. Professor Rask. 1832. St. Martin, from Kloproth's Aperçu. 1850. Colonel Rawlinson. In Colonel Rawlinson's commentary on the cuneiform inscriptions, to which we have already referred, he has briefly explained the process of decyphering the inscriptions, and taken a cursory view of the nature and structure of the alphabet employed in it. The necessity of addressing the population in three different languages spoken in the Empire, led to the trilingual inscriptions on the Assyrian monuments. The inscriptions at Behistun, Naksh-i-Rustam, and Persepolis furnished a list of more than eighty proper names, of which the true pronunciation is fixed by their Persian orthography, and of which we have also the Babylonian equivalents. By carefully comparing, therefore, these duplicate forms of writing the same names, and duly appreciating the phonetic distinctions peculiar to the two languages, Colonel Rawlinson had the means of determining, with more or less certainty, the value of about 100 Babylonian characters, and thus laying a basis for a complete arrangement of the alphabet. His next step was to collate inscriptions, and to ascertain particularly the same geographical name, the homophones of each known alphabetical power. "In this stage of the inquiry," says Colonel Rawlinson, "much caution, or it may be called critique, has been rendered necessary; for although two inscriptions may be absolutely identical in sense, and even in expression, it does not, by any means, follow that wherever one text may differ from the other, we are justified in supposing that. we have found alphabetical variants. Many sources of variety exist besides the employment of homophones. Ideographs, or abbreviations, may be substituted for words expressed phonetically; sometimes the aliocution is altered; sometimes synonyms are made use of; grammatical suffixes or affixes, again, may be employed or modified at option. It requires, in short, a most ample field of comparison, a certain familiarity with the language, and, above all, much experience in the dialectic changes, and in the varieties of alphabetical expression, Rev. Dr. Hincks' Discoveries. 295 before variant characters can be determined with any certainty. By mere comparison, however, repeated in a multitude of instances, so as to reduce almost infinitely the chance of error, I have added nearly fifty characters to the hundred which were previously known through the Persian key; and to this acquaintance with the phonetic value of about 150 signs is, I believe, limited my present knowledge of the Babylonian and Assyrian alphabet."-Commentary, &c., P. 4. The same process which Colonel Rawlinson employed in identifying the signs of the Assyrian alphabet was applied to the language, duplicate phrases giving the meaning of the Babylonian vocable, in the same manner as duplicate names give the value of the Assyrian characters. After having mustered every Babylonian letter, and every Babylonian word to which any clue existed in the trilingual tablets, Colonel Rawlinson frankly confesses that so great was the difficulty of applying the key thus obtained, that he was tempted, more than once, to abandon the study altogether, in utter despair of arriving at any satisfactory result. He considers the science of Assyrian decypherment as yet in its infancy; and he is of opinion that all that can be said of it is, that a commencement has been made, and that the first outwork has been carried in a hitherto impreg nable position. We regret that it is not in our power to give our readers much information respecting the discoveries made by the Rev. Dr. Hincks, in addition to those mentioned in the course of this article. In his first paper on the subject, he explained the system of writing used in the Van inscriptions, and shewed the nature of the language in which they were composed. His second memoir was on the Khorsabad inscriptions ;f and in the addenda to the paper, he claims to be the discoverer of the almost perfect correspondence of the Median, as well as the Van, phonographs with the Assyrio-Babylonian:-of the fact that the primitive value of all of these are Indo-European syllables, and not Semitic letters;-of the existence of ideographic characters with various uses, which he has fully explained; and the consequent possibility of a character being read in two or more ways according as it was used as a phonograph or an ideograph. In the same addendum he has given two brief specimens of translations from the Khorsabad inscriptions, with a view to illustrate passages of Holy Scripture, such as those in the Second Book of Kings, respecting the deportation of conquered nations by the Assyrians, and the planting of other nations in the cities from Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. ix. p. 387, March 1847. + Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxii, part 2. which they were removed. Dr. Hincks has given a further account of his discoveries in a memoir "On the Assyrio-Babylonian Phonetic Characters," published in the same volume of the Irish Transactions. He was the first to detect the name of Sennacherib in the group of arrow-headed characters at the commencement of nearly all the inscriptions at Kouyunjik, and written on all the inscribed bricks from the same ruins. Dr. Hincks also discovered the names of Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon, and in restoring to him the honour of this discovery, which he had erroneously assigned to others, Mr. Layard adds, "that we owe these discoveries, with many others of scarcely less importance, to the ingenuity and learning of Dr. Hincks." We cannot conclude this article without referring also to Mr. Layard's own labours in the field of interpretation, which are referred to throughout his volume; and it gives us much pleasure in being able to state, that the great services which he has rendered to literature by his Assyrian labours have been appreciated, and in a certain degree rewarded, by the Government. When Earl Granville was made Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, he gave Mr. Layard the appointment of Under Secretary, an office for which he was highly qualified. He of course lost this situation when Lord John Russell's ministry resigned; but he has since been elected member for Aylesbury in the new Parliament, and we have no doubt that when he returns from Constantinople, to which he lately accompanied Lord Stratford de Redcliffe on a particular errand, he will again find a suitable appointment under the liberal ministry of Lord Aberdeen. THE NORTH BRITISH REVIEW. AUGUST, 1853. ART. I.-1. Poetics: An Essay on Poetry. By E. S. DALLAS. London, 1852. 2. Poems. By ALEXANDER SMITH. London, 1853. the SCOTLAND seems to be doing something original at present in way of literature. Here, at least, we have two new works, each by a young Scottish author, which have already attracted as much attention, after their respective kinds, as it is usual to bestow on first publications of more than ordinary merit. Edinburgh claims the one débutant; Glasgow the other. Mr. Dallas, a young man of thorough academic culture, and an admiring pupil of Sir William Hamilton, applies his native talent and the habits of philosophical investigation he has acquired under his illustrious teacher, to the performance of no less a task than that undertaken of old by Aristotle in one of his treatises, and meddled with by Coleridge and others in modern times-the_systematic elaboration and exposition of a Theory of Poetry. "To discover the laws of operative power in literary works," said Dr. Whewell, the other day, "though it claims no small respect under the name of criticism, is not commonly considered the work of a science." Accepting this as true, but regretting that it is so, and maintaining that the very abundance of our critical opinions, and the superior depth of our criticism as compared with that of the previous age, make the want of a system of critical doctrine more felt-Mr. Dallas, with due modesty, offers his work as a contribution towards such a system, in as far as it is an attempt at a science of poetry and of poetic expression. While Edinburgh, in the person of one of her young metaphysicians, is thus philosophizing on poetry, Glasgow accomplishes the more VOL. XIX. NO. XXXVIII. U |