Part 2 (1/2)

[31] _Genesis_ x. 6-20.

[32] _Genesis_ x. 22: ”The children of Shem.”

[33] _Genesis_ xi. 27-32.

[34] In his paper upon the _Date des ecrits qui portent les Noms de Berose et de Manethou_ (Hachette, 8vo. 1873), M. ERNEST HAVET has attempted to show that neither of those writers, at least as they are presented in the fragments which have come down to us, deserve the credence which is generally accorded to them. The paper is the production of a vigorous and independent intellect, and there are many observations which should be carefully weighed, but we do not believe that, as a whole, its hypercritical conclusions have any chance of being adopted. All recent progress in Egyptology and a.s.syriology goes to prove that the fragments in question contain much authentic and precious information, in spite of the carelessness with which they were transcribed, often at second and third hand, by abbreviators of the _ba.s.se epoque_.

[35] See -- 2 of Fragment 1. of BEROSUS, in the _Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum_ of CH. MuLLER (_Bibliotheque Grecque-Latine_ of Didot), vol. ii.

p. 496; En de te Babuloni polu plethos anthropon genesthai alloethnon katoikesanton ten Chaldaian.

[36] Gaston MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, liv. ii.

ch. iv. _La Chaldee_. Francois LENORMANT, _Manuel d'Histoire ancienne de l'Orient_, liv. iv. ch. i. (3rd edition).

[37] The princ.i.p.al texts in which these terms are to be met with are brought together in the _Worterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen_ of PAPE (3rd edition), under the words Kissia, Kissioi, Kossaioi.

[38] A single voice, that of M. Halevy, is now raised to combat this opinion. He denies that there is need to search for any language but a Semitic one in the oldest of the Chaldaean inscriptions. According to him, the writing under which a Turanian idiom is said to lurk, is no more than a variation upon the a.s.syrian fas.h.i.+on of noting words, than an early form of writing which owed its preservation to the quasi-sacred character imparted by its extreme antiquity. We have no intention of discussing his thesis in these pages; we must refer those who are interested in the problem to M.

HALeVY'S dissertation in the _Journal Asiatique_ for June 1874: _Observations critiques sur les pretendus Touraniens de la Babylonie_. M.

Stanislas Guyard shares the ideas of M. Halevy, to whom his accurate knowledge and fine critical powers afford no little support.

[39] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 134. Upon the etymology of _Turanians_ see MAX MuLLER'S _Science of Language_, 2nd edition, p. 300, _et seq._ Upon the const.i.tuent characteristics of the Turanian group of races and languages other pages of the same work may be consulted.... The distinction between Turan and Iran is to be found in the literature of ancient Persia, but its importance became greater in the Middle Ages, as may be seen by reference to the great epic of Firdusi, the _Shah-Nameh_.

The kings of Iran and Turan are there represented as implacable enemies. It was from the Persian tradition that Professor Muller borrowed the term which is now generally used to denote those northern races of Asia that are neither Aryans nor Semites.

[40] This family is sometimes called _Ural-Altac_, a term formed in similar fas.h.i.+on to that of _Indo-Germanic_, which has now been deposed by the term Aryan. It is made up of the names of two mountain chains which seem to mark out the s.p.a.ce over which its tribes were spread. Like the word _Indo-Germanic_, it made pretensions to exact.i.tude which were only partially justified.

[41] This is the opinion of M. OPPERT. He was led to the conclusion that their writing was invented in a more northern climate than that of Chaldaea, by a close study of its characters. There is one sign representing a bear, an animal which does not exist in Chaldaea, while the lions which were to be found there in such numbers had to be denoted by paraphrase, they were called _great dogs_. The palm tree had no sign of its own. See in the _Journal Asiatique_ for 1875, p. 466, a note to an answer to M. Halevy ent.i.tled _Summerien ou rien_.

[42] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, p. 135.

[43] These much disputed terms, Sumer and Accad, are, according to MM.

Halevy and Guyard, nothing but the geographical t.i.tles of two districts of Lower Chaldaea.

-- 4.--_The Wedges._

The writing of Chaldaea, like that of Egypt, was, in the beginning, no more than the abridged and conventionalized representation of familiar objects.

The principle was identical with that of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and of the oldest Chinese characters. There are no texts extant in which images are exclusively used,[44] but we can point to a few where the ideograms have preserved their primitive forms sufficiently to enable us to recognize their origin with certainty. Among those a.s.syrian syllabaries which have been so helpful in the decipherment of the wedges, there is one tablet where the primitive form of each symbol is placed opposite the group of strokes which had the same value in after ages.[45]

This tablet is, however, quite exceptional, and, as a rule, the cuneiform characters cannot thus be traced to their primitive form. But well-ascertained and independent facts allow us to come to certain conclusions which even this scanty evidence is enough to confirm.

In inventing the process of writing and bringing it to perfection, the human intellect worked on the same lines among the Turanians of Chaldaea as it did everywhere else. The point of departure and the early stages have been the same for all peoples, although some have stopped half-way and others when three-fourths of the journey were complete. The supreme discovery which should crown the effort is the attribution of a special sign to each of the elementary articulations of the human voice. This final object, an object towards which the most gifted nations of antiquity were working for so many centuries, was just missed by the Egyptians. They were, we may say, wrecked in port, and the glory of creating the alphabet that men will use as long as they think and write was reserved for the Phoenicians.

Even when their civilization was at its height the Babylonians never came so near to alphabetism as the Egyptians. This is not the place for an inquiry into the reasons of their failure, nor even for an explanation how signs with a phonetic value forced themselves in among the ideograms, and became gradually more and more important. Our interest in the two kinds of writing is of a different nature; we have to learn and explain their influence upon the plastic arts in the countries where they were used.

In our attempt to define the style of Egyptian sculpture and to give reasons for its peculiar characteristics, we felt obliged to attribute great importance to the habits of eye and hand suggested and confirmed by the cutting and painting of the hieroglyphs. In their monumental inscriptions, if nowhere else, the symbols of the Egyptian system retained their concrete imagery to the end; and the images, though abridged and simplified, never lost their resemblance;[46] and if it is necessary to know something more than the particular animal or thing which they represent before we can get at their meaning, that is only because in most cases they had a metaphorical or even a purely phonetic signification as well as their ideographic one. For the most part, however, it is easy to recognize their origin, and in this they differ greatly from the symbols of the first Chaldaean alphabet. In the very oldest doc.u.ments there are certain ideograms that, when we are warned, remind us of the natural objects from which their forms have been taken, but the connection is slight and difficult of apprehension. Even in the case of those characters whose forms most clearly suggest their true figurative origin, it would have been impossible to a.s.sign its prototype to each without the help of later texts, where, with more or less modification, they formed parts of sentences whose general significance was known. Finally, the a.s.syrian syllabaries have preserved the meaning of signs, that, so far as we can judge, would otherwise have been stumbling-blocks even to the wise men of Nineveh when they were confronted with such ancient inscriptions as those whose fragments are still found among the ruins of Lower Chaldaea.

Even in the remote days that saw the most venerable of these inscriptions cut, the images upon which their forms were based had been rendered almost unrecognizable by a curious habit, or caprice, which is unique in history.

Writing had not yet become entirely _cuneiform_, it had not yet adopted those triangular strokes which are called sometimes nails, sometimes arrow-heads, and sometimes wedges, as the exclusive const.i.tuents of its character. If we examine the tablets recovered by Mr. Loftus from the ruins of Warka, the ancient Erech (Fig. 1), or the inscriptions upon the diorite statues found at Tello by M. de Sarzec (Fig. 2), we shall find that in the distant period from which those writings date, most of the characters had what we may call an unbroken trace.[47] This trace, like that of the hieroglyphs, would have been well fitted for the succinct imitation of natural objects but for a rigid exclusion of those curves of which nature is so fond. This exclusion is complete, all the lines are straight, and cut one another at various angles. The horror of a curve is pushed so far that even the sun, which is represented by a circle in Egyptian and other ideographic systems, is here a lozenge.