A History of Science, vol 4 - Henry Smith Williams (epub e ink reader .txt) 📗
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screeds above be also made of words, only the elect have any way
of proving the fact.
Fortunately, however, even the least scholarly observer is left
in no doubt as to the real import of the thing he sees, for an
obliging English label tells us that these three inscriptions are
renderings of the same message, and that this message is a
“decree of the priests of Memphis conferring divine honors on
Ptolemy V. (Epiphenes), King of Egypt, B.C. 195.” The label goes
on to state that the upper inscription (of which, unfortunately,
only part of the last dozen lines or so remains, the slab being
broken) is in “the Egyptian language, in hieroglyphics, or
writing of the priests”; the second inscription “in the same
language is in Demotic, or the writing of the people”; and the
third “the Greek language and character.” Following this is a
brief biography of the Rosetta Stone itself, as follows: “The
stone was found by the French in 1798 among the ruins of Fort
Saint Julien, near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. It passed into
the hands of the British by the treaty of Alexandria, and was
deposited in the British Museum in the year 1801.” There is a
whole volume of history in that brief inscription—and a bitter
sting thrown in, if the reader chance to be a Frenchman. Yet the
facts involved could scarcely be suggested more modestly. They
are recorded much more bluntly in a graven inscription on the
side of the stone, which reads: “Captured in Egypt by the British
Army, 1801.” No Frenchman could read those words without a
veritable sinking of the heart.
The value of the Rosetta Stone depended on the fact that it gave
promise, even when casually inspected, of furnishing a key to the
centuries-old mystery of the hieroglyphics. For two thousand
years the secret of these strange markings had been forgotten.
Nowhere in the world—quite as little in Egypt as elsewhere—had
any man the slightest clew to their meaning; there were those who
even doubted whether these droll picturings really had any
specific meaning, questioning whether they were not rather vague
symbols of esoteric religious import and nothing more. And it was
the Rosetta Stone that gave the answer to these doubters and
restored to the world a lost language and a forgotten literature.
The trustees of the museum recognized at once that the problem of
the Rosetta Stone was one on which the scientists of the world
might well exhaust their ingenuity, and promptly published to the
world a carefully lithographed copy of the entire inscription, so
that foreign scholarship had equal opportunity with the British
to try at the riddle. It was an Englishman, however, who first
gained a clew to the solution. This was none other than the
extraordinary Dr. Thomas Young, the demonstrator of the vibratory
nature of light.
Young’s specific discoveries were these: (1) That many of the
pictures of the hieroglyphics stand for the names of the objects
actually delineated; (2) that other pictures are sometimes only
symbolic; (3) that plural numbers are represented by repetition;
(4) that numerals are represented by dashes; (5) that
hieroglyphics may read either from the right or from the left,
but always from the direction in which the animal and human
figures face; (6) that proper names are surrounded by a graven
oval ring, making what he called a cartouche; (7) that the
cartouches of the preserved portion of the Rosetta Stone stand
for the name of Ptolemy alone; (8) that the presence of a female
figure after such cartouches in other inscriptions always denotes
the female sex; (9) that within the cartouches the hieroglyphic
symbols have a positively phonetic value, either alphabetic or
syllabic; and (10) that several different characters may have the
same phonetic value.
Just what these phonetic values are Young pointed out in the case
of fourteen characters representing nine sounds, six of which are
accepted to-day as correctly representing the letters to which he
ascribed them, and the three others as being correct regarding
their essential or consonant element. It is clear, therefore,
that he was on the right track thus far, and on the very verge of
complete discovery. But, unfortunately, he failed to take the
next step, which would have been to realize that the same
phonetic values which were given to the alphabetic characters
within the cartouches were often ascribed to them also when used
in the general text of an inscription; in other words, that the
use of an alphabet was not confined to proper names. This was the
great secret which Young missed and which his French successor,
Jean Francois Champollion, working on the foundation that Young
had laid, was enabled to ferret out.
Young’s initial studies of the Rosetta Stone were made in 1814;
his later publication bore date of 1819. Champollion’s first
announcement of results came in 1822; his second and more
important one in 1824. By this time, through study of the
cartouches of other inscriptions, Champollion had made out almost
the complete alphabet, and the “riddle of the Sphinx” was
practically solved. He proved that the Egyptians had developed a
relatively complete alphabet (mostly neglecting the vowels, as
early Semitic alphabets did also) centuries before the
Phoenicians were heard of in history. What relation this alphabet
bore to the Phoenician we shall have occasion to ask in another
connection; for the moment it suffices to know that those strange
pictures of the Egyptian scroll are really letters.
Even this statement, however, must be in a measure modified.
These pictures are letters and something more. Some of them are
purely alphabetical in character and some are symbolic in another
way. Some characters represent syllables. Others stand sometimes
as mere representatives of sounds, and again, in a more extended
sense, as representations of things, such as all hieroglyphics
doubtless were in the beginning. In a word, this is an alphabet,
but not a perfected alphabet, such as modern nations are
accustomed to; hence the enormous complications and difficulties
it presented to the early investigators.
Champollion did not live to clear up all these mysteries. His
work was taken up and extended by his pupil Rossellini, and in
particular by Dr. Richard Lepsius in Germany, followed by M.
Bernouf, and by Samuel Birch of the British Museum, and more
recently by such well-known Egyptologists as MM. Maspero and
Mariette and Chabas, in France, Dr. Brugsch, in Germany, and Dr.
E. Wallis Budge, the present head of the Department of Oriental
Antiquities at the British Museum. But the task of later
investigators has been largely one of exhumation and translation
of records rather than of finding methods.
TREASURES FROM NINEVEHThe most casual wanderer in the British Museum can hardly fail to
notice two pairs of massive sculptures, in the one case winged
bulls, in the other winged lions, both human-headed, which guard
the entrance to the Egyptian hall, close to the Rosetta Stone.
Each pair of these weird creatures once guarded an entrance to
the palace of a king in the famous city of Nineveh. As one
stands before them his mind is carried back over some
twenty-seven intervening centuries, to the days when the “Cedar
of Lebanon” was “fair in his greatness” and the scourge of
Israel.
The very Sculptures before us, for example, were perhaps seen by
Jonah when he made that famous voyage to Nineveh some seven or
eight hundred years B.C. A little later the Babylonian and the
Mede revolted against Assyrian tyranny and descended upon the
fair city of Nineveh, and almost literally levelled it to the
ground. But these great sculptures, among other things, escaped
destruction, and at once hidden and preserved by the accumulating
debris of the centuries, they stood there age after age, their
very existence quite forgotten. When Xenophon marched past their
site with the ill-starred expedition of the ten thousand, in the
year 400 B.C., he saw only a mound which seemed to mark the site
of some ancient ruin; but the Greek did not suspect that he
looked upon the site of that city which only two centuries before
had been the mistress of the world.
So ephemeral is fame! And yet the moral scarcely holds in the
sequel; for we of to-day, in this new, undreamed-of Western
world, behold these mementos of Assyrian greatness fresh from
their twenty-five hundred years of entombment, and with them
records which restore to us the history of that long-forgotten
people in such detail as it was not known to any previous
generation since the fall of Nineveh. For two thousand five
hundred years no one saw these treasures or knew that they
existed. One hundred generations of men came and went without
once pronouncing the name of kings Shalmaneser or Asumazirpal or
Asurbanipal. And to-day, after these centuries of oblivion,
these names are restored to history, and, thanks to the character
of their monuments, are assured a permanency of fame that can
almost defy time itself. It would be nothing strange, but rather
in keeping with their previous mutations of fortune, if the names
of Asurnazirpal and Asurbanipal should be familiar as household
words to future generations that have forgotten the existence of
an Alexander, a Caesar, and a Napoleon. For when Macaulay’s
prospective New Zealander explores the ruins of the British
Museum the records of the ancient Assyrians will presumably still
be there unscathed, to tell their story as they have told it to
our generation, though every manuscript and printed book may have
gone the way of fragile textures.
But the past of the Assyrian sculptures is quite necromantic
enough without conjuring for them a necromantic future. The story
of their restoration is like a brilliant romance of history.
Prior to the middle of this century the inquiring student could
learn in an hour or so all that was known in fact and in fable of
the renowned city of Nineveh. He had but to read a few chapters
of the Bible and a few pages of Diodorus to exhaust the important
literature on the subject. If he turned also to the pages of
Herodotus and Xenophon, of Justin and Aelian, these served
chiefly to confirm the suspicion that the Greeks themselves knew
almost nothing more of the history of their famed Oriental
forerunners. The current fables told of a first King Ninus and
his wonderful queen Semiramis; of Sennacherib the conqueror; of
the effeminate Sardanapalus, who neglected the warlike ways of
his ancestors but perished gloriously at the last, with Nineveh
itself, in a self-imposed holocaust. And that was all. How much
of this was history, how much myth, no man could say; and for all
any one suspected to the contrary, no man could ever know. And
to-day the contemporary records of the city are before us in such
profusion as no other nation of antiquity, save Egypt alone, can
at all rival. Whole libraries of Assyrian books are at hand that
were written in the seventh century before our era. These, be it
understood, are the original books themselves, not copies. The
author of that remote time appeals to us directly, hand to eye,
without intermediary transcriber. And there is not a line of any
Hebrew or Greek manuscript of a like age that has been preserved
to us; there is little enough that can match these ancient books
by a thousand years. When one reads Moses or Isaiah, Homer,
Hesiod, or Herodotus, he is but following the
transcription—often unquestionably faulty and probably never in
all parts perfect—of successive copyists of later generations.
The oldest known copy of the Bible, for example, dates probably
from the fourth century A.D., a thousand years or more after the
last Assyrian records were made and read and buried and
forgotten.
There was at least one king of Assyria—namely, Asurbanipal,
whose palace
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