A DISCOVERER OF LANGUAGES

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 47, 19 November 1926, Page 15

A DISCOVERER OF LANGUAGES

translator of cuneiform. Piles of unintelligible specimens of Oriental inscriptions had been accumulating for ‘2OO years in museums before a young subaltern of 23 years found the clues to the knowledge of the civilisations of ancient Persia and Mesopotamia, and r.dded thousands of years to the history of man. Egyptian hieroglyphs had been opened by the lucky discovery of the Rosetta stone which contained an inscription in three languages of which the Greek supplied the clue to the Egyptian. Lieutenant Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, father of the Lord Rawlinson, who commanded the Fourth Army in the Great War, was sent to join his regiment in India in 1831, He distinguished himself as an athlete, but as he also acquired a knowledge of Persian, .he was sent to that country with a military mission in 1833. Mr. Ernest Black, in the “Nineteenth Century” for September, relaxes that there he heard of the great rock at Behistun, on the face of which, 500 ft. up from the plain, Darius L, King of Persia, had engraved ''an inscription, lift, by 12ft., which recounts the way in which, after the death of Cambyses, he killed the usurper Gaumata, defeated the numerous rebels, and restored the kingdom. “It stood from B.C. 521 as a monument to a Persian king,” says Mr. Black; "since 1835 it has stood as a monument to Rawlinson.”

As he could not copy the giant script with his field glasses, Rawlinson climbed the cliff three or four times a day. He found an inscription written in three languages in paralled columns cut in the cliff, trimmed and dressed •in the shape of a writing tablet. Where the surface of the stone had been soft, molten lead had been worked into the face of the cliff to preserve it, and the whole had been covered with a coating of shellac, a large part of which had remained. The left column proved to be written in an alphabet of 40 letters, none of which he knew. A recurrent combination gave him the word ‘king,” with its plural form. Then he reached, “great king, king of kings,” and then, in conjunction witli this, three proper names—Darius, Xe xes, and Hytaspes. With so many letters he built up the rest of the alphabet, and, the language proving to be ancient Persian, he was able to use his knowledge of modern Persian to do the rest. The Afghan war interrupted his studies, but after it he was appointed to Bagdad. With the help of his translation of the left column, other scholars had deciphered the middle column from his copy. This proved to be ancient Median or Susan, another tongue which had disappeared from human ken. In 1817 Rawlinson returned to his cliff to copy tlie third column, which was very difficult of access. Of aH his army of helpers, only one wild Kurdish boy would attempt the cliff. 1 He succeeded in driving in pegs, to which Rawlinson attached a painter’s cradle. The new language was written, not in an alphabet, but in a script of 500 svmbols, each representing a syllabic sound. There was. also a host of other sjmbols which indicated what class the object belonged to—whether it was god, man, woman, wood, metal, vegetable, and so on. To this Rawlinson brought his Persian translation, and a mastery of Hebrew, Armaic, and other Oriental languages learne-l for the purpose. Letter by letter, this time with the aid of all the scholars of Europe, Rawlinson deciphered his text. Then a number of sceptics,. headed by Sir George Cornewall Lewis and Ernest Renan, denied the genuineness of the new knowledge. A test was arranged. Four of its new exponents were each given a new inscription which had not been deciphered. The four translations agreed so nearly that the examining committee agreed that a new branch of science had indeed been discovered.