of the ancient Arabic, with the syllables and perfect words yielded by the phonetic characters of the Egyptian system, but also the strong affinity of the ancient Hamyratic alphabet with the Egyptian demotic, of which he gives several interesting illustrations.

He was first led to his Egyptian investigations by his casual discovery, that a group of characters in the inscription on the Rosetta stone, did not give the Greek name of the city of Lycopolis, as supposed by Dr. Young; but its translation, in ancient Arabic, which he supposes closely allied to, if not the same, as the ancient Egyptian. The syllables in question are read ar, or air, and kuaw, by Young and Champollion, beneath which power, in default of a definite solution, they have simply placed the word Lycopolis, suggested by the Greek text. Mr. Forster, on the other hand, sought the meaning of these words in the ancient Arabic, and found kuaw to be the howling of a wolf, and thus that group of Egyptian characters was evidently shewn to be a translation of the Greek name, Lycopolis, founded on Lycos (wolf) and Polis (city), that is, the city of the wolf. This is certainly unimpeachable, and perfectly accords with the Oriental system of translating or paraphrasing names which they understood, rather than adopting the foreign name itself. Thus, we find on the Eastern coins of the Roman Emperor Augustus, his name translated as Sebastos, a Greek word having the same meaning as the Latin Augustus. Mr. Forster gives a new and interesting interpretation of a hieroglyphic figure of the god Thoth upon analogous grounds. But these are not entirely original views of Mr. Forster; for Dr. Young himself had perceived that the name of Octavius was, in one instance, expressed by its Arabic equivalent Zminis.

So far the new views and elucidations of Mr. Forster may prove of great value; but his method of dealing with the name of Ptolemy, or more correctly Ptolmaios, is open to much doubt, and, if true, would indeed throw into confusion nearly the whole of the materials which have been so elaborately collected and arranged for the interpretation of the Egyptian records.

Mr. Forster first attacks the assumption that the figure of the lion is to read as L in this word, asserting that of the 200 names for the lion and his characteristics contained in the ancient Arabic only one begins with L, while even in the Coptic only four do so. By the phonetic powers of the characters in this name, as Mr. Forster accepts the value of the phonetic powers of the hieroglyphic inscription, he could by no arrangement obtain the Greek name Ptolmaios; but very clearly the words hamum, jajah, rahi, which means the lion, or hero, great king of kings, a correct Oriental form of regal title. The corresponding demotic gives, according to Mr. Forster, aayar, raha, rahin, the lion, or warrior, king of kings. The lion couchant, in the centre, is asserted to be merely the "device of the legend," like the shield of arms on a modern coin. In the name of Ptolemaios, the title, as made out by Mr. Forster, is a fair figura

Not the modern dialect of the followers of Mahomet.

The city of Sebastopol, anciently Sebastopolis, was thus named in honour of Augustus.

tive translation of the Greek name, which is derived from odeμog, war. It is farther remarked, that the title Lion is common among Oriental princes, of which the assumption of the name sing (lion) by the modern princes of the Punjab is cited as an example.

Mr. Forster, gives a long list of cartouches, containing regal names, in which the couchant lion occurs, in all of which he states that it is merely a device and not a letter, the accompanying hieroglyphs forming titles similar to those he gives to Ptolemy. Among these are the names of Darioush (Darius), Tahrak, Khsehersh (Xerxes), Philippos, Arsenoi, and Cleopatra, upon the interpretation of which the whole modern system of reading the hieroglyphics is based.

I believe no one of our existing Egyptologers will be found willing to bow to this sweeping innovation; at the same time, the speculations of Mr. Forster are highly ingenious and valuable, and may, perhaps, find their true explanation in the eventual discovery, that by the practised skill of the sacred scribes the phonetics used to express the sounds of the Greek, Roman, and Persian names above enumerated, may also contain, by the ancient asssociations connected with the characters selected, a paraphrase of the name in the magniloquent Oriental style, as we find such titles in the Greek inscriptions of the Parthian and Greco-Indian princes; for one of which, Mr. Forster's reading of the name of Ptolemy might pass. Mr. F. farther states that hieroglyphic writing is entirely phonetic, and that the pictorial figures are to be taken as illustrations, just as we find them, to use his own example, in the "London Illustrated News." But this remark evidently arises from an imperfect view of the nature of determinative signs, so accurately defined by Champollion and Lepsius. In short, the interpretation of an inscription of the time of Rhameses II., relating to the gold mines of Æthiopia, published by Mr. Birch, in 1852; and the interpretation by the same Egyptian scholar, assisted by the works of the Chevalier Lepsius, of Thothmes III., the hieroglyphic inscription on the great temple at Karnac, published in 1853, are a sufficient refutation of the wholesale objections recently brought against the accepted system of hieroglyphic interpretation, however incomplete it may yet be.

Such is the present state of the question regarding Egyptian hieroglyphics. Though much has been done, much is doubtless uncertain, and even erroneous; but the first, apparently unsurmountable, difficulties have been overcome, and the final triumph is certain, though long years of learned labour must be consumed before it is consummated.

57

CHAPTER VI.

THE CUNEIFORM WRITING OF ASSYRIA, BABYLONIA, AND PERSIA.

O fragments of papyrus, as in the case of Egypt, have conveyed to all parts of Europe remnant specimens of the handwriting of the people forming the great empires of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia, even at the latest period of their existence. The chief monuments of their written character were for many ages only to be found in the long unread carvings upon the lofty rocks of Asia, the very import of the characters of which had become a mystery. These sculptured records of the mountain side, which were engraved by order of victorious monarchs, whose very names had passed into oblivion, to record the subjection of conquered nations now unknown, have, after their long concealment in the depths of the forgotten East, astonished modern travellers by their extent, the beauty of their execution, and their wonderful preservation. The gigantic records, of the long-buried palaces of Nineveh, so miraculously disentombed in our own day, are the monuments by means of which we have been made acquainted with characters which are, doubtless, similar to, if not identical with, those of the "handwriting on the wall," which was interpreted by the prophet Daniel. And this" handwriting" with which the walls of the ruined palaces are covered, forms one of the most striking and graphic illustrations of that and other passages of the Jewish Scriptures.

It was my intention in the present work to arrange the still existing monuments which refer to the history of writing in something like chronological order; but I have already been obliged openly to deviate from that mode of arrangement in two instances, that of Mexico and that of China, a deviation which I adopted with the view of at all events making the order of progression perfect, even at the expense of that of strict chronological succession. After having disposed of the progressive development of the art in Egypt, the chronological part of the question arises again as to which class of writing shall take the next place. As regards the Egyptians themselves, it is matter for discussion whether they received the art in a primitive form from some other nation, or whether they originated it. themselves. Colonel Rawlinson, however, is of opinion-and I have long held the same that civilisation originated first on the Nile, and was from thence thrown back upon the East, by a kind of periodical reflux; an action which was still at work in medieval times, and is strikingly so at the present

day. Assuming, therefore, that the Egyptians, and not the nations of India, conferred the art of writing upon the Assyrians, Phoenicians, and other nations, both of central and western Asia, it becomes a question whether the Assyrians or the Phoenicians were the first to adopt a system of writing founded on that of the Egyptians, and mould it into a system of notation for their own language. It is possible that this achievement may have been effected during the ancient supremacy in Egypt of the shepherd kings of Phoenicia; but as no Phoenician monuments of this early date exist, and as the earliest known examples of their system of writing exhibit a much more advanced stage of the art than the earliest Assyrian records, it will be more instructive to consider the Assyrian system first, especially as its existing monuments are more ancient than any known of Phoenicia, and form the natural link of progress between the Phoenician system of writing and that of Egypt. The probable date at present generally agreed on for the earliest specimens of cuneiform inscriptions is between 1000 and 1300 B.C., while the oldest Phoenician inscriptions now in existence cannot claim a higher antiquity than between four and five centuries B.C.

The decyphering of the cuneiform character is an event of a very recent achievement, and forms an epoch in the annals of the science of paleography almost as remarkable and interesting as that of the interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics by Young and Champollion. Indeed, both the Egyptian and Assyrian discoveries are the result of modern, and very recent erudition and investigation, and are not among the least striking evidences of the great general progress of the last thirty years. The mode of both these discoveries was similar; for, as the first step in the interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics was made through the medium of the bilingual and trilitteral inscription of the celebrated Rosetta stone, so the first real progress towards a true knowledge of the meaning of cuneiform characters was effected, by similar means, through the study of the inscriptions at Persepolis and Pasargada, which, addressed as they were to a wide-spread population, speaking different dialects, were written in three languages; just as a governor of Baghdad at the present day publishes an edict in Persian, Turkish, and Arabic.

The three languages of these cuneatic inscriptions were the ancient Persian, the Assyrian, and a dialect addressed to the Medes, which has lately been termed Scythic, all three being closely allied to the Zend, or Sanscrit; and the Assyrian bearing the strongest resemblance to the Hebrew and ancient Chaldee.

The cuneatic, or wedge-shaped, characters of Assyria and Persia are of two forms, the one notched at the obtuse end, the other square. The wedge form of the characters is supposed by some to have originated from the custom of writing on moist clay with a sharp stick, of which custom the earliest Babylonian bricks are examples; indeed there appears some reason to conclude, from passages in ancient writers, and modern fragmentary remains, that thin slabs of clay formed

the Babylonian substitute for papyrus or vellum, for keeping their historical chronicles and astronomical observations. In fact, vast piles of flat bricks, or slabs, inscribed with cuneatic letters, have recently been found arranged as though in a record chamber. Writing on such a substance was analagous to the mode afterwards used by the Grecks and Romans, when they wrote on tablets covered with wax, in which, with a sharp instrument called a stylus, they engraved, or rather scratched, the characters required. It may be conceived, and even tested by experiment, that in using a hard sharp point, to mark characters deeply in soft clay, curves would be difficult of execution; and it would naturally occur to a person to form the characters by means of a combination of straight lines placed at different angles, which would naturally be blunt at the end, where the wooden stylus was first inserted, and sharp where it was withdrawn; thus of necessity producing the wedge-form in cach main line.

Supposing the demotic character of Egypt to have been the model, or parent, of the Assyrian system, we may conceive how its form may have been thus modified by writing it with a sharp tool upon clay, and how the simple wedge-formed characters may have eventually assumed the arrow-head shape, by receiving another touch at the broad end, by way of finish. This modification of form may have been more developed and better defined, when, in monumental inscriptions, the letters had to be cut upon stone; a process performed more deliberately, and with greater care, than in the archives inscribed on clay.

Several ancient authors have alluded to the cuneiform writing of Assyria and Persia, but not in a manner to assist modern investigation. Nevertheless, such passages, wherever they occur, become now of great value, as illustrating modern discovery, though they were too vague to assist it.

Both Herodotus and Diodorus allude to the cuneiform system, under the names of Syrian and Assyrian writing, and Clemens of Alexandria speaks of it in more detail, but still without distinctness. The "tablets" of Acicarus were most probably in the cuneiform character, which, at the beginning of the fourth century B.C., was evidently still understood; as the Greek philosopher Democritus is said to have translated those inscriptions, and to have incorporated their contents in his works on Babylonian ethics. Glimpses of this brief nature are all the information to be gleaned from the scanty notices of ancient authors on this subject.

The claim of Egyptian parentage for this class of writing appears, at first, shaken by the fact, that the writing of Egypt invariably runs from right to left, while the Assyrian is to be read from left to right. But in considering this difficulty, I have been led to the fact, that the earliest class of cuneiform writing is that found on the cylinders, or seals, of which such numbers have been discovered, containing very probably royal proclamations and edicts, of which copies could be multiplied by impressions in clay, and circulated ad