Cuneiform, Cuneate, Wedge-shaped, Arrow-headed (Fr. tête-à-clou, Ger. keilförmig), are terms for a certain form of writing, of which the component parts resemble a wedge. It was used by the ancient peoples of Akkad, Babylonia, Assyria, Armenia, Elam, and Persia; and was inscribed upon stone, bronze, iron, glass, and clay. Cuneiform inscriptions were chiselled upon stone and iron, but they were impressed upon soft clay with a pointed stylus having three unequal facets; the smallest to make the fine wedge of the cuneiform signs, the middle-sized to make the thicker wedges, and the largest to make the outer and thick wedges of the characters. The first date that can be assigned to the use of cuneiform writing is about 3800 B.C., and its use was continued until after the birth of Christ. The earliest inscription at present known is that inscribed upon the porphyry whorl in the time of Sargon of Agade; the latest is a tablet preserved at Munich, which may have been written about 83 A.D. Cuneiform writing was first used in Mesopotamia, and from thence it spread to Persia and to the districts north of Nineveh. For nearly 1600 years after its extinction its very existence was forgotten. The immense ruins found all over that ancient kingdom, and especially those of ancient Persepolis, had at all times attracted the attention of eastern travellers; still no one seems to have dreamed that those strange wedges which com- pletely covered some of them could have any meaning. It was Garcia de Sylva Figuëroa, ambassador of Philip III. of Spain, who, on a visit to Persepolis in 1618, first became possessed with the firm conviction that these signs must be inscriptions in some lost writing and, perhaps, language, and had a line of them copied. Amongst subsequent travellers whose attention was attracted to the subject, Chardin, after his return to Europe in 1674, published three complete groups of cuneiforms, copied by himself at Persepolis, together with a comparatively long and minute account of the mysterious character. He likewise declared it to be 'writing and no hieroglyphs: the rest, however, will always be unknown.' Michaux, a French botanist, sent, in 1782, a boundary stone, found at Bagdad, to Paris, covered with inscriptions. Ever since, the materials for the investigation of a subject the high importance of which by that time was fully recognised have been rapidly accumulating. Sir H. Jones, Ker Porter, Robert Stewart, Sir W. Ouseley, Bellino, Dr Schultz—up to Rich and Bottà, Flandin, Rouet, Layard, Oppert, Smith, Rassam, Budge, and, above all, Rawlinson, each in his turn brought back more or less valuable materials from his eastern travels; and, naturally enough, those explorers were among the foremost to engage in the study of the records they had brought to light.
Now that we are able to explain so much of these inscriptions, it is highly interesting and instructive to notice the opinions first entertained of them by the wise and learned in Europe. In the Transactions of the Royal Society of June 1693, they first appeared from a copy made by Flowers, and they are held to be 'the ancient writing of the Gaures or Gebres.' Thomas Hyde, the eminent Orientalist, declared them, in his learned work on the religion of the ancient Persians (1700), to be nothing more or less than idle fancies of the architect, who endeavoured to show how many different characters a certain peculiar stroke in different combinations could furnish. Witte, in Rostock, saw in them the destructive work of generations upon generations of worms. Generally, they were pronounced to be talismanic signs, mysterious formulæ of priests, astrological symbols, charms which, if properly read and used, would open immense vaults full of gold and pearls—an opinion widely diffused among the native savants. The next step was to see in them a species of revealed digital language, such as the Almighty had first used to Adam. Lichtenstein read in some of them certain passages from the Koran, written in Kufic, the ancient Arabic character; in others, a record of Tamerlane; and was only surprised that others should not have found this, the easiest and clearest reading, long before him. Kämpfer was not quite sure whether they were Chinese or Hebrew characters. That they were Runes, Oghams, Samaritan, or Greek characters, were some of the soberest explanations.
It was Karsten Niebuhr who first showed the way, to the more sensible portion of the learned, out of this labyrinth of absurdities. Without attempting to read the character itself, he first of all established three distinct cuneiform alphabets instead of one, the letters of which seemed to outnumber those of all other languages together. The threefold inscriptions found at Persepolis he rightly took to be transcripts of the same text in three alphabets, in a hitherto unknown language. Tychsen of Rostock (1798), and Münter of Copenhagen (1800), affirmed and further developed this conjecture. The latter went so far as to divide the characters and inscriptions into alphabetical, syllabic, and monogrammatical, and to assume two different languages—Zend for inscriptions of a religious, Pehlevi for those of a political character.
The real and final discovery, however, is due to Grotefend of Hanover, and dates from 1802. On the 7th of September of that year he laid the first cuneiform alphabet, with its equivalents, before the Academy of Göttingen—strangely enough, in the very same sitting in which Heyne gave an account of the first reading of hieroglyphs. The process by which Grotefend arrived at that wonderful result is so supremely interesting, that we cannot omit to sketch it briefly. He fixed upon a Persepolitan inscription of what was called the first class, and counted in it thirty promiscuously recurring groups or combinations of cuneiforms. These groups he concluded to be letters, and not words, as a syllabary of thirty words could not be thought of in any language. Then, again, a certain oblique wedge, evidently a sign of division, which stood after three, four, five, up to eight or nine such groups or letters, must show the beginning or end, not of a phrase, but of a word. Tychsen and Münter had already pointed out a certain combination of seven characters as signifying the royal title. Grotefend adopted this opinion. The word occurred here and there in the text, and after the first words of most of the inscriptions, twice; the second time with an appendage, which he concluded to be the termination of the genitive plural, and he translated these two words, without regard to their phonetic value, 'King of Kings.' He then, in comparing the words preceding the royal titles in two tablets, found them repeated in what he assumed to be a filial relation; thus: There were three distinct groups, words, or names, which we will call X, D, and H, and this is how they occurred: (1) X, King of Kings, son of D, King of Kings; (2) D, King of Kings, son of H; but the (3) H was not followed by the word King. H, therefore, must have been the founder of the dynasty. Now the names themselves had to be found. Grotefend, unlike his predecessors, had recourse not to philology, but to archaeology and history. The inscriptions in question were by that time proved to belong to the Achaemenian dynasty, founded by Hystaspes = group H. He was followed by Darius, 'King of Kings, son of Hystaspes,' or Darius Hystaspes = group D; he, again, by Xerxes, King of Kings, son of Darius, King of Kings = group X—and the problem was solved. It could not have been Cyrus and Cambyses, as the groups did not begin with the same signs (C); nor Cyrus and Artaxerxes, the first being too short for the group, the second too long—it could only be Darius, Xerxes, Hystaspes—of course in the orthography of their, not of our time; and wherever in these names the same letters recurred, they were expressed by the same combinations of signs. A further proof of the correctness of the reading was furnished by a vase in Venice, bearing a cuneiform and a hieroglyphical inscription, which were both read at the same time independently: 'Xerxes.' Innumerable difficulties, however, remained, and remain up to this moment. Grotefend had, after all, only read—and not altogether correctly—three names, which did not contain more than twelve letters—the rest being mere conjecture—and there were many more in this alphabet. The other two alphabets, with an infinite variety of letters, had hardly been properly approached yet. Moreover, the discovery of Grotefend was in itself so startling, so extraordinary and bold, that no one ventured to follow it up for the next twenty years, when H. Martin found the grammatical flexions of the plural and genitive case. We cannot now specify his further discoveries, or those of Rask, Burnouf, Lassen, Westergaard, Beer, Jacquet, and others who followed; we will only say that they mostly secured for themselves fame and name by rectifying or fixing one or two letters. The last and greatest of investigators of this first alphabet is Rawlinson, who not only first copied, but also read, the gigantic Behistun inscription—containing more than 1000 lines—of which more anon.
Inscriptions in the Persian cuneiform character are mostly found in three parallel columns, and are then translations of each other in different alphabets and languages, called respectively Persian, Median, and Babylonian; the Achaemenian kings being obliged to make their decrees intelligible to the three principal nations under their sway, as in our days the Shah of Persia would use the Persian, Turkish, and Arabic languages, in order that he might be understood in Bagdad and Teheran.
The first of the three, the Persian, consists of thirty-nine to forty-four letters, and is the most recent, the most ancient being the Babylonian. It is distinguished by the oblique stroke which divides its words. Its letters are composed of not more than five strokes or wedges placed side by side horizontally or perpendicularly, or both, but never—with one exception—crossing each other. The language is pronounced by all investigators to be as near Zend (q.v.) as possible, and to be the mother-language of modern Persian. It is only twice found by itself; all the other inscriptions are trilingual. The time of its use is confined to the years 570–370 B.C. The oldest instance of its employment is an inscription of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadæ; the most recent, that of Artaxerxes Ochus at Persepolis. The most important is that of Darius Hystaspes, in the great inscription of Behistun (q.v.), which contains, besides genealogical records, a description of the extent of his power, the leading incidents of his reign, prayers to Ormuzd and the angels, and reference to the building of the palaces. Most of these inscriptions occur at Persepolis, Behistun, Naksh-i-Rustam, and Hamadan.
The second kind is called the Median, because it takes the second place in the trilingual inscriptions, under the conquering Persians, but over the conquered Assyrians, and as the Medes stood somewhat in that relation to these two nations, that name was selected. Another name, 'Scythic,' has been proposed, or, by way of compromise, 'Medo-Scythic,' and the language—supposed to have been spoken by those innumerable Tartaro-Finnic tribes which occupied the centre of Asia—has been pronounced to be a Turanian dialect. But the process of constructing out of such slender elements as Samojed and Ostiak words, a so-called 'Scythic,' is somewhat similar to the attempt of reconstructing Sanskrit from some detached and very doubtful French and English words. These inscriptions never occur by themselves (one instance again excepted), and being translations of the Persian records, about ninety names have been ascertained, and an alphabet of about one hundred characters—combinations of a syllabic nature—has been established. The principal investigators of this character are Westergaard, De Saulcy, Hincks, Norris, and Oppert. Gobineau holds the language to be Huzvaresh, a mixture of Iranian and Semitic.
The third and most important is the Babylonian portion of the cuneiforms. The trilingual records gave the first clue to the deciphering of this character; but many original documents, more than three thousand years older, have since been found in Babylon, Nineveh, and other places near the Euphrates and Tigris, and even in Egypt. On one occasion, the Asiatic Society submitted a cylinder of Tiglath-pileser to four prominent investigators of the subject, and they independently read it nearly alike, with the exception of the proper names, where they widely differed. As a proof of the enormous importance of this character for history, grammar, law, mythology, archaeology, and antiquities generally, we name some of the records which Rawlinson began to publish (now in progress): Babylonian Legends, such as the Fight between Marduk and Tiamat, the Descent of Ishtar into Hades (2000–1500 B.C.); Bricks from Kilehshergat of the early Kings of Assyria (1350–1100 B.C.), in a character much complicated; Annals of Tiglath-pileser I. (1120 B.C.); Annals of Assur-nasir-pal, of Shalmaneser I. and II., Sargon, Sennacherib, Assur-bani-pal, son of Esarhaddon; Inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar I. and II.; Cylinders containing the name of Belshazzar, &c.; besides syllabaries, vocabularies, mathematical and astronomical tablets, calendars, and a selection from the mythological tablets.
In order to give the reader some idea of the appearance of the cuneiform character, we subjoin the name of Darius, written in the Persian, Scythic, and Babylonian characters.
The cuneiform signs were originally pictures of objects. It appears that they were first drawn in outline upon some vegetable substance, called in the native documents likhusi. Whether the supply of this material failed it is impossible to say, but it is quite certain that at a very early period in the history of Babylonia, clay was adopted as a substance for writing upon. On substances like papyrus and leather it is quite easy to draw in outline a picture of any object; but it became more difficult to do this when clay was used, because the outlines of the object represented had to be pressed into it. The necessary result of this was that the shapes of the objects became altered. Thus a circle (1) represented the sun, but when inscribed upon clay it became 2; and a star (3) became 4: in process of time, as scribes became busier, these signs were represented by 5 and 6 respectively.
The use of clay as a writing material completely modified the shape of nearly every character in the cuneiform syllabary. The signs inscribed upon stones of the early empire are most complex, and in many of them it is difficult to see what object they are intended to represent. As time went on, these complex signs became simplified, and wedge after wedge was discarded, until the character was reduced to its simplest form. Lenormant, Hyde Clark, and others adopting their theory, have tried to prove that the Babylonian and Chinese signs are related. In the time of Esarhaddon and Assur-bani-pal, it became the fashion to write inscriptions in the ancient complex character, and special syllabaries of such signs were drawn up. Fragments of these are now in the British Museum. The cuneiform syllabary contains about two thousand signs of a phonetic, syllabic, and ideographic nature. Each sign originally represented an object, but no attention was paid to its ideographic signification when its syllabic or phonetic value was employed in a word. Before the name of a king, town, city, or private person, &c., a cuneiform sign, being the ideograph for the word following, was placed; after names of places like Babilu (Babylon), a suffix ki, meaning 'earth' or 'land,' was placed. It is the opinion of some that the cuneiform characters were invented by the primitive Akkadian inhabitants of Chaldaea (who spoke an agglutinative language). See the articles ASSYRIA, BABYLON, WRITING.
See Sir H. Rawlinson, The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia (6 vols. folio, ed. by E. Norris, G. Smith, and T. G. Pinches, 1861-80); Grotefend, Die Keilinschriften aus Behistun (1854); Lassen u. Westergaard, Ueber die Keilinschriften (1845); Hincks, On the First and Second Kinds of Persepolitan Writing (Transact. Roy. Ir. Soc. 1846); Norris, Memoir on the Scythic Version of the Behistun Inscription (Journal As. Soc. 1853); Rawlinson, A Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria (1850); and works by Benfey, Oppert, Renan, Spiegel, Schrader, Delitzsch, and others.