Then it took thirty years before a patient German school-
master by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four
letters, the D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian
King Darius. And another twenty years had to go by
until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous
inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail-
writing of western Asia.
Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings,
the job of Champollion had been an easy one. The
Egyptians used pictures. But the Sumerians, the earliest
inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the idea of
scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded pictures
entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which
showed little connection with the pictures out of which they
had been developed. A few examples will show you what I
mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into
a brick looked as follows: {illust.} This sign however was too
cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of
``heaven'' was added to that of star the picture was simplified
in this way {illust.} which made it even more of a puzzle.
In the same way an ox changed from {illust} into {illust.}
and a fish changed from {illust.} into {illust.} The sun
was originally a plain circle {illust.} and became {illust.}
If we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an
{illust.
Pages:
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57