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Welcome to the World of Antiquity channel.
I’m David Miano, and I am answering voicemails. Let’s give one a listen.
“Hello, this is Lee. My question is about Sumerian cuneiform
script. Is there a Rosetta-Stone-like artifact that helped decipher it?
Or is it a collaboration of several scholars over the years to help decipher the script?”
Ah, good question. For those who don’t know, and as Lee indicated, cuneiform is a script. It’s a
way to write language, but it is not a language itself. In fact, in ancient times, cuneiform was
used to write a number of languages: Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian and others. After the
Phoenician alphabet was invented, a system that was way more efficient and economic, cuneiform
gradually was abandoned, and over the centuries, those who knew how to use it all died off.
The decipherment of cuneiform began in the 19th century with the study of Persian inscriptions.
The kings of the Achaemenid Empire liked to put cuneiform on the monuments. This had not been the
practice of the earlier Mesopotamians, who used it primarily on clay tablets. The Persian monuments
were largely accessible at the time and in pretty decent condition. Typical inscriptions
were trilingual (written in three languages), and in that sense, “Rosetta-Stone-like.”
The first of these three languages was, like the others, in wedge-shaped writing (cuneiform),
except that it was alphabetic, although some signs were logograms. Some 43 signs were employed.
Decipherment of that was started largely by a German scholar by the name of Georg Friedrich
Grotefund, who started the process by recognizing proper names in the text and typical royal
expressions. He revealed his findings in 1802. His work was refined and expanded by others after him.
One was a Danish scholar, Rasmus Rask, who in 1826
demonstrated that the language was related to Sanskrit. We classify it now as Old Persian.
The second language on the inscriptions is New Elamite. It contained over 100 signs
and thus was determined to be syllabic, rather than alphabetic,
that is, each sign represents a syllable instead of a letter. This form of writing and language
still is largely obscure, and not as much work has been done on it as the other two.
Okay, so we’ve got Old Persian, we’ve got New Elamite. So now let’s turn to
the final language in these inscriptions. This is written in Mesopotamian cuneiform,
the one I assume you are asking about.
Probably the most notable early scholars that worked on the decipherment were Edward
Hincks and Sir Henry Rawlinson, who separately worked on all three scripts. In fact, although
each was helped by the work of the other, they appear to have been somewhat competitive.
Sometimes you will hear that the Behistun inscription was the “Rosetta Stone” for the
decipherment of Mesopotamian cuneiform, which was used by Rawlinson to work it out. But
it’s not really true. Rawlinson concentrated on the trilingual inscriptions at Mount Alvand
near Hamadan, which he copied in 1835. Later he will also use the Behistun inscription,
but it wasn’t really the key that unlocked everything. Many inscriptions were used.
Plus Rawlinson tends to get most of the credit, while Hincks often gets forgotten.
They both noted that the third script in these trilingual inscriptions had far more
signs than even the New Elamite script, and they each concluded that it must be syllabic in nature,
each sign representing a syllable. In 1846, they both published papers
making this known, not knowing that the other had discovered it too.
Hincks announced that he had determined the language to be similar to known Semitic languages
and that it was related to the cuneiform found on the many tablets that had been unearthed in
Mesopotamia. It was the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, which we now call Akkadian.
At first, the only way that the sounds of cuneiform signs could be ascertained
was by looking at the way known proper names were written. He was able to find the name
“Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon” written in many inscriptions. He also identified the
first word that wasn’t a proper name, the first person pronoun anāku. Hincks figured out that
a sign representing a consonant and vowel could be followed by a sign representing a
vowel and consonant to create a single syllable of consonant-vowel-consonant. He also was able
to work out correspondences between the two ways of writing a sign, which he called cursive and
lapidary. Nevertheless, the extreme variety of the signs and peculiar features of the writing system,
including an evolution in practice, made the script very difficult to decipher,
and the work continued after Hincks and Rawlinson to the end of the 19th century through the
discoveries of scholars like Friedrich Delitzsch, Benno Landsberger, and Wolfram von Soden.
But what about Sumerian? Once the basics of the cuneiform system were worked out,
it became possible for scholars to tackle also other languages that used the system. As early as
1849, Hincks had argued that the inventors of the cuneiform script could not have been the speakers
of Akkadian, or any Semitic language, because, as he said, “no Semitic people could have invented
a system of writing so uncongenial to their language.” A heated controversy took place after
Hincks’ death, between a scholar named Joseph Halévy, who argued that the Sumerian language
and people didn’t exist, and a scholar named Jules Oppert, who did. Various scholars took sides. It
wasn’t until the 20th century that Sumerian was finally understood to be a different language.
(Previously they thought it was just a special way of noting Akkadian.) But the strange character of
the Sumerian language, and the fact that there was no known language related to Sumerian,
made it very difficult to work out. There was no Rosetta Stone for this undertaking.
What helped scholars to decipher it was the collection of grammatical lists and vocabularies
that priests of Mesopotamia had made of the language. They had largely done this in later
periods, when Sumerian was no longer spoken, and they wanted to preserve knowledge of it. Scholars
involved in the decipherment of the Sumerian language were the aforementioned Friedrich
Delitzsch, François Thureau-Dangin, Arno Poebel (poobel), Anton Deimel, and Adam Falkenstein.
Today, we can read Sumerian quite well! I hope that answers your question sufficiently.
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