The discovery and decipherment of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptionsBooth, Arthur John
History
The discovery and decipherment of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptions
Booth, Arthur John
Achaemenian inscriptions; Cuneiform inscriptions
Grotefend was now able to transliterate after his own fashion all the
inscriptions in the first style of writing. It was quite a different
matter to translate the mass of strange words that began to pour in
upon him. He had to seek for analogous words in Zend or Pehlevi, or in
other languages he considered akin; and he was assured by many candid
friends that this was an undertaking for which he was incompetent. In
the excitement of the first discovery he was much more reckless in this
matter than he afterwards became, when he had more experience of the
difficulties of the task. We find that he contributed the following
translation of the B and G inscriptions to the ‘Göttingen Literary
Gazette,’ August 1802. B: ‘Darius, the valiant King, the King of Kings,
the Son of Hystaspes, the Successor of the Ruler of the World, in the
constellation of Moro.’ This figures in De Sacy in 1803 as follows:
‘Darius, rex fortis, rex regum, rex populorum, Hystaspis stirps, mundi
rectoris in constellatione mascula Moro τοῦ Ized.’ For G we have:
‘Xerxes, the valiant King, the King of Kings, the Son of Darius the King,
the successor of the ruler of the world.’[316]
His next attempt at translation appeared in the ‘Göttingen Literary
Gazette’ of August 1803. In the interval he had made a study of Niebuhr’s
inscriptions A, H and I, and compared the A with Le Bruyn’s inscription
No. 131, which it nearly resembles.[317] The translation of the second
paragraph of A he gives thus: ‘Xerxes the Monarch, the valiant King,
the King of Kings, the King of all pure nations, the King of the pure,
the pious, the most potent assembly, the Son of Darius the King, the
descendant of the Lord of the Universe, Jemsheed.’[318] The H of Darius
ran to much the same effect and also culminated in Jamshid. Subsequently
he attempted the inscription on the windows of the Palace of Darius that
remained for so long a stumbling-block to his successors, and also the
one on the royal robe in the Palace of Xerxes given by Le Bruyn (No.
133). He likewise allowed the complete translation of the Le Bruyn No.
131 to appear in the Appendix to Heeren in 1815.[319] Many of these
attempts excited well-deserved ridicule, and even in 1815 we find him
much less eager to gratify public curiosity, and perhaps less confident
in his own ability to do so adequately. He willingly furnished Heeren
with the transliteration of the texts, but it was only by special
request that he added some of his translations. ‘If I have,’ he says,
‘as a decipherer established the value of the signs, it belongs to the
Orientalist to complete the interpretation of the writing now for the
first time made intelligible.’[320] He, however, still thought he could
answer for the general sense of his rendering, though not for its verbal
accuracy, and subject to that limitation the window inscription and the
Le Bruyn plate No. 131 appeared in 1815. In the later edition of 1824
they are, however, suppressed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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