BABYLONIAN WRITING
While the civilization of the Nile Valley was developing
this extraordinary system of hieroglyphics, the
inhabitants of Babylonia were practising the art of
writing along somewhat different lines. It is certain
that they began with picture-making, and that in due
course they advanced to the development of the
syllabary; but, unlike their Egyptian cousins, the men
of Babylonia saw fit to discard the old system when
they had perfected a better one. [40]
So at a very early day their writing—as revealed to us now through the
recent excavations—had ceased to have that pictorial
aspect which distinguishes the Egyptian script. What
had originally been pictures of objects—fish, houses,
and the like—had come to be represented by mere
aggregations of wedge-shaped marks. As the writing
of the Babvlonians was chiefly inscribed on soft clay,
the adaptation of this wedge-shaped mark in lieu of
an ordinary line was probably a mere matter of convenience,
since the sharp-cornered implement used in
making the inscription naturally made a wedge-shaped
impression in the clay. That, however, is a detail.
The essential thing is that the Babylonian had so
fully analyzed the speech-sounds that he felt entire
confidence in them, and having selected a sufficient
number of conventional characters—each made up of
wedge-shaped lines—to represent all the phonetic
sounds of his language, spelled the words out in
syllables and to some extent dispensed with the
determinative signs which, as we have seen, played so
prominent a part in the Egyptian writing. His
cousins the Assyrians used habitually a system of
writing the foundation of which was an elaborate
phonetic syllabary; a system, therefore, far removed
from the old crude pictograph, and in some respects
much more developed than the complicated Egyptian
method; yet, after all, a system that stopped short of
perfection by the wide gap that separates the syllabary
from the true alphabet.
A brief analysis of speech sounds will aid us in
understanding the real nature of the syllabary. Let us
take for consideration the consonantal sound represented
by the letter b. A moment's consideration will
make it clear that this sound enters into a large
number of syllables. There are, for example, at least
twenty vowel sounds in the English language, not to
speak of certain digraphs; that is to say, each of the
important vowels has from two to six sounds. Each
of these vowel sounds may enter into combination
with the
b sound alone to form three syllables; as
ba, ab, bal, be, eb, bel, etc. Thus there are at least
sixty
b-sound syllables. But this is not the end, for
other consonantal sounds may be associated in the
syllables in such combinations as bad, bed, bar, bark,
cab, etc. As each of the other twenty odd consonantal
sounds may enter into similar combinations,
it is obvious that there are several hundreds of fundamental
syllables to be taken into account in any
syllabic system of writing. For each of these syllables
a symbol must be set aside and held in reserve
as the representative of that particular sound. A
perfect syllabary, then, would require some hundred
or more of symbols to represent
b sounds alone; and
since the sounds for
c,
d,
f, and
the rest are equally varied, the entire syllabary would run into thousands
of characters, almost rivalling in complexity the
Chinese system. But in practice the most perfect
syllabary, Such as that of the Babylonians, fell short of
this degree of precision through ignoring the minor
shades of sound; just as our own alphabet is content to
represent some thirty vowel sounds by five letters,
ignoring the fact that
a, for example, has really half a
dozen distinct phonetic values. By such slurring of
sounds the syllabary is reduced far below its ideal limits;
yet even so it retains three or four hundred characters.
In point of fact, such a work as Professor Delitzsch's
Assyrian Grammar [41] presents
signs for three hundred and thirty-four syllables, together with
sundry alternative signs and determinatives to tax the memory of
the would-be reader of Assyrian. Let us take for
example a few of the b sounds. It has been explained
that the basis of the Assyrian written character is a
simple wedge-shaped or arrow-head mark. Variously
repeated and grouped, these marks make up the syllabic
characters.
To learn some four hundred such signs as these
was the task set, as an equivalent of learning the
a b c's, to any primer class in old Assyria in the long
generations when that land was the culture Centre of
the world. Nor was the task confined to the natives
of Babylonia and Assyria alone. About the fifteenth
century B.C., and probably for a long time before and
after that period, the exceedingly complex syllabary
of the Babylonians was the official means of communication
throughout western Asia and between Asia
and Egypt, as we know from the chance discovery
of a collection of letters belonging to the Egyptian
king Khun-aten, preserved at Tel-el-Amarna. In the
time of Ramses the Great the Babylonian writing was
in all probability considered by a majority of the
most highly civilized people in the world to be the
most perfect script practicable. Doubtless the average
scribe of the time did not in the least realize the
waste of energy involved in his labors, or ever suspect
that there could be any better way of writing.
Yet the analysis of any one of these hundreds of
syllables into its component phonetic elements—had
any one been genius enough to make such analysis—would
have given the key to simpler and better things.
But such an analysis was very hard to make, as the
sequel shows. Nor is the utility of such an analysis
self-evident, as the experience of the Egyptians proved.
The vowel sound is so intimately linked with the consonant—the
con-sonant, implying this intimate relation
in its very name—that it seemed extremely
difficult to give it individual recognition. To set off
the mere labial beginning of the sound by itself, and to
recognize it as an all-essential element of phonation,
was the feat at which human intelligence so long
balked. The germ of great things lay in that analysis.
It was a process of simplification, and all art development
is from the complex to the simple. Unfortunately,
however, it did not seem a simplification, but
rather quite the reverse. We may well suppose that
the idea of wresting from the syllabary its secret of
consonants and vowels, and giving to each consonantal
sound a distinct sign, seemed a most cumbersome
and embarrassing complication to the ancient
scholars—that is to say, after the time arrived when
any one gave such an idea expression. We can
imagine them saying: "You will oblige us to use four
signs instead of one to write such an elementary
syllable as `bard,' for example. Out upon such endless
perplexity!'' Nor is such a suggestion purely
gratuitous, for it is an historical fact that the old
syllabary continued to be used in Babylon hundreds
of years after the alphabetical system had been
introduced.
[42] Custom is
everything in establishing our prejudices. The Japanese
to-day rebel against
the introduction of an alphabet, thinking it ambiguous.
Yet, in the end, conservatism always yields, and so
it was with opposition to the alphabet. Once the
idea of the consonant had been firmly grasped, the
old syllabary was doomed, though generations of time
might be required to complete the obsequies—generations
of time and the influence of a new nation. We
have now to inquire how and by whom this advance
was made.
