THE CODEBREAKERS

by DAVID KAHN

  I did not hesitate to give to the four signs preceding the number the value b’šnt, “in the years, in the year.” This hypothesis had the advantage of permitting me to ignore the appearance of the sign in determining its [sound-]value. All my work consisted of carrying forward these four letters wherever the corresponding signs were found and of filling the empty spaces with cross-checkings suggested by Phoenician. In the first line of Tablet C, I found the group n- š and, since a copper tablet was involved, I reconstituted the word n΁š, “copper, bronze.” The ΁, thus identified with the sign of the bird, gave me in lines 6 and 10 the final of a group, --b΁, where I recognized the word mzb΁), “altar.” The m thus obtained, carried forward as penultimate of line 14, gave me b’tm-, which could only be the designation of the month “in Tammuz.” I thus had a second z which I marked z1. The month must have been preceded by the mention of the day. Since there was no number at all in line 14, I recognized in the group š-š the name of a number and I thought first of šlš, “three.” After some fruitless trials of the consonant l wherever it appeared, I finally perceived that the number was not šlš, “three,” but actually šdš, “six” in its primitive form. The d was thus added to the identified signs. The group following šdš could only be the word “days,” in the plural like “years” in line 15, and I read this group ymm (yâmîm), which furnished me with y and two other m’s. Thus the filling in of correct solutions not only in Tablet C but also in Tablet D permitted me to obtain new values, always ignoring the form of the signs and resorting only to the suggestion of the contexts. All those who have practiced this kind of cryptography, where the pencil and the eraser are unremittingly in action, where one successively carries forward the hypothetical values to replace them with others which end by yielding place to the definitive values—these will understand by what obsessive work of day and night 1 succeeded in drawing up my syllabic alphabet and finding the Phoenician words which hid themselves under this undeciphered writing and were, according to the experts, undecipherable without a bilingual text.

  The tablet from Byblos that Édouard Dhorme used to start his solution of the pseudo-hieroglyphics

  Since the Roman alphabet is derived through the Greek from the Phoenician and ultimately from Egyptian hieroglyphics, Dhorme thought that his decipherment placed a new link “between the hieroglyphs and the alphabets of Phoenicia.” Some scholars contest this interpretation, but few doubt that, as he said, his decipherment “rendered a hitherto unappreciated documentation to the history of writing.”

  Other Case I solutions have raced forward with equal speed. In 1928, the plow of a native cultivating a field near the Syrian coast lifted a flagstone and disclosed a tomb; archeologists next year discovered that the 60-foot mound called Ras Shamra that stood nearby marked the remains of the ancient city of Ugarit. In a three-columned chamber, the excavators found about 50 clay tablets, impressed with an unknown cuneiform writing. This first find—other tablets came to light later—was published promptly by one of the archeologists, Dr. Charles Virolleaud.

  He pointed out that some of the 26 or 27 different signs resembled those of Akkadian cuneiform but did not have the same sound values; his readers knew that the Akkadian version (used for the languages of Babylonia and Assyria) had hundreds of signs and was primarily syllabic. The Ugarit words were divided by a short vertical mark. Some were only one letter long, most two or three letters in length, some four, and very few any longer. This indicated a consonantal script to Virolleaud. He did not have to add that the tablets came from a locale where Semitic languages had long predominated.

  He commented that the shortest text, a six-sign inscription on four bronze ax handles, might represent the name of the owner. A fifth ax handle had the same six signs preceded by a word of four letters, which he said probably stood for “ax” or “hatchet” or “pick.” He saw that a sign of three vertical wedges that preceded the probable names also appeared in the first line of one of the tablets, and he suggested in his paper that this might stand for the Semitic letter l which means “to.”

  Virolleaud’s publication came to the hands of Dr. Hans Bauer of the University of Halle on April 22, 1930. A big, heavy man and a brilliant philologist, then 52, who knew not only the Western and Near Eastern languages but those of the Far East as well, he set to work at once to try to solve them. Like Dhorme, he had had some cryptanalytic experience in World War I. His technique, in fact, depended primarily upon statistics, as do the general solutions of cryptanalysis, and only secondarily upon guessing at words for the actual reconstruction of the text—one of the few decipherments in archeological history to sustain that order of importance. It began with a study of the letters in the West Semitic languages that could appear as initials, terminals, or as one-letter words. Among other things, this showed that m, k, and w could appear in all three places. He correlated the list he compiled with a similar list that he made for the signs of the Ras Shamra tablets.

  Based on this, he decided that two signs could represent either w or m and that two others could stand for either n or t. Then, picking up Virolleaud’s possible l, he looked for the probable word mlk, “king.”* He found it, and extended his decipherment by filling in other possibilities. Within five days he had recovered 20 letters. When he tested these against the four-letter word on the ax handle that Virolleaud had thought might mean “ax,” he produced grzn, a Semitic word meaning “ax.” On April 28 he reported his recoveries to the French archeologists. On June 4, he published a preliminary report in the Vossische Zeitung which gave the values of t, r, n, and alef, a guttural sound, and the deciphered names of the gods Ba‘al, Astarte, Ashera, and El.

  At the same time, Dhorme, who was then in Jerusalem, had been working on the texts independently. He, too, began with Virolleaud’s suggestion for l. “This consonant furnished me with the word b’l (‘Ba‘al’), which repeats in all the lines of [Tablet] No. 14,” he wrote on August 15, 1930. “Unhappily, in striking out from the consonant b, I read bn, ‘son,’ where it was necessary to read bt (bath, ‘daughter,’ or bayt, ‘house’), and vice versa. This derailment on two letters as frequent as n and t had rendered my subsequent efforts vain so that I was only put back on the track by an article which Professor [W. F.] Albright procured for me in the middle of June…. M. Hans Bauer, professor at the University of Halle, announced in it that he had discovered the key of the Ras Shamra texts…. I did not have Bauer’s alphabet before me, but the elements contained in the above-mentioned article permitted me to believe that it corresponds, outside of a sign or two perhaps, to that which I composed according to the information from that article and my personal researches.”

  Virolleaud, meanwhile, had solved the tablets on his own. He had looked for a three-letter word with his l in the middle as a possible mlk. He found it, then Ba‘al, then an itemized list that gave him the spelled-out forms of numbers, which virtually completed the alphabet. He was about to publish his decipherment when Bauer beat him to it. Like Dhorme, Virolleaud did not agree with all of Bauer’s values. Bauer was corresponding with Dhorme and, on comparing his work with the Frenchman’s, he soon found that a scribe’s dropping of a word separator had led him astray. His primary findings of k and m, as well as p, q, s, and š, had been wrong. He freely admitted this “with a perfect scientific loyalty” in a letter of October 3 to Dhorme. His other identifications had been sufficiently right to give them the clues they needed to decipher the texts, however. The three men thus solved, partly independently, partly together, the alphabet for what has been called “the most important corpus of ancient literature discovered so far in the twentieth century.”

  For dozens, even scores, of parallels have been observed between Ugaritic literature and the Bible. One Ugaritic tablet declares: “Ah, thy enemies, O Ba‘al; ah, thy enemies, you will strike them down; Thus you will slaughter your adversaries.” Psalm 92 proclaims: “For, lo, Thine enemies, O Lord, For, lo, Thine enemies shall perish; All the workers of iniquity shall be sc
attered.” Another tablet refers to “The dew of heaven, the fat of the earth,” which is almost word for word Genesis 27:28’s “The dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth.” A third says, “Thy kingdom is everlasting, thy power (endureth) to all generations,” which is not unlike Psalm 145: “Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion endureth throughout all generations.” Even Job’s moving expression of faith, “But as for me, I know that my Redeemer liveth” (19:25), which Handel set to music in his Messiah, may echo a Ugaritic tablet: “I know that Alein-Ba‘al is living.”

  The parallels can illuminate many obscure or unique words in the Bible. They can help explain strange practices. The reason for the prohibition of Exodus 23:19, “Thou shall: not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk,” the basis of the kosher law that forbids mixing meat and dairy foods, had never been clear. A Ugarit tablet reading in part “Cook a lamb in milk, a lamb in curdled milk” suggests that the Hebrews reacted against a Canaanite practice and thereby set themselves apart. The name El, which Bauer found applied to a Ugarit god in his very first solution, is the very name given to the Hebrew God Yahweh in Genesis (often in the plural of majesty, Elohim). Indeed, a possible god Yw appears in the Ugarit tablets, and Ba‘al himself, as a son of god, is put to death and rises again. It well may be that the literature made available by the three-man decipherment of Ugaritic will illuminate much of the Holy Scriptures of the Judaeo-Christian ethos.

  Case II solutions—in which the script is known but the language is not—are really not decipherments. They are linguistic reconstructions. Many have been made, particularly during the explosive growth of linguistic science during the nineteenth century.

  Gothic, the oldest known form of the Germanic languages (of which English is a member), had become extinct by about the 900s; it survived only in such Latin alphabet manuscripts as the magnificent Codex Argentius, a translation of the four Gospels. A host of German scholars determined its grammar, the meaning of its words, how they sounded—and in doing so shed light on the development of modern languages. Ancient Persian, the 2,000-year-old language of the Zend-Avesta, was reconstructed by the successive efforts of Anquetil du Perron, Rasmus Rask, Eugene Bournouf, Niels Ludvig Wester-gaard, and A. V. Williams Jackson. The original form of Slavic, called Old Slavic, necessary for a knowledge of the interrelationships of such modern tongues as Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Slovakian, was found only in scattered church manuscripts. Philologists such as Joseph DobrovskÝ, Franz von Miklošić, and August Leskien painstakingly assembled a picture of the dead language from these bits and pieces.

  Perhaps the most interesting Case II involved Tokharian. Expeditions sent out by scholarly societies in the 1890s discovered in the ruined towns of Eastern Turkestan—the westernmost part of China—bundles of manuscripts almost perfectly preserved by the bone-dry climate and the overlying sands. One group proved to be written in the Brahmī script, used in ancient India and the script from which all later Indic scripts are descended. The language, however, was unknown. Careful analysis of the manuscripts by F. W. K. Müller showed that they were written in what turned out to be two new members of the great Indo-European family of languages. He named them Tokharian A and B. Surprisingly, though they were two of the most easterly members of that family, they resembled the western branch more. This threw new light on the prehistoric migrations of Central Asia.

  In such reconstructions, philologists make use of translations (usually in the form of bilingual inscriptions), of glosses (marginal notes in manuscripts explaining the meaning of some obscure or foreign word), of remarks in other literatures about the meaning of alien terms. Philologists have also learned enough about how languages develop internally to identify several normal types of linguistic change. The pair “man, men” is an example of one such regular variation, known as umlaut. This alters one vowel to another under the influence of a succeeding sound. In the Primitive Germanic, the plural of man was “manni”; speakers, anticipating the front-of-the-mouth /ee/ sound of the plural, shifted the /a/ forward in the mouth to become the /eh/ sound, and this remained when the final syllable fell away. Other types of change, such as assimilation, dissimilation, diphthongization, and articulative intrusion, enable the philologist to trace sounds back like a movie run in reverse and so to arrive at an earlier point in the development of the language. These principles also assist in determining differences between languages descended from a common ancestor, so that the vocabulary and syntax of a known tongue can be applied on a basis of analogy to help determine those of the unknown one.

  These processes commingle with those of Case I in Case III decipherments. Incomparably the most romantic instance is that of the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  Probably the most beautiful system of writing ever created, hieroglyphics burst suddenly into being just before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt into one kingdom about 3200 B.C. They appeared first in rudimentary form on small seals and decorative palettes and developed rapidly. By the Fourth Dynasty, artists were painting columns of hieroglyphs on the chamber walls of the immense pyramids, all around the reddish men with the strange eyes and contorted bodies who march and hunt and sail eternally—comrades for the departed kings. Pharaohs with names like Amenhotep and Thutmose and Ramses carved monumental inscriptions in it on the massive temples of Karnak and Luxor. The writing itself comprises lovely drawings of birds, snakes, squares, feathers, shepherd’s crooks, whorls, stools, hands, banners, and hundreds of other images.

  Egypt held many mysteries for the foreigner. No one knew the source of the Nile, nor why it annually spread its gift of fertile soil upon the land. The Greeks puzzled over this old civilization, indisputably developed independently of their own, so at variance with their opinion of barbaric foreigners, so wounding to their own confident superiority. The abyss between the Oriental and Occidental world-views—the one mystical, the other rational—prevented total comprehension, and the Greeks sensed that something was not coming through in their intercourse with the Egyptians. They thought that a mysterious knowledge lurked behind this impenetrable veil. They came to regard Egypt as the fount of an ineffable wisdom of the East. Their admiration for what Pythagoras called “the symbolic and occult teachings” of Egypt distorted their preconceptions of the hieroglyphics.

  For the Greeks never really learned the complex writing system. The meanings of a few hieroglyphs were explained to them, but they never grasped the relation between the sound and the image. Rather they misinterpreted this relation as an allegorical one. Thus, one writer knew that the Egyptians used the picture of a goose to represent the Egyptian word for “son,” but he thought that they did so because this animal supposedly loved its offspring more than any other. This false view of hieroglyphics perfectly fitted the Platonic theory of forms, in which the concrete objects of the real express the abstract notions of the ideal. Plato’s congeniality to Christianity fixed this impression strongly in men’s minds and long prevented proper understanding. A neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus, himself born in Egypt, gave the idea of hieroglyphics the formulation that became universally accepted: the Egyptians, in their superior wisdom, had imbued these pictures—which transcended ordinary writing—with symbolic qualities that intuitively revealed to the initiated a vision of the very essence of things. Plotinus drew part of this conception from the Egyptians themselves, who regarded writing as possessing magical powers. His view endowed the hieroglyphics with the fascinating aura of esoterism and hidden knowledge and eternal truth that surrounds them to this day.

  In ancient Egypt, hieroglyphics transmitted the solemn proclamations of the divine king and his priestly viziers to the gods and to his subjects; the word “hieroglyph” itself means “sacred carvings.” But the domination of foreigners, beginning with the Persian conquest of 525 B.C. and continuing with the Greeks under Alexander, cut the script off from its political roots. The writing became a professional secret of the priests. The people began to write their language in
the Greek alphabet of the rulers. The hieroglyphic vocabulary contracted. Inscriptions grew increasingly stereotyped. With the advent of Christianity and the collapse of the pagan religion, the hieroglyphic tradition flickered out here and there over Egypt. It resisted longest on the Island of Philae near the First Cataract of the Nile, where a fanatic Nubian clergy defended the cult of Isis in dilapidated temples amid memories of past glories. Here the last hieroglyphic inscription was recorded in 394 A.D. The last man to know the ancient writing as a living tradition must have gone to his grave soon thereafter. So the gods departed from Egypt. Isis and Osiris, Ra and Thoth fell silent for more than a thousand years.

  But their memory lingered. The Pyramids stood. The Sphinx brooded. The shadowy notion of Egypt’s omniscience haunted Europe, and the currents that stirred the Renaissance quickened the never-quite-forgotten curiosity about the hieroglyphs. Leon Battista Alberti attempted to reconstruct them from written descriptions, and urged their use as imperishable inscriptions on monuments. The great Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499, scattered hieroglyphic emblems throughout its exquisite woodcuts. Much of this activity stemmed from the discovery in 1419 of the only manuscript on the subject preserved from antiquity, the Hieroglyphics of a fourth-century author known only as Horapollo, which was immediately accepted as the accurate authority on the subject and which fixed the course of investigation for centuries. Circulating at first in manuscript, it was published by Aldus Manutius in 1505. Horapollo knew what some of the signs meant, probably because Egyptians had told him. But his derivations of sense from symbol are totally wrong, and so he could not interpret the inscriptions. His ideas in general followed those of Plotinus, who had written in the third century. He therefore assumed that the hieroglyph of a bird stood for that particular bird or for some idea associated with it, as speed or flight. He supposed that the vulture was used for “mother” (as it was) because no male vultures exist!