THE CODEBREAKERS

by DAVID KAHN

  The spell was broken. The problem of the ages had been solved. In a fever of excitement Champollion rushed to his brother’s office nearby, threw his papers on the desk, pronounced his famous “Je tiens 1’ affaire!” (“I’ve got it!”), and collapsed.

  With this new knowledge of the writing system enabling him to penetrate to the language, and his knowledge of Coptic enabling him to approximate Egyptian, Champollion refined and corrected the language by the script and the script by the language., Within three years he had arrived at an understanding of both accurate enough to enable him to translate an Early Egyptian inscription of Amenophis III. He discovered that the hieroglyphic writing system was essentially that of the rebus, though overlaid with many refinements. In a rebus, a word is represented by an object whose spoken name resembles the spoken form of the word. In English, for example, the verb “be” might be represented by a picture of a bee; a child’s cry, or wail, by a picture of a whale. The Egyptians drew a swallow, /wr/ in Egyptian (the vowels of the language are unknown, since they were not written for most of its history), to indicate the word “great,” which is /wr/, a beetle (/hpr/) to indicate /hpr/, meaning “to become,” and so forth. The goose meant “son” because the Egyptian words for goose and son sounded alike, as did the pair “vulture” and “mother.”

  The system obviously had great potential for confusion, intensified by the lack of vowels; to preclude as much of it as possible the Egyptians tacked onto their words mute explanatory signs called determinatives. Thus, a picture of a seated man always followed names or designations of men, a pelt with a tail followed mentions of mammals, a jug was used for citations of liquids, a pair of legs for movement, a circle with an open cross inside (representing a walled city with intersecting streets) for towns, a papyrus roll for spiritual matters.

  Champollion distinguished these from the true logograms that Egyptians also used. Thus, a picture of an eye meant “eye,” of a bow meant “bow”; a stylized representation of a loaf meant “bread,” of an angle meant “corner.” The Egyptians further used logograms to stand for verbs and adverbs by extending their images to associated concepts. A man with a stick in his hand meant “to beat”; a leg and foot, “to walk”; a stooped man leaning on a staff’, “old age”; a lily, the flower characteristic of Upper Egypt, to mean “south.” There were hundreds of these in common use. They had in part inspired the old allegorical view of hieroglyphs, and they gave it the only validity it had had.

  Someone reading hieroglyphics aloud would therefore have to know whether a given sign represented a single sound that formed part of a word, a concept whose spoken form would not have anything to do with the picture (as the sound of “lily” in Egyptian has nothing to do with that of “south”), or a determinative that was not to be uttered at all. Nor did that end the complexity of hieroglyphics. Not content with determinatives, the Egyptians often added extra phonetic signs to words, to make absolutely sure the sense would come through. Though the swallow adequately represented /wr/, the Egyptians liked to draw a mouth, standing for /r/, after the swallow. Though “to hear” was effectively expressed by the picture of an ear, they would append an owl, standing for /m/, the last sound of /sdm/ (“to hear”) just after the ear. Often it seemed as if they could not pile up enough of these pleonastic symbols—to the decipherer, however, each one acted as a kind of null.

  The final complication of Egyptian writing were the homophones—different signs standing for the same sound. In Champollion’s original decipherment, a semicircle stood for the /t/ in Ptolemis and a hand for the /t/ in Cleopatra. Champollion found many homophones: so many, in fact, that they retarded general acceptance of his decipherment. Eventually the German scientist Richard Lepsius showed that many of these phonetic signs stood for two- or three-letter consonantal groups. The three-pronged sign that had appeared in “Ramses” and “Thutmose” stood, not just for /m/, as Champollion had thought, but for /ms/—with the extra /s/’s that Champollion had found in those words just pleonasm. Lepsius’ decipherment of the lengthy bilingual Decree of Canopus, discovered in 1866, cleared up many of the details that Champollion had not been able to resolve.

  For he had died in 1832, aged 41, less than ten years after his solution. Yet he had had the satisfaction of having resolved the riddle which the silent Sphinx had guarded since time immemorial. Like the rising sun warming the colossus of Memnon, Champollion’s brilliance struck sound from statues and inscriptions dumb through a long darkness. He animated a whole vast civilization once known only through its relics. The decaying temples, the rock-hewn tombs, the Pyramids, became the setting for a shimmering pageant of barges on the Nile, of slaves and nobles, of an expedition to Punt returning with cinnamon-wood and apes and ivory, of strange religious beliefs and incestuous royalty and a brave doomed fight for monotheism, of the young warrior-pharaoh, Ramses II, recording upon the walls of Luxor and Thebes the very thoughts he thought when he beat back an enemy army that almost overpowered him at faraway Kadesh—a drama of human joys and sorrows reaching back into unsuspected depths of antiquity. Champollion let man see more of his past than perhaps any other human being. It is an enviable accomplishment.

  It is not only the dead men of Egypt who have told their tales. Decipherers have also conjured forth the annals of ancient Babylonia. Their decipherment of cuneiform is a more astonishing feat in a way than that of hieroglyphics because it was achieved without the aid of a bilingual. Only after a simple cuneiform used for a known language had been read could progress be made on the complicated form and its unknown tongue—the tongue of Nineveh and Babylon.

  The solution was begun by a 27-year-old schoolteacher of Göttingen, Georg Friedrich Grotefend, who had written a book on a universal language and who enjoyed solving ciphers and word puzzles. He equated a common and repetitious series of signs in the cuneiform inscriptions with the frequent and repetitious formula “king of kings” and “son of the king X” that was known from the Greek versions of later Persian inscriptions. He shrewdly compared the formulas in two inscriptions and discerned a succession of father, son, and grandson in which the son and grandson were kings but the father was not. Historical evidence had fixed the approximate period of the dynasty, and the kings of Persia were well known from Greek historians. Grotefend found that only Hystapes, Darius, and Xerxes fitted the pattern. He obtained the modern Persian forms of the names from the Zend-Avesta, substituted these sound-values back into the cuneiform, and obtained 13 correct values and four incorrect ones for the alphabet of 42 signs. This was the breakthrough, but much of the subsequent work in recovering the Old Persian language was done by the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask.

  Independently, an Englishman, Henry C. Rawlinson, clinging like a fly to the sheer face of the high cliff of Behistun to copy the trilingual inscription carved thereon like a giant billboard from antiquity, also solved the Old Persian cuneiform. He too found a series of signs that he recognized as kings’ names, identified them, and broke into the script. He recovered rather more of the alphabet than did Grotefend, and this provided the key for the next and far more important step: solution of the syllabic cuneiform used to write Akkadian, the language of Babylonia and Assyria.

  In terms of numbers of signs, this script was the most complicated of the three found at Behistun and on other trilingual inscriptions. Rawlinson and other scholars located the repeated schemata that included the names of the kings. Comparisons of these with their sounds and meanings—now known from the Old Persian solution—showed that the Akkadian script was partly syllabic, partly logographic. For example, it represented the word “king” by a single sign whereas it spelled out the names of the kings with several signs. The number of signs used in these names equalled the number of consonants in them. This led the Swede Isidor Löwenstern to conclude that the language was Semitic, a family whose later scripts, at least, write only the consonants as letters, representing the vowels by points and lines. However, he discovered an abnormal number of signs repr
esenting a single consonant. An Irish clergyman, Edward Hincks, showed that these actually stood for syllables based on that consonant, such as /ra/, /ri/, /ru/, /ar/, /er/, /ir/, /ur/. He also recognized that a single sign could serve as a word-sign, a syllable-sign, or a determinative much like the hieroglyphic determinatives.

  Rawlinson, meanwhile, continued to substitute new-found phonetic values back into the cuneiform texts. At times the suggested values appeared jarringly out of place, and after many occurrences in which a single sign appeared to be wrong in a word that context compelled to be right, a regularity in these apparent errors impressed itself upon him. He finally concluded that a single sign could possess several different sound values, much as the English c can sound like either an /s/ or a /k/. Thus, in the Akkadian, Rawlinson discovered, the sign that usually represents /ud/ can also stand for /tam/, /par/, /lah/, and /his/. The 246 polyphonous symbols that he established by 1851 proved in the long run to be almost entirely correct. They were confirmed by finding, among the 20,000 clay tablets of the library of Ashurbanipal, about 100 on which students learning the complicated language had correlated the various signs, syllabic polyphones, and logograms. Only then was it possible to understand why the name Nabu-kudurrī-usur (“Nebuchadnezzar”), meaning “O Nabu, protect my boundary mark,” came out as AN-AG-ŠA-DU-ŠIŠ. It turned out that AN-AG was a logographic symbol for the god Na-bi-um, ŠA-DU represented the word kudurru (“boundary mark”), and ŠIŠ stood for nasāru (“to protect”), the imperative form of which was uṣur.

  In view of complexities like this, it was hardly surprising that many scholars jeered at the results as pure imagination. To settle the question of reliability, the Royal Asiatic Society in 1857 sent a newly discovered cuneiform inscription to four experts, Rawlinson, Hincks, William Henry Fox Talbert, and Jules Oppert, with the request that they work on it independently. The sealed envelopes containing the four solutions were opened at a formal meeting. In all essential points their translations agreed.

  Within fifteen years, a world that still largely believed in the revelatory uniqueness of Holy Scripture was reading in shocked surprise the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which a story of an ancient flood parallels the Biblical narrative down to the details of the release of a bird to see whether the waters had subsided. Then, at the turn of the century, a broken black diorite stele covered with 3,600 lines of cuneiform was found to be the law code of Hammurabi—with crimes and punishments and even phrases that the later Mosaic Law had evidently copied. The decipherment of cuneiform showed that what the West had regarded for centuries as God-given truths had come merely from the human minds of a pagan civilization and, by undermining the divine authority of the moral law, helped pave the way for the ethical and philosophical revolution of today. It revealed so much about the ziggurat lands of Assyria and Babylonia, with their winged bulls, their bearded kings, their royal lion hunts, their astronomy, and their deities like Marduk and Ishtar, that modern man knows far more about them than the most learned traveler of ancient Greece, who was 2,000 years closer to them in time.

  Scholars have elucidated many other lost languages—indeed, every tongue that has become extinct and has been recovered falls into the category. Many involve obscure dialects of half-forgotten peoples, and so have not had the impact on history that the solution of the hieroglyphic and cuneiform writing of two great civilizations has had. Surprisingly often, the basic solution is the work of a single scholar, though almost invariably his work is extended and checked, usually in the infinitely detailed field of philology, by others.

  Of these other solutions, perhaps the most important is Bedřich HroznÝ’s 1916 reading of the Hittite cuneiform. The Czech scholar, a lively, generous man, then 37, read the Hittite cuneiform texts using the sound-values and occasional logograms of Akkadian cuneiform, but the language seemed to make no sense. Eventually he found a sentence that included the logogram for bread, and he transliterated the rest of it as: Nu-BREAD-an ezzateni, wadar-ma ekuteni. It seemed to echo a familiar phrase, and suddenly he saw that it referred to eating bread and water, wadar resembling Germanic watar and, of course, the English water, and ezzateni being cognate with German essen and English eat. The language thus turned out to be Indo-European, flying in the face of nearly all philologists, who had assumed it to be almost anything but. This placed the language on the proper footing for its reconstruction, and within 20 years a satisfactory understanding of it had been gained. This helped clear up some of the mystifying details about the history of this people, who are mentioned in the Bible and in the chronicles of other ancient peoples. (The Hittites also wrote in their own hieroglyphics; several scholars, each adding a detail or a hypothesis to the corpus of the decipherment, are still laboriously working out the solution.)

  Most of the other solutions have come from Mediterranean lands, the seedbed of civilization. Meroitic, the language of the “Ethiopian” kingdom of Meroë, which flourished south of Egypt from about 100 B.C. to 300 A.D., proved to be an offshoot of Egyptian when Francis Llewellyn Griffith solved it in the 1920s. Lycian, spoken in southwestern Asia Minor, was in large measure deciphered with the help of epitaphs whose rigid formula was ascertained from others nearby, written in Greek. Lydian, the language of King Croesus, was read with the aid of both Aramaic and Greek bilinguals. Sidetic, spoken in the city of Side on the southern coast of Asia Minor, could not be read at first because the Greek bilinguals were too short; but a longer one discovered in 1949 enabled Helmuth T. Bossert to make considerable headway. In 1843, F. C. de Saulcy read Libyan, also called Numidian, the language spoken in northwestern Africa at the time of Carthage and written in what appears to be a specially invented script; he had the aid of bilinguals in Latin and in Punic, the language of Carthage, and of philological insights from Numidian’s modern descendant, the language of the Berber tribesmen. The Iberian script, used in about 150 inscriptions found in Spain, the longest only 342 letters, was deciphered in the mid-1920s by Professor Manuel Gómez Moreno; some points are still in question. Writings of South Arabia, such as the graceful Sabaean alphabet, have been deciphered; they provide knowledge of the earliest dialects of Arabia. The North Arabian Safaitic inscriptions, which were mainly incised on volcanic rocks near es-Safa southeast of Damascus in the first two centuries A.D., were largely read by the German E. Littmann.

  James Prinsep, professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, who died in 1840 at age 41, solved not one but two important ancient scripts and has been called “one of the most talented and useful men that England has given to India.” He first unraveled the Pahlavi script after finding bilingual coins in it and in Greek from the Bactrian empire of Persia that flourished after Alexander the Great. Greek proper names on them suggested the sound values of letters in Pahlavi, which proved to be Persian written in a Semitic alphabet. Then he turned his attention to the inscriptions of the Buddhist king Asoka, who in the third century B.C. ruled the greatest empire that ever existed in India. They were written using the then-unknown Brahmī alphabet in the common language of the people, Prakrit (as distinguished from the literary tongue, Sanskrit). In 1837, Prinsep saw a number of brief inscriptions on objects found in a temple near Bhopal in Central India and concluded that they meant somebody’s “gift” to the temple. Equating the known sounds of the Prakrit word for “gift” and of the Prakrit proper names with the letters, Prinsep worked out the oldest known writing of India. The solution filled in much of early Indian history and some of the development of Indian language and writing, with consequences important for the knowledge of other Indo-European languages. It also paved the way for Müller’s reconstruction of Tokharian, which was written in the Brahmī script.

  Müller also played a major role in the decipherment of Sogdian. This was the lingua franca of Central Asia during the first millennium A.D. when that melting pot—today a sparsely populated sandy waste—was a rich land of smiling cities like Samarkand, criss-crossed by caravans bearing spices and emeralds to Europe. Like Pahlavi, the language was an
eastern dialect of Middle Persian, the alphabet also a descendant of the Aramaic.

  Other abandoned scripts from the oddest corners of the Orient have yielded to the analyses of linguists. Mon, a script employed in Burma about the eleventh century A.D., fell before the attack of C. O. Blagden, whose principal weapon was a quadriliteral of Mon, Pyu, Pali, and Burmese. Some inscriptions in Khmer, a fifth-century language of Cambodia, were solved in the 1920s by G. Coedès. A group of scholars collaborated in reading, with the help of Sanskrit bilinguals, an Indian tongue written in a script called Central Asian Slanting Gupta.

  The decipherment that is sometimes cited as the most typical of armchair decipherments involved another writing from Central Asia. In 1889, explorers discovered two large inscribed stones near the Orkhon River about 40 miles north of Karakorum. A short Chinese text on one declared that it had been erected in memory of a Turkish prince in a year that corresponded to 732 A.D. A second and longer inscription on that stone was graven in an angular script that resembled Germanic runes. Both inscriptions were published in 1892. The next year a Danish scholar, Vilhelm Thomsen, after failing to match the Chinese rendering of the prince’s name (“K’we-te-kin”) to the rune-like characters that represented it, discovered that the Turkish form of the prince’s name was Kül-tigin and matched the characters to that. Then he found the Turkish word tängri (“heaven”) in a group that occurred where the Khan’s appellation of “Celestial” might appear. These two words together contained all the characters necessary for reading a word that occurred very frequently—türk, the name of Kül-tigin’s people. The language proved to be the oldest and purest Turkish dialect known, before it was affected by the Moslem conquest; the script, now called Kök-Turki runes, was shown by other discoveries to be a national script that the Turks later forsook. Thus, on November 25, 1893, with the aid of a Chinese bilingual, Thomsen deciphered the writing, and so completely and accurately had he done it that since then there has been almost nothing to add or correct.