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Updated: May 23, 2025
This is one of the facts which we have learnt from the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. The cuneiform system of writing and the Babylonian language had spread all over Western Asia, and nowhere had they taken deeper root than in Canaan.
Perhaps, however, the discovery which above all others has revolutionised our conceptions of early Oriental history, and reversed the critical judgments which had prevailed in regard to it, was that of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna. The discovery was made in 1887 at Tel el-Amarna on the eastern bank of the Nile, midway between the modern towns of Minia and Siût.
Its first settlers those who had founded its cities, who had invented the cuneiform system of writing and originated its culture were of a wholly different race, and spoke an agglutinative language which had no resemblance to that of the Semites.
However, it is only in his more recent work on Human Origins that he thus comes forward as an historian, in preparation for which he seems to have devoted himself to the study of cuneiform and hieroglyphs and mastered the subject thoroughly and exhaustively, before bursting forth from behind the clouds to flood the world with new-born light.
He held the Camden Professorship of Ancient History at Oxf. from 1861. Brother of the above, entered the service of the East India Company, and held many important diplomatic posts. He studied the cuneiform inscriptions, and pub. Naturalist, s. of a blacksmith at Black Notley, Essex, was at Camb., where he became a Fellow of Trinity, and successively lecturer on Greek and mathematics.
These tablets now excite the wonder and admiration of all who are able to appreciate the beauty of the inscriptions, as well as of those who are speculatively curious as to the origin of written language. This attempt to explain the probable origin of the cuneiform character may to some appear fanciful.
To connect these outlines with the pictures that formed the starting-point for the development of the script was again a perfectly natural procedure, although a scholastic one. The investigations of Delitzsch have shown that the more than four hundred cuneiform characters in use can be reduced to a comparatively small number of 'outlines' of pictures to about forty-five.
From the use of the corner of a brick in writing, the transition was easy to a pointed stick with a triangular end, by the use of which all the cuneiform characters can readily be produced upon the soft clay. This curious question formed the subject of an interesting paper read by Mr. Nasmyth before the British Association at Cheltenham. But the most engrossing of Mr.
Step by step, the problem was advanced by dint of a painstaking labor, the degree of which cannot easily be exaggerated, until to-day the grammar of the Babylonian-Assyrian language has been clearly set forth in all its essential particulars: the substantive and verb formation is as definitely known as that of any other Semitic language, the general principles of the syntax, as well as many detailed points, have been carefully investigated, and as for the reading of the cuneiform texts, thanks to the various helps at our disposal, and the further elucidation of the various principles that the Babylonians themselves adopted as a guide, the instance is a rare one when scholars need to confess their ignorance in this particular.
And it is important to note that, according to the cuneiform inscription upon another time-worn relic in the British Museum, the Babylonians of old, at a time when the descendants of Jacob or Israel were without scriptures of their own, had a tradition to the effect that the fate of our first parents who, thanks to a wicked Serpent of Darkness, tasted of the forbidden fruit which grew in the "Garden of the Gods" was placed in the hands of "their Redeemer."
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