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Updated: May 8, 2025
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.
After the Egyptologists of the school of De Rouge thought they had demonstrated that the familiar symbols of the Phoenician alphabet had been copied from that modified form of Egyptian hieroglyphics known as the hieratic writing, the Assyriologists came forward to prove that certain characters of the Babylonian syllabary also show a likeness to the alphabetical characters that seemingly could not be due to chance.
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.
Though not as valuable as a true phonetic alphabet, such as the Koreans and the Cherokees possess, the i-ro-ha, or kana script, even though a syllabary and not an alphabet, was a wonderful aid to popular writing and instruction.
Such an introduction, however, implies that the new alphabet had already taken deep root among the merchants of Canaan, and driven out before it the cumbrous syllabary of Chaldæa. It was in this alphabet that Hiram and Solomon corresponded together, and it is probable that Moses made use of it.
We there find "Ut-napishte" given as the equivalent of the Sumerian "Zisuda", evidently an abbreviated form of the name Ziusudu; and it is significant that the names occur in the syllabary between those of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, evidently in consequence of the association of the Deluge story by the Babylonians with their national epic of Gilgamesh.
But in the thirteenth, the aim of Yasutoki and his fellow legislators was to render the laws intelligible to all, and with that object they were indited mostly in the kana syllabary. *Called also the Kwanto Goseibai Shikimoku. There was no intention of suppressing the Daiho code. The latter was to remain operative in all regions to which the sway of the Kyoto Court extended direct.
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.
Nun-gal signifies the 'great chief. His temple stood in Sippar, and from this we may conclude that he was one of the minor gods of the place whose original significance becomes obscured by the side of the all-powerful patron of Sippar the sun-god. A syllabary describes the god as a 'raging' deity, a description that suggests solar functions.
The sign which represents this bird in the cuneiform syllabary also signifies 'fate. The mischief wrought by swarms of insects, as grasshoppers and locusts, the danger lurking in the bites of scorpions sufficiently explain the importance attached to the actions of these animals.
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