The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions . II., the Egyptian copy of which has long beenknown to us. The two Arzawan letters in the Tel el-Amarna collection no longer stand alone; the BoghazKeui tablets show that an active correspondence wascarried on between Egypt and Cappadocia. We mustrevise our old ideas about an absence of intercourse betweendifferent parts of the ancient Oriental world: there wasquite as much intercommunication as there is and Babylonia, Assyria and Asia Minor, Palestineand Egypt, all were linked together by the ties of a commonculture; there were no excl
The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions . II., the Egyptian copy of which has long beenknown to us. The two Arzawan letters in the Tel el-Amarna collection no longer stand alone; the BoghazKeui tablets show that an active correspondence wascarried on between Egypt and Cappadocia. We mustrevise our old ideas about an absence of intercourse betweendifferent parts of the ancient Oriental world: there wasquite as much intercommunication as there is and Babylonia, Assyria and Asia Minor, Palestineand Egypt, all were linked together by the ties of a commonculture; there were no exclusive religions to raise barriersbetween nation and nation, and the pottery of the Hittiteswas not only carried to the south of Canaan, but thecivilization of Babylonia made its way through Hittitelands to the shores and islands of Greece. On the south,the iEgean became a highway from Asia Minor to Europe,while northward the Troad formed a bridge which carriedthe culture of Cappadocia to the Balkans and the Danube. A. H. THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THECUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS CHAPTER I THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE CUNEIFORMINSCRIPTIONS The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions wasthe archaeological romance of the nineteenth was no Rosetta stone to offer a clue to theirmeaning; the very names of the Assyrian kings andof the gods they worshipped had been lost and for-gotten ; and the characters themselves were but con-ventional groups of wedges, not pictures of objectsand ideas like the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The de-cipherment started with the guess of a classical scholarwho knew no Oriental languages and had nevertravelled in the East. And yet it is upon this guessthat the vast superstructure of cuneiform decipher-ment has been slowly reared, with its ever-increasingmass of literature in numerous languages, the veryexistence of some of which had been previously un-known, and with its revelation of a civilized world thathad faded out of sight before Greek
Size: 1320px × 1893px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookidarchaeologyofcun00sayc
