________________
122
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[JUNE, 1922
and Akkadian properly denoted the Semitic language spoken in the northern half of Babylonia. The first attempt at a grammar and analysis of the language had been made by my. self in 1870, and was developed by my friend, François Lenormant-a name ever to be honoured-three years later. The Sumerians were the founders of Babylonian civilisation, the builders of its cities, and the originators of its theology. The larger part of Babylonian literature was due to their initiative.
Another agglutinative language, unrelated, however, to Sumerian, was spoken in the highlands of Elam and is now known as Susian. In its later form it is represented by what in the early days of Assyriology wus termed the Scythian version of the Achæmenian inscriptions. It was, in fact, the language of Susa, the third capital of the Persian kings, and we owe most of our present knowledge of it to the numberless inscriptions disinterred by de Morgan among the ruins of Susa and brilliantly deciphered by Dr. Scheil.
There was yet another language embodied in the cuneiform characters, which was spoken in the north of Assyria in what is now Armenia. This I succeeded in deciphering in 1882, my Memoir appearing in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and so brought to light the history, geography and theology of a power which once contended on equal terms with the Assyrian Empire, and was for a while the mistress of the nations of the north. To this language I gave the name of Vannic, the capital of the kingdom having been the city of Bianas, the modern form of which is Van. The language belonged to what is called the Caucasian or Asianic group, that is to say, to the numerous languages spoken to-day in the Caucasus and formerly in Asia Minor, and divided into several groups unrelated to one another.
In 1888 came a discovery which revolutionised our ideas of ancient Oriental history and had a far-reaching effect. This was the discovery of cuneiform tablets at Tel.el-Amarna in Upper Egypt. By a stroke of ill-luck they were found by the peasants in the winter of 1886-7, the one winter that I did not happen to be in Upper Egypt. Both before that and afterwards I spent my winters on the Nite, and always visited Tel-el-Amarna, sometimes twice during the same season, where I was accordingly well-known to the natives from whom I purchased small antiquities. Had I been there that winter, the whole collection of tablets would have passed into my hands intact. As it was, there was no one in Egypt, much less among the antica-dealers, who knew anything about cuneiform or cuneiform tablets. A tablet sent to Paris was pronounced by Oppert to be a forgery, and the result was that the precious documents were packed un donkey-back and carried more than once up and down the two banks of the Nile, so that a considerable number of them were lost altogether, and a large number broken and rendered more or less illegible. When I arrived in Cairo in the spring of 1888, a few had made their way there, and I was able to assure the authorities at the Museum, that whatever their date might be, they were genuine.
The following winter I was again at Tel-el-Amarna where the fellahin showed me the house in which the tablets had been discovered. The bricks of the house, some of which I carried away with me, proved that it was the Foreign Office of the later Kings of the 18th dynasty. Most of the bricks were inscribed with the words : "Rerord Office of Aten."
The discovery, as I have said, had far-reaching consequences. For one thing, it dealt a second blow at the destructive criticism of the soeptical school of the historians of the ancient East. That criticism was based on the assumption that literature and the use of writing for literary or epistolary purposes had no existence before the classical ago, and that consequently no contemporaneous history of an earlier period could have come down to us, the
