The German Genius

Mare Humboldtianum, on the moon. 37
    A B REAK IN THE G REAT W ALL OF L ANGUAGES
     
    “Only after 1771 does the world become truly round; half the intellectual map is no longer blank.” These are the words of Raymond Schwab, the French scholar, in his book The Oriental Renaissance ; what he meant was that the decipherment of the “Great Wall of Asian languages”—Sanskrit, Hindi, the hieroglyphics, and cuneiform scripts—was, in his words, “one of the great events of the mind.” C. W. Ceram agreed. The decipherment of the cuneiform script, according to him, “was one of the human mind’s most masterly accomplishments,” a work of true genius. 38 It came amid the golden age of translation, when many of the scripts of the ancient Near East, and India itself, were giving up their secrets. The overall impact of the age of translation on European thinking, and German thinking in particular, is discussed in Chapter 8.
    Aside from its intrinsic importance, the decipherment of cuneiform has attracted interest for two colorful reasons. One, the original effort was made as the result of a wager; and two, the working out of the decipherment is starkly clear and simple: the sheer cleverness is there for all to see. The man who made the bet and did the deciphering, Georg Friedrich Grotefend, was born on June 9, 1775, at Münden in Hanover. He studied philology at Göttingen, where he became friendly with Christian Gottlob Heyne (see Chapter 1). On Heyne’s recommendation, in 1797 Grotefend became an assistant master at the Gymnasium in Göttingen, later promoted to vice principal of the Frankfurt am Main grammar school.
    His early interest was in Latin, but in his late twenties he became fascinated by cuneiform scripts that had been discovered in the seventeenth century but were not yet understood. The idea for the wager occurred to Grotefend while he was drinking at an inn with colleagues. Never believing he could pull it off, they accepted his proposal immediately, the more so as the only scripts available to him were some poor copies of the inscriptions discovered in the ruins of Persepolis. He wasn’t deterred and tackled head-on a problem that the best scholars of the day had found insurmountable. 39
    He probably would not have made the breakthrough he did without having had the traditional education in Germany which, as we have seen, stressed the classics and philology. Grotefend noted that on some of the Persepolitan tablets there were three different scripts, written side by side in three separate columns. 40 Knowing a certain amount of ancient Persian history, through his study of the Greek writers, he was aware that Cyrus had laid waste to the Babylonians around 540 B.C. , and this had allowed the rise of the first great Persian kingdom. Grotefend therefore inferred that at least one of the scripts on the tablet would be written in the language of the conqueror. He judged that that would be the middle column since in antiquity the most important script was always put there.
    That was his starting point. He next noticed a complete absence of curved lines in cuneiform, provoking the thought that the characters had not actually been “written,” as such, but instead impressed in wet clay. We now know that cuneiform writing (from the Latin cuneus , meaning wedge-shaped) had originally been pictographic but had become progressively more stylized—for ease and rapidity of writing—and later Persian was almost an alphabetic system, reduced to about thirty-six characters from the original six hundred. With all this as background, Grotefend observed that most of the points of the wedges ran either downward or to the right. Furthermore, the angles formed where two wedges met always opened to the right. The implication was clear: cuneiform was written horizontally, not vertically, and it read from left to right, not the other way round. 41
    The actual act of decipherment began when he further observed that one group of signs, and another single sign, recurred frequently throughout the text. He inferred that this group of signs was the word “king” and the single sign—a simple wedge slanting upward from left to right—was a device that separated one word from another, in effect an ancient space bar. His next inference—and perhaps his greatest—was to assume that particular mannerisms could be found in the inscriptions, mannerisms that would have remained unchanged over generations. Here he drew a parallel