The German Genius

with the practice, in his own time, of using the phrase “Rest in peace.” This, he pointed out, had been carved unchanged on gravestones for centuries. Probably, something similar would have been used on the Old Persian texts. From his knowledge of such ancient texts as he had encountered through his Greek and Latin studies, he thought that, in any inscription, such phrases as “great king,” “king of kings,” “son of…” would be found. These dynastic formulas should be repeated in all three columns of the tablet. The actual phrase was familiar from languages already known:
    X, Great King, King of Kings, King of A and B, Son of Y, Great King, King of Kings.
     
    If such a syntax did exist, Grotefend inferred that the first word must be a king’s name. Following that would be the word divider, and then two words, one of which ought to be “king,” which should be easily identified because it would be often repeated. 42 Looking down the inscriptions, Grotefend observed that there were just two versions of the same cuneiform groups at the beginnings of the columns—the same words were used each time but in a different order. If he was right about the word for “king,” then what was written was as follows:
    X (king), son of Z
    Y (king), son of X (king)
    Again assuming he was correct, this inscription referred to a dynastic succession in which father and son were kings but not the grandfather . He therefore set himself to find a royal succession that fit such a picture. Looking down the king lists for Persian kings, known from other studies, he quickly concluded that it could not be Cyrus and Cambyses, because the two names in cuneiform did not begin with the same letter, and the inscriptions could not refer to Cyrus and Artaxerxes, because these names were too dissimilar in length. That left Darius and Xerxes, each with the same number of letters, each beginning with a different initial. “They fitted so easily,” said Grotefend, “that I had no doubt about making the right choice.” 43 This success was underlined by the fact that Xerxes’s father was Darius, and both of them were kings, but Darius’s father, Hystaspes, was not a king. This is exactly what the inscription said.
    Publication of Grotefend’s discoveries was delayed for a while because he was felt to be too young to have made such an important breakthrough and because he was “only” a schoolteacher rather than a full-fledged university academic. In fact, another thirty years were to pass before anyone added anything of substance to Grotefend’s discoveries, when the Frenchman Émile Burnouf and the Norwegian-German Christian Lassen made further inroads into the decipherment of cuneiform.
    T HE T RANSFORMATION OF W AR
     
    Vom Kriege ( On War ), a long and not altogether cohesive work by an otherwise unknown Prussian general of the Napoleonic era, Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz, has achieved a supreme position in Western thinking about warfare. Dismissed by some as a narrow-minded pedant, an out-and-out militarist obsessed with war “as an instrument of policy,” he has also been attacked for treating war “as a rational act.” 44 On the other hand, for Bernard Brodie, the American strategist of the nuclear era, On War is “not simply the greatest book on war but the one truly great book on that subject yet written.” It has been compared with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Darwin’s Origin of Species in the force of its impact. 45
    The book has undoubtedly become a classic, but it didn’t happen immediately. On War was a product of its time, and it is true to say that the book owes almost as much to Napoleon as to its German author. We should not forget that, at the time the book’s main ideas were being conceived, Prussia’s survival as an independent nation was under threat. Napoleon had disturbed the European balance of power fundamentally, and the French ideas of revolution and individual rights threatened the ancient regimes everywhere. 46 The emperor’s advances had sparked vituperative essays by such writers as Friedrich von Gentz but these “squibs” could do little to counter the new reality: that, so far as war was concerned, Napoleon had enlisted the aid of the general population, inventing a new mass army. Prussia and its forces, Clausewitz realized, must reform in order to combat these new circumstances. Like Wilhelm von Humboldt (see Chapter 10), Clausewitz realized that major reforms