Colloque - Jules Oppert (1825-1905) et l’assyriologie de son temps - Kevin Cathcart : The Decipherment of Akkadian and its Cuneiform Writing System: Hincks, Oppert and Rawlinson

Dominique Charpin

Collège de France

Année 2024-2025

Civilisation mésopotamienne

Colloque - Jules Oppert (1825-1905) et l'assyriologie de son temps - Kevin Cathcart : The Decipherment of Akkadian and its Cuneiform Writing System: Hincks, Oppert and Rawlinson

Kevin Cathcart

Résumé

In 1846 Edward Hincks announced that he had made a beginning in the decipherment of Akkadian. Between 1846 and 1849 he established that many signs have more than one reading or represent more than one sound, several signs can be pronounced the same, and signs have "ideographic" (logographic) as well as phonetic or syllabic values. As early as 1849 Hincks was expressing the view that Akkadian was not the language of the inventors of cuneiform. H. C. Rawlinson's most enduring contribution to cuneiform studies was his copying and publication of the Old Persian text of the long trilingual inscription at Behistun. His publication of the Babylonian text was less successful and he was disappointed to find that it was not the key to decipherment that he thought it would be. It took him several years to come to terms with the logo-syllabic nature of the script and to shed his notion that the script was partly alphabetic. Jules Oppert began the study of Mesopotamian cuneiform with the advantages of an excellent academic formation. He had studied in depth Sanskrit and Old Persian when he turned to the study of Akkadian and Sumerian. His archaeological experience in the Near East became an asset in his research on the collections of cuneiform tablets. His clear understanding of the Akkadian language and its writing system is evident in his numerous and detailed publications of texts.