Chapter 17
Section 17 of Celebrated Travels and Travelers, Volume 3. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Abai in November 2014. Celebrated Travels and Travelers, Volume 3. The Great Explorers and Travelers of the Nineteenth Century by Jules Verne.
First Part, Chapter 3. The Oriental Scientific Movement and American Discoveries. 1. The decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions and the study of a Syrian remains up to 1840. Ancient Iran and the Avesta. The Survey of India and the Study of Hindustani.
The exploration and measurement of the Himalaya Mountains The Arabian Peninsula Syria and Palestine Central Asia and Alexander von Humboldt Pike at the sources of the Mississippi, Arkansas and Red River
Major Long's two expeditions General Cass Schoolcraft at the sources of the Mississippi The exploration of New Mexico Archaeological Expeditions in Central America
Scientific Expeditions in Brazil Spix and Martin Prince Maximilian of Wied Neuvied D'Orbigny and American Man Although the discoveries which we are now to relate are not strictly speaking geographical,
they nevertheless throw such a new light on several early civilizations and have done so much to extend the domain of history and ideas that we are compelled to dedicate a few words to them. The reading of cuneiform inscriptions and the decipherment of hieroglyphics are events so important in their results,
they reveal to us so vast a number of facts hitherto unknown or distorted in the more or less marvellous narratives of the ancient historians Diodorus, Stesius and Herodotus, that it is impossible to pass over scientific discoveries of such value in silence. Thanks to them we form an intimate acquaintance with a whole world, with an extremely advanced civilization, with manners, habits and customs differing essentially from our own.
How strange it seems to hold in our hands the accounts of the steward of some great lord or governor of a province, or to read such romances as those of Sedna and the two brothers, or stories such as that of the predestined prince. Those buildings of vast proportions, those superb temples, magnificent hypogia and sculptured obelisks, were once nothing more to us than sumptuous monuments, but now that the inscriptions upon them have been read, they relate to us the life of the kings who built them and the circumstances of their erection.
How many names of races not mentioned by Greek historians? how many towns now lost, how many of the smallest details of the religion, art and daily life, as well as of the political and military events of the past, are revealed to us by the hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions. Not only do we now see into the daily life of these ancient peoples,
of whom we had formerly but a very superficial knowledge, but we get an idea even of their literature. The day is perhaps not far distant when we shall know as much of the life of the Egyptians in the 18th century before Christ as that of our forefathers in the 7th and 18th century of our own era. Carsten Niebuhr was the first to make and bring to Europe an exact and complete copy of inscriptions at Persepolis in an unknown character.
Many attempts had been made to explain them, but all had been vain, until in 1802 Grotefend, the learned Hanoverian philologist, succeeded, by an inspiration of genius, in solving the mystery in which they were enveloped. Truly, these cuneiform characters were strange and difficult to decipher. Imagine a collection of nails variously arranged and forming groups horizontally placed. What did these groups signify? Did they represent sounds and articulations, or, like the
letters of our alphabet, complete words? Had they the ideographic value of Chinese written characters? What was the language hidden in them? These were the problems to be solved. It appeared probable that the inscriptions brought from Persepolis were written in the language of the ancient Persians, but Rask, Bopp and Lassen had not yet studied the Iranian idioms and proved their affinity with Sanskrit. It would be beyond our province to give an account of the ingenious
deductions, the skillful guesses and the patient groping through which Grotefend finally achieved the recognition of an alphabetic system of writing and succeeded in separating from certain groups of words what he believed to be the names of Darius and Xerxes, thus attaining the knowledge of several letters, by means of which he made out other words. It is enough for us to say that the key was found by him, and to others was left the task of completing and perfecting his work.
More than thirty years passed by, however, before any notable progress was made in these studies. It was our learned fellow countryman Eugène Bourneau who gave them a decided impulse. Turning to account his knowledge of Sanskrit and Zend, he found that the language of the inscriptions of Persepolis was but a Zend dialect used in Baktriana, which was still spoken in the 6th century and in which the books of Zoroaster were written.
Bourneau's pamphlet bears the date 1836. At the same period Lassen, a German scholar of Bonn, came to the same conclusion on the same grounds. The inscriptions already discovered were soon all deciphered, and with the exception of a few signs, on the meaning of which scholars were not quite agreed, the entire alphabet became known.
But the foundations alone were laid, the building was still far from finished. The Persepolitan inscriptions appeared to be repeated in three parallel columns. Might not this be a triple version of the same inscription of the three chief languages of the Archimian Empire, namely the Persian, Median, and Assyrian or Babylonian? This guess proved correct, and owing to the decipherment of one of the inscriptions, a test was obtained,
and the same plan was followed as that of Champollion with regard to the Rosetta Stone, on which was the trilingual inscription in Greek, Demotic or Anchorial, and hieroglyphic characters. In the second and third inscriptions were recognized Syrochalde, which, like Hebrew, Himyaric and Arabic, belonged to the Semitic group, and a third idiom, to which the name of Medic was given,
resembling the dialects of the Turks and Tatars. But it would be presumptuous of us to enlarge upon these researches. That was to be the task of the Danish scholar Vestergaard, of the Frenchmen de Solcy and Au Père, and of the Englishmen Morris and Rawlinson,
not to mention others less celebrated. We shall have to return to this subject later. The knowledge of Sanskrit and the investigation of Brahmanic literature had inaugurated a scientific movement which has gone on ever since with increasing energy. Long before Nineveh and Babylon were known as nations,
a vast country called Iran by Orientalists, which included Persia, Afghanistan and Baluchistan, was the scene of an advanced civilization, with which is connected the name of Zoroaster, who was at once a conqueror, a lawgiver and the founder of religion. The disciples of Zoroaster, persecuted at the time of the Mohammedan conquest and driven from their ancient home, where their mode of worship was still preserved,
took refuge under the name of Parsis in the northwest of India. At the end of the last century, the Frenchman Aquetil du Perron brought to Europe an exact copy of the religious books of the Parsis written in the language of Zoroaster. He translated them, and for 60 years all the savants had found in them the source of all their religious and philological notions of Iran.
These books are known under the name of Zend Avesta, a word which compromises the name of the language, Zend, and the title of the book, Avesta. As the knowledge of Sanskrit increased, however, that branch of science required to be studied afresh by the light of the new method. In 1826, the Danish philologist Rask and later Eugène Burnoff, with his profound knowledge of Sanskrit and by the help of a translation in that language recently discovered in India, turned once more to the study of the Zend. In 1834, Burnoff published a masterly treatise on the Yakna, which marked an epoch. From the resemblance between the archaic Sanskrit and the Zend
came the recognition of the common origin of the two languages and the relationship, or rather, the identity of the races who speak them. Originally the names of the deities, the traditions, the generic appellation, that of Aryan of the two peoples, are the same, to say nothing of the similarity of their customs.
But it is needless to dwell on the importance of this discovery, which has thrown an entirely new light on the infancy of the human race, of which for so many centuries nothing was known. From the close of the 18th century, that is to say from the time when the English first obtained a secure footing in India,
the physical study of the country was vigorously carried on, outstripping of course for a time that of ethnology and kindred subjects, which require for the prosecution a more settled country and less exciting times. It must be owned, however, that knowledge of the races of the country to be controlled is as essential to the government as it is to commercial enterprise, and in 1801 Lord Wellesley, as governor for the company, recognizing the importance of securing a good map of the English territories,
commissioned Brigadier William Lampton to connect, by means of a trigonometrical survey, the eastern and western banks of the Indus with the observatory of Madras. Lambton was not content with the mere accomplishment of this task. He laid down with precision one arc of the meridian from Cape Comorin to the village of Takur Kera, 15 miles southeast of Iličpur.
The amplitude of this are exceeded 12 degrees. With the aid of competent officers, amongst whom we must mention Colonel Everest, the government of India would have hailed the completion of the task of its engineers long before 1840, if the successive annexation of new territories had not constantly added to the extent of ground to be covered. At about the same time with this progress in our knowledge of the geography of India,
an impulse was given to the study of the literature of India. In 1776, an extract from the most important native codes, then for the first time translated under the title of the Code of the Gentooes, was published in London. Footnote. Gentoo was the name given by old English writers to the natives of Hindustan and is now obsolete, having been superseded by that of Hindu. End of footnote.
Nine years later, the Asiatic Society was founded in Calcutta by Sir William Jones, the first who thoroughly mastered the Sanskrit language. In Asiatic researches, published by this society, were collected the results of all scientific investigations relating to India. In 1789, Jones published his translation of the drama of Sakuntala,
that charming specimen of Hindu literature so full of feeling and refinement. Sanskrit grammars and dictionaries were now multiplied, and the regular rivalry was set on foot in British India, which would undoubtedly soon have spread to Europe, had not the continental blockade prevented the introduction of works published abroad. At this time, an Englishman named Hamilton, a prisoner of war in Paris, studied the oriental manuscripts in the library of the French capital
and taught Frederick Schlegel the rudiments of Sanskrit, which it was no longer necessary to go to India to learn. Lassen was Schlegel's pupil, and together they studied the literature and antiquities of India, examining, translating and publishing the original texts, whilst at the same time Franz Bob devoted himself to the study of the language, making his grammars accessible to all, and coming to the conclusion, which was then startling, although it is now generally accepted,
of the common origin of the Indo-European languages. It was proved that the Vedas, that collection of sacred writings held in too universal veneration to be tempered with, were written in a very ancient and very pure idiom which had not been revived, and whose close resemblance with the Zen put back the date of the composition of the books beyond the time of the separation of the Aryan family into two branches.
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, dating from the Brahminical or the period succeeding that of the Vedas, were next studied, together with the Puranas. Owing to a profounder knowledge of the language and a more intimate acquaintance with the mythology of the Hindus, scholars were able to fix approximately the date of the composition of these poems, to ascertain the numberless interpolations and to extract everything of
actual historical or geographical value from those marvellous allegories. The result of these patient and minute investigations was a conviction that the Celtic, Greek, Latin, Germanic, slave and Persian languages had one common parent, and that parent none other than Sanskrit. If, then, their language was the same, it followed as a matter of course that the people
had also been identical. The differences now existing between these various idioms are accounted for by the successive breakings up of the primitive people. Approximate dates enable us to realize the greater or less affinity of those languages with the Sanskrit and the nature of the words which they have borrowed from it, words corresponding
by their nature to the different degrees of advance in civilization. Moreover, a very clear and definite notion was obtained of the kind of life led by the founders of the Indo-European race and the changes brought about in it by the progress of civilization. The Vedas give us a picture of the Aryan race before it migrated to India and occupied the Punjab and Kabulistan. By the aid of these poems we can look on at struggles against the primitive races of Hindustan,
whose resistance was all the more desperate in that the conqueror of their caste divisions left them only the lowest and most degraded. Thanks to the Vedas we can realize every detail of the pastoral and patriarchal life of the Aryans, a life so domestic and unruffled that we mentally ask ourselves whether the eager strife of the modern peoples is not a poor exchange for the peaceful existence which their few ones secured to their forefathers.
We cannot dwell longer on this subject, but a little that we have said will be enough to show the reader the importance to history, ethnography and philology of the study of Sanskrit. For further details, we refer him to the special works of Orientalists and to the excellent historical manuals of Robilloux, Le Normand and Maspero. All the scientific results of whatever kind obtained up to 1820 are also skillfully and impartially summed up in Walter Hamilton's large work
A Geographical, Statistical and Historical Description of Hindustan and the Neighbouring Countries. This is a book which, by recording the various stages of scientific progress, marks with accuracy the point reached at any given epoch. End of section 17
