It has
been exceedingly difficult to read, for, in the first place, it served
as the writing medium of five different languages--Assyrian, Susian,
Mede, Chaldean, and Armenian, without counting the Old Persian--and
there was no knowledge of these five languages. Then, too, it is very
complicated, for several reasons:
1. It is composed at the same time of symbolic signs, each of
which represents a word (sun, god, fish), and of syllabic signs,
each of which represents a syllable.
2. There are nearly two hundred syllabic signs, much alike and
easy to confuse.
3. The same sign is often the representation of a word and a
syllable.
4. Often (and this is the hardest condition) the same sign is used
to represent different syllables. Thus the same sign is sometimes
read "ilou," and sometimes "an." This writing was difficult even
for those who executed it. "A good half of the cuneiform monuments
which we possess comprises guides (grammars, dictionaries,
pictures), which enable us to decipher the other half, and which
we consult just as Assyrian scholars did 2,500 years ago.
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