Archibald Henry Sayce

“ Roots, therefore, are merely the materials out of which speech can be made, the embodiments of isolated conceptions with which the lexicographer alone has to deal, whereas stems present us with words already combined in a sentence and embodying the relations of grammar. If we would rightly understand primitive Indo-European grammar, we must conceive it as having been expressed or implied in the suffixes of the stems, and in the order according to which the stems were arranged in a sentence. ”

“ With the recovery of Babylonian independence under Nabopolassar a new era of architectural activity set in, and his son Nebuchadrezzar made Babylon one of the wonders of the ancient world. It surrendered without a struggle to Cyrus, but two sieges in the reign of Darius Hystaspis, and one in the reign of Xerxes, brought about the destruction of the defences, while the monotheistic rule of Persia allowed the temples to fall into decay. ”

“ Comparison is the instrument with which science works, and a scientific grammar, accordingly, is one in which the comparative method has been applied to the relations of speech. If we would understand the origin and real nature of grammatical forms, and of the relations which they represent, we must compare them with similar forms in kindred dialects and languages, as well as with the forms under which they appeared themselves at an earlier period of their history. ”

“ It follows from this that the grammar of a people changes, like its pronunciation, from age to age. Anglo-Saxon or Early English grammar is not the grammar of Modern English, any more than Latin grammar is the grammar of modern Italian; and to defend an unusual construction or inflexion on the ground that it once existed in literary Anglo-Saxon is as wrong as to import a peculiarity of some local dialect into the grammar of the cultivated speech. ”

“ Such words as “very,” “awfully,” “schrecklich,” illustrate a second mode in which Indo-European grammar has found means of expression. Words may lose their true signification and become the mere exponents of grammatical ideas. Professor Earle divides all words into presentive and symbolic, the former denoting objects and conceptions, the latter the relations which exist between these. Symbolic words, therefore, are what the Chinese grammarians call “empty words”—words, that is, which have been divested of their proper signification and serve a grammatical purpose only. ”

“ We must next get rid of the notion that English grammar should be modelled after that of ancient Rome; until we do so we shall never understand even the elementary principles upon which it is based. We cannot speak of declensions, since English has no genders except in the pronouns of the third person, and no cases except the genitive and a few faint traces of an old dative. Its verbal conjugation is essentially different from that of an inflexional language like Latin, and cannot be compressed into the same categories. In English the syntax has been enlarged at the expense of the accidence ”

“ The Semitic verb, for example, remains unintelligible so long as the explanation of its forms is sought in the conjugation of the Aryan verb, since it has no tenses in the Aryan sense of the word, but denotes relation and not time.
A good practical grammar of a language, therefore, should be based on a correct appreciation of the facts which it expounds, and a correct appreciation of the facts is only possible where they are examined and co-ordinated in accordance with the scientific method. A practical grammar ought, wherever it is possible, to be preceded by a scientific grammar. ”

“ Alyattes’s long reign of fifty-seven years saw the foundation of the Lydian empire. All Asia Minor west of the Halys acknowledged his sway, and the six years’ contest he carried on with the Medes was closed by the marriage of his daughter Aryenis to Astyages. The Greek cities were allowed to retain their own institutions and government on condition of paying taxes and dues to the Lydian monarch, and the proceeds of their commerce thus flowed into the imperial exchequer. The result was that the king of Lydia became the richest prince of his age. ”

“ A winding ascent led to the summit of the tower, where there was a chapel, containing, according to Herodotus, a couch and golden table (for the showbread) but no image. The golden image of Merodach 40 ft. high, stood in the temple below, in the sanctuary called E-Kua or “House of the Oracle,” together with a table, a mercy-seat and an altar—all of gold. The deities whose chapels were erected within the precincts of the temple enclosure were regarded as forming his court. Fifty-five of these chapels existed altogether in Babylon, but some of them stood independently in other parts of the city. ”

“ The comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages is alone in an advanced state, those of the Semitic idioms, of the Finno-Ugrian tongues and of the Bantu dialects of southern Africa are still in a backward condition; and the other families of speech existing in the world, with the exception of the Malayo-Polynesian and the Sonorian of North America, have not as yet been treated scientifically. ”

“ The adverbial meaning of so many of the cases explains the readiness with which they became crystallized into adverbs and prepositions. An adverb is the attribute of an attribute—“the rose smells sweetly,” for example, being resolvable into “the rose has the attribute of scent with the further attribute of sweetness.” In our own language once, twice, needs, are all genitives; seldom is a dative. The Latin and Greek humi and χαμαί are locatives, facillime (facillumed) and εὐτυχῶς ablatives, πάντη and ἄμα instrumentals, πάρος, ἑξῆς and τηλοῦ genitives. ”

“ The country known as Caria was shared between the Carians proper and the Caunians, who were a wilder people, inhabiting the district between Caria and Lycia. They were not considered to be of the same blood as the Carians, and were, therefore, excluded from the temple of the Carian Zeus at Mylasa, which was common to the Carians, Lydians and Mysians, though their language was the same as that of the Carians proper. ”

“ In the Persian epoch, native dynasts established themselves in Caria and even extended their rule over the Greek cities. The last of them seems to have been Pixodarus, after whose death the crown was seized by a Persian, Orontobates, who offered a vigorous resistance to Alexander the Great. But his capital, Halicarnassus, was taken after a siege, and the principality of Caria conferred by Alexander on Ada, a princess of the native dynasty. ”

“ Sardis now became the western capital of the Persian empire, and its burning by the Athenians was the indirect cause of the Persian War. After Alexander the Great’s death, Lydia passed to Antigonus; then Achaeus made himself king at Sardis, but was defeated and put to death by Antiochus. The country was presented by the Romans to Eumenes, and subsequently formed part of the proconsular province of Asia. By the time of Strabo (xiii. 631) its old language was entirely supplanted by Greek.
The Lydian empire may be described as the industrial power of the ancient world. ”

“ Almost the whole of Caria is mountainous. The two great masses of Cadmus (Baba-dagh) and Salbacum (Boz-dagh) , which are in fact portions of the great chain of Taurus (see Asia Minor) , form the nucleus to which the whole physical framework of the country is attached. From these lofty ranges there extends a broad tableland (in many parts more than 3000 ft. high) , while it sends down offshoots on the north towards the Maeander, and on the west towards the Aegean. ”

“ The legends of Belshazzar’s feast and of the siege and capture of Babylon by Cyrus which have come down to us from the book of Daniel and the Cyropaedia of Xenophon have been shown by the contemporaneous inscriptions to have been a projection backwards of the re-conquest of the city by Darius Hystaspis. The actual facts were very different. Cyrus had invaded Babylonia from two directions, he himself marching towards the confluence of the Tigris and Diyaleh, while Gobryas, the satrap of Kurdistan, led another body of troops along the course of the Adhem. ”

“ According to Hübschmann, the nominative, accusative and genitive cases are purely grammatical, distinguished from one another through the exigencies of the sentence only, whereas the locative, ablative and instrumental have a logical origin and determine the logical relation which the three other cases bear to each other and the verb. The nature of the dative is left undecided. The locative primarily denotes rest in a place, the ablative motion from a place, and the instrumental the means or concomitance of an action. The dative Hübschmann regards as “the case of the participant object.” ”

“ In 1854 Sir H. C. Rawlinson discovered the name of Bel-sarra-uzur—“O Bel, defend the king”—in an inscription belonging to the first year of Nabonidos which had been discovered in the ruins of the temple of the Moon-god at Muqayyar or Ur. Here Nabonidos calls him his “first-born son,” and prays that “he may not give way to sin,” but that “the fear of the great divinity” of the Moon-god may “dwell in his heart.” In the contracts and similar documents there are frequent references to Belshazzar, who is sometimes entitled simply “the son of the king.” ”

“ Another form of adverb is the infinitive, the adverbial force of which appears clearly in such a phrase as “A wonderful thing to see.” Various cases, such as the locative, the dative or the instrumental, are employed in Vedic Sanskrit in the sense of the infinitive, besides the bare stem or neuter formed by the suffixes man and van. In Greek the neuter stem and the dative case were alone retained for the purpose. ”

“ Moreover, our area of comparison must be as wide as possible; where we have but two or three languages to compare, we are in danger of building up conclusions on insufficient evidence. The grammatical errors of the classical philologists of the 18th century were in great measure due to the fact that their area of comparison was confined to Latin and Greek. ”

“ He then endeavoured to buy off the invaders by numerous presents—30 talents of gold, 800 talents of silver, precious stones, couches and thrones inlaid with ivory, girls and eunuchs—but all in vain. Jerusalem was saved eventually by a plague, which decimated the Assyrian army and obliged Sennacherib to return to Nineveh. ”

“ The statement is on the whole borne out by the few Lydian, Mysian and Carian words that have been preserved, as well as by the general character of the civilization prevailing among the three nations. The race was probably a mixed one, consisting of aborigines and Aryan immigrants. It was characterized by industry and a commercial spirit, and, before the Persian conquest, by bravery. The religion of the Lydians resembled that of the other civilized nations of Asia Minor. It was a nature worship, which at times became wild and sensuous. ”

“ So important were they, that the whole of Susiana was sometimes called Cissia after them, as by Herodotus (iii. 91, v. 49, &c.) . In fact Susiana was only a late name for the country, dating from the time when Susa had been made a capital of the Persian empire. In the Sumerian texts of Babylonia it was called Numma, “the Highlands,” of which Elamtu or Elamu, “Elam,” was the Semitic translation. Apart from Susa, the most important part of the country was Anzan (Anshan, contracted Assan) , where the native population maintained itself unaffected by Semitic intrusion. ”

“ There are many indications that the parent Indo-European in an early stage of its existence had no signs of gender at all. The terminations of the names of father and mother, pater and mater, for example, are exactly the same, and in Latin and Greek many diphthongal stems, as well as stems in i or ya and u (like ναῦς and νέκυς, πόλις and λῖς) , may be indifferently masculine and feminine. Even stems in o and a (of the second and first declensions) , though the first are generally masculine and the second generally feminine, by no means invariably maintain the rule ”

“ The only two considerable rivers are: (1) the Xanthus, which descends from the central mass of Mt Taurus, and flows through a narrow valley till it reaches the city of the same name, below which it forms a plain of some extent before reaching the sea, and (2) the Limyrus, which enters the sea near Limyra. The small alluvial plains at the mouths of these rivers are the only level ground in Lycia, but the hills that rise thence towards the mountains are covered with a rich arborescent vegetation. ”

“ LYDIA, in ancient geography, a district of Asia Minor, the boundaries of which it is difficult to fix, partly because they varied at different epochs. The name is first found under the form of Luddi in the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal, who received tribute from Gyges about 660 B.C. In Homer we read only of Maeonians (Il. ii. 865, v. 43, x. 431) , and the place of the Lydian capital Sardis is taken by Hydē (Il. xx. 385) , unless this was the name of the district in which Sardis stood (see Strabo xiii. p. 626) . ”

“ The idea of gender was first suggested by the difference between man and woman, male and female, and, as in so many languages at the present day, was represented not by any outward sign but by the meaning of the words themselves. ”