Buck - A New Darius Inscription

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Linguistic Society of America

A New Darius InscriptionAuthor(s): Carl D. BuckReviewed work(s):Source: Language, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Mar., 1927), pp. 1-5Published by: Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/409638 .

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A NEW DARIUS INSCRIPTIONCARLD. BucK

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Any addition to our scanty store of Old Persian inscriptions is certainto yield something of interest, and this is true of the new Darius in-scription published by Sidney Smith in JRAS, 1926, 433 ff. It is in theusual trilingual versions, and occurs in duplicate on a gold and a silvertablet. These presumably belonged to a series of three or more (gold,silver, and baser materials), such as have been unearthed in foundationdeposits. The editor gives a copy made from a photograph of the goldtablet, and restorations of the text (of the Elamite version) from aphotograph of the silver tablet. A photograph of the gold tablet wasreceived from a dealer by the Oriental Institute of the University ofChicago, and I have used this.Just recently, after my comment was written, I have seen Herzfeld'scommunication in the DeutscheLiteraturzeitung, 1926, 2105 ff., where isgiven the first account of the provenience of the gold tablet. It wasfound between two blocks of an ancient foundation which came tolight in rebuilding a small house in Hamadan and which belongs to anextensive series of Achaemenian ruins of ancient Egbatana. Herzfeldmakes no mention of the silver tablet, though he must have used it inconstituting the Elamite text, which is much mutilated in the goldtablet. In the Old Persian text too, his line division after the firsttwo lines is not that of the gold tablet. It looks as if his text, thoughnominally that of the gold tablet, were in reality that of the silver tablet,which is in much better condition. Mr. John P. Kellogg, who was inPersia last summer, and to whom I am indebted for first calling myattention to the find and the publications, informs me that the silvertablet was also found at Hamadan and presumably in the same building,and that the gold tablet is now in New York.Herzfeld deals mainly with the historical and archaeological impor-tance of the find. His brief grammatical notes have not made my owncomments on the Old Persian text superfluous. He gives a letter forletter transcription (except in rendering the ideogram for "king").The editor in JRAS has followed the more usual method of fullertranscription, but with a considerable number of errors-the misreading

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2 CARL D. BUCKof some signs (or misprints), several misinterpretations of sequences,and the omission of one whole word.

The correct reading, in the system of transcription commonly em-ployed in Iranian studies, but with ' (cf. Boh. F) instead of the usualOrMeillet's V,or Weisbach's r*,is as follows.1 Ddrayavaug XS vazarka XS XSyansm XS dah-2 yuvndm Viltlspahyd pula Haxlmanigiya.3 Odtiy Ddrayavaug XS ima x~afam tya ada-4 m ddraydmiy haEs Sakaibig tyaiy pa-5 ra Sugdam amata yAt~ a Kug haid Hi(n)da-6 uv amata yati a Spardd tyamaiy Aurama-7 zdAfribara hya maOi~tabaganam. m-8 m Auramazda pdtuv utimaiy viOam."Darius the great king, king of kings, king of the lands, son ofHystaspes, the Achaemenian. Says Darius the king: This (is)the kingdom that I hold, from the Scythians beyond Sogdianato Kush, from India to Sardis, (the kingdom) which Auramazda,who is the greatest of the gods, gave me. May Auramazda protectme and my family."Instead of an enumeration of the subject lands, such as we have

elsewhere, the extent of the kingdom is here defined by the extremities,from northeast to southwest and from southeast to northwest. Thisorientation is of peculiar interest in connection with the conclusions ofJ. L. Myres, GeographicalJournal 1896, 605 ff., as to the distorted axisof ancient geography.From the fact that Sardis (i.e. Lydia) is given as the (north)westernfrontier, Smith thinks it probable that the inscription was writtenbefore the expedition to Samos in 516 B. C., and for the same reasonHerzfeld states that it must antedate the expedition against the Euro-pean Scythians in about 515 B. C. These seem somewhat doubtfulinferences, since Lydia might well figure as the (north)western frontierland without excluding islands off the coast or lands further north butnot so westerly. More significant perhaps are the (south) eastern andsouth(west)ern borders, India and Kush (Ethiopia), which are notincluded in the earliest of the lists of subject lands, India occurring inthe second and third, Kush only in the third, the Naxg-i-Rustam listof 486 B. C.' But I leave this question to the historians, and pass tosome grammatical comments.

1 In the form of the word-divider, and in the spelling of the first syllable ofVidtaspa (vii, not simply vi), our inscription differsfrom the Behistun inscription,


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A NEW DARIUS INSCRIPTION 3Throughout this inscription, as in many of the other short inscriptions,

x?dyaOiyas indicated by the ideogram, which with Tolman we representby XS. For the genitive plural we expect XkySanm as in Dar. Suezc 5, or XS&ndm as in Xerx. Pers. ca 6, cb 10. Cf. gen. sg. XSyahyaand XShya = xsayaOiyahyd. Smith reads -yanam and that is doubt-less the form intended. But the original text has XSyanama, he vowelsign after ya having been omitted, so that the only faithful transcriptionis -yandm.In 11.1-2 Smith reads dahyunam, which is the proper transcriptionfor every other occurrence of the form. But here the text hasdahyuvnam (dahayauvanaama), paralleled by paruvnam in NR a 6 ff.and the four copies of Art. Pers. The spelling uv is taken over from thefinal position, just as in the compound paruvzananam besideparuzanAndm.Cf. Skt manobhis with sandhi treatment of -as beforethe case-ending.1. 2. ViMtaspahya. Smith gives the second sibilant as s', but it is sas always. As noted above, the first syllable is written here v'i, notsimply vi.1. 4. Smith reads Sakibis, remarking "elsewhere Saka." The cor-rect reading of sakaibaiga is of course Sakailnb, like bagaibis. Theplural Sakd is usual in the enumeration of the provinces, as in NR a25 ff, Dar. Pers. e 18, though the singular occurs once, Sakam Bh. 5. 21.Noteworthy is the instrumental form after haca "from," with whichthe ablative is the natural construction and the usual one in both Aves-tan and Old Persian. At the same time one must bear in mind that inOld Persian the syncretism of ablative and instrumental is only some-what less complete than in Latin. The forms are to a considerableextent identical, and the uses are indicated by the preposition, e.g.hac' Parsa "from Persia," but hadd kard, "with the army." Withoutpreposition the ablative is unknown and the instrumental restricted.In the singular of a-stems, which are the most numerous, the twocases are merged in -a, through the loss of final d of the ablative. Inthe pronouns the ending -na, corresponding to the Sanskrit instru-mental ending -na, serves also for the ablative, and we have hacaaniyand Dar. Pers. d 11, e 20. In the plural no form in -biya, answeringto Sanskrit -bhyasis quotable, but hitherto there has been no occurrenceof a plural with haad. The haia Sakaibis is the first example, and inconnection with the situation in the singular of a-stems it justifies thebut agrees with the Darius Persepolis inscriptions, as well as with the Naxg-i-Rustam inscription, so that there is no material help from this.


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4 CARL D. BUCKprovisional assumption that here too the two cases were merged, theinstrumental ending serving for both.

But the syncretism of ablative and instrumental has no bearing on thehamiHi(n)dauv of 11.5-6, which stands in contrast to the previouslyknown hamiBabiraus with the regular genitive-ablative form. ForHi(n)dauv (wrongly transcribed in JRAS, as if the text had du in-stead of the actual dau) is a locative form like Babirauv. One mayrecall the fact that the formally identical Vedic saca "with"2is used withthe locative, or again that in Avestan the locative forms in -5 = OPers.-auv, and in -vo, and also other locative forms sometimes serve asablatives, as haIa gdtvQ,hacl basman (cf. Bartholomae, Grd. d. iran.Phil. I 222, 229). But the contrast between haca Babiraus and hacIHi(n)dauv remains surprising.11. 4-5. tyaiy para Sugdam. Smith remarks that we should expecttara, and Herzfeld that para is new. It has been customary in thecorresponding phrase NR a 28-9 to read Saka tyai[y ta]radraya, withtara = Av. tar5, Skt. tiras "across, beyond." But the ta is a restoration,for which we should now substitute pa. For para = Skt. paras "be-yond" (cf. Grk. 1repa, prp-,v)gives the same sense.As between Sugdamhere and the previously known Suguda (sauguudaand sauguda) it is the latter that is abnormal with its anaptyctic vowelbetween stops.11.5, 6. amata ydtd d Kula (Sparda) = hinc usque ad. In all pre-viously known passages ydta is a conjunction meaning "while" or"until." The a was known only as a postpositive with the locative,but here is used like Skt. a with the ablative. The new word amata,for which neither editor offers any satisfactory explanation,3 is, I think,

2 I believe in this formal identity, despite the skepticism of some (cf. Bartho-lomae, Altiran. Wtb. 1753) and the fact that Delbrilck's explanation (Vergl.Syntax I 752) of the shift of meaning in Iranian is insufficient. The shift is nomore violent than that which once took place in Eng. with, only that here we knowbetter the particular context in which it started; nor is it more startling than theopposite poles reached by the group represented by Latin sub and super.s InJRAS; "Is it another derivative from the same root as amata(if the readingis correct) variously rendered in the Bisitin inscription Col. I, 3? In that caseshould amata ydtda be translated 'extending up to'?" Herzfeld: "d-matakannwohl nur von der Wurzelmad-'zumessen,' im jungawestischen belegt, abgeleitetwerden." Such a participle would have the form masta. His further remark

"Im Elamischen ist das Altpers.dmata nur an erster Stelle durch das ebenfallsneue mittumaausgedrtickt"is due to a misunderstandingof the Elamite structure.For mittuma is a postpositive with Sukta, answering to the OP para before Sug-


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A NEW DARIUS INSCRIPTION 5clearly an adverb formed with the ablatival -ta = Skt. -tas from a pro-nominal stem ama-, corresponding to the rare Skt. ama- "this" occurringin a formula of the Atharva Veda and the Brihmanas, amo 'ham asmi,sa tvam"he am I, she thou" (AV 14. 2. 71, with Whitney's translation),and further attested by the adverbs amd "at home" ("chez lui") inRV, AV, etc, and amat "from this place, from here" RV 5. 53. 8.11.6, 8. Smith transcribes tyamiy but utamaiy. The text has in bothcases maiy, not m'iy. Herzfeld transcribes tyamiy, utamiy, the firstincorrectly according to his system, since there is no a-sign after the ya.1. 7. Smith omits baganam in his transcription and even remarksthat the Persian version has "the greatest" simply, in contrast to theother versions. But his own copy, confirmed by the photograph, showsbagqncm. The phrase hya maOeitabaganam is identical with that inDar. Pers. d. 1, Xerx. Ely., Xerx. Van, and the Elamite and Babylonianversions conform to it. The corresponding Elamite phrase is the sameas in Xerx. Elyv.and Xerx. Van. That of the Babylonian version differsfrom that in Xerx. Elyv.and Xerx. Van, and also from that in Dar. Pers.g 1, but is equivalent to them in meaning. Smith says that "theobscure word alla here seems to mean 'the other part, remainder."'On this my colleague Professor Luckenbill furnishes the following note:sa rab'i alla ilanipz of 1. 7 is the equivalent of sa rabt eli ildnil,,"who (is) great above (i.e., greater than, or greatest of) the gods."alla is undoubtedly the cuneiform rendering of the Aramaic 'al,The use of eli in Assyrian for "over, more than" is well established.,In Xerxes Elvend and Xerxes Van the same idea of the superlativeis expressed by the more commov raba sa ilani'l, the "great one ofthe gods," while in Darius Pers. g we have a phrase, which hasthe same force as eli. al-la occurs in the Babylonian version ofthe Behistun Inscription, 1.29 (? XVI).-"Darius the king thusspeaks: al-la a anaku adfiku ana Gumdtu Magusu, after I hadslain Gaumita the Magian." Here alla sa is the Aramaic 'al se.See also Peiser, Babylonische Vertrage 230 and Tallqvist, DieSprache der Contracts Nabd-nd'ids 42, for the use of alla in theNeo-Babylonian and Persian period contracts.1. 8 mam auramazdapatuv, as in many parallel passages, while othershave mam Auramazda patuv hada bagaibil. In this inscription theBabylonian version agrees with the latter, the Elamite with the former.dam, just like mittumanna in NR a 23. It is the kuis, the regular equivalent ofOP yata,which here in both cases answers to the whole Persian phrase amataydida.

Buck - A New Darius Inscription

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