British archaeologist Layard not only discovered Nineveh in Kuyunjik, but also dug up the library of Assyrian King sinatra Herib in the southwest palace of the ancient city, which is a milestone in the history of cuneiform.

At the end of 185 1, Layard achieved great success, retired from the torrent, turned to politics, became a member of parliament, and transferred all his undisputed archaeological career to his favorite pupil and assistant, Hormuz Rusum. Laserme also inherited Layard's good fortune. In Gong Bei, Nineveh, he excavated the library of King Asuba, the grandson of sinatra Hrib, and the relief of the king's lion hunting map, and unearthed more books and utensils with cuneiform inscriptions, which accumulated 25,000-30,000 cuneiform inscriptions of two generations of kings and shocked the world again.

Unlike rawlinson, Botha, Layard and other western scholars, Rusum himself is an Assyrian who was born and raised in Mosul. At the age of 20, he joined the archaeological team from Layard and became the "cow" of Assyrian cuneiform archaeological research.

From the photos, Russum, with a beautiful beard and national costume, is handsome and won the favor of Layard. Layard even sent the Assyrian young man to Oxford University for full-time study for nearly two years at his own expense, and personally took the latter to practice archaeology in various parts of Iraq.

Assyrian Russell failed his teacher's gratitude. After Layard turned to politics, he continued to represent the British Museum and led many excavations in Assyria and Babylon, and made many important discoveries. He is recognized as the first batch of archaeologists in the Middle East and Assyria, and has won many honorary titles such as a member of the Royal Geographical Society and a researcher at Victoria College.

Russum's greatest achievement is that he let the world know the King's Library in Ashgabat with a large number of cuneiform clay tablets excavated and arranged by himself.

We know that the combination of words constitutes an article, and the collection of articles becomes a book. The owner of the book is the library, and the library is the most precious crystallization of human knowledge and wisdom. Borges, a famous Argentine writer and director of the National Library, once said: "I have always secretly imagined that heaven should be like a library." The most typical appearance of this kind of library should be the library of Trinity College Dublin, which we have been to, and the library of Father Sinks's alma mater.

However, the earliest "paradise" in the world-King's Library of Asubeniba, which was praised as "the most precious source of historical materials in the world" by British writer Wells in "Historical Outline-All Stories of Mankind", was made of clay tablets.

Because the clay tablets and unearthed cultural relics in Ashgabat Library have been transported to the British Museum for a long time, we can only "listen" to Ruthem's explanation of Assyrian cuneiform and Ashgabat's "sandwich martial arts"-why is there a peak in the application of cuneiform in the hands of the last generation of Assyrian emperors?

Standing in the Assyrian Hall of the British Museum, Russum first introduced the prismatic clay columns unearthed in Ashgabat Library. The ten edges are thickly engraved with cuneiform characters, which can be called "a set of history books". Made in 643 BC, the cylinder with a diameter of about 20 cm and a height of about 50 cm was officially named "Russum Column", which is the cuneiform tablet of King Subanj. It is the most complete record in the chronicle of his reign, and describes in detail the nine battles of the king against various enemies.

? "Look, this symbol (on the left) is the cuneiform of the word Assyria," Russum said with a smile, pointing to the words above the Russum column, "and the cuneiform of Asubani is like this (on the right)."

"Look again," Laserme continued. "From the Sumerian-Akkadian period to the New Assyrian period, the shape of cuneiform characters has undergone tremendous changes. For example, the first line of Akkadian cuneiform shown below is a complex font (traditional Chinese characters), while the second line of New Assyrian cuneiform is a simple font (simplified Chinese characters). These changes can be exemplified on Russum cylinder. "

The "new Assyrian cuneiform" mentioned by Russum, that is, Akkadian cuneiform in Assyrian dialect, is used to express Assyrian, belonging to Semitic language family, with similar pronunciation and little spelling change. But the new Assyrian cuneiform fonts were separated from the ancient Babylonian cuneiform fonts, and the strokes reached the peak of simplification and standardization. Finally, simplified characters even changed oblique strokes into horizontal strokes or vertical strokes, which became farther and farther away from the face of ancient fonts and realized the third style change (as to why it was "the third time", readers will know the reason later).

In addition, the new Assyrian cuneiform is still a mixed ideogram and syllable, and the stroke combination of cuneiform is reduced to 570, and only 300 are commonly used, which is half less than that of ancient Babylon. It further developed the syllabic symbols of phonology, and gradually approached the syllabic characters in the later period.

At this time, Russum did not stop his speech on "Russum Column": "If you want to know the contents and pronunciation of cuneiform characters in Ten Faces in detail, Mr. george smith has translated the full text, and we have listed some of them. You can look at the historical stories of King shabani's suppression of Egyptian rebellion, the defeat of the Black Pharaoh, the pacification of Babylon, the attack on the Arabian Peninsula, and the conquest and destruction of the Elam Empire. "

This partial map of cuneiform characters listed by Russum and translated by Smith also gives readers an intuitive understanding of the writing method, Latin phonetic notation and English translation of new Assyrian cuneiform characters (the sequence of each serial number is three lines), and gives concrete examples.

Readers can also go back to the local examples of the inscription of Beshiton in Chapter 8 and compare the differences between the new Assyrian cuneiform and the Persian cuneiform translated by rawlinson. Although the font simplification reform has been carried out again, it seems that the strokes of the new Assyrian cuneiform are not as concise as those of the Persian cuneiform in later generations.

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