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."[19]

Cuneiform inscriptions have been solved in the same manner as the Egyptian hieroglyphics—­there was an inscription in three languages—­Assyrian, Mede, and Persian.  The last gave the key to the other two.

=The Assyrian People.=—­The Assyrians were a race of hunters and soldiers.  Their bas-reliefs ordinarily represent them armed with bow and lance, often on horseback.  They were good knights—­alert, brave, clever in skirmish and battle; also bombastic, deceitful, and sanguinary.  For six centuries they harassed Asia, issuing from their mountains to hurl themselves on their neighbors, and returning with entire peoples reduced to slavery.  They apparently made war for the mere pleasure of slaying, ravaging, and pillaging.  No people ever exhibited greater ferocity.

=The King.=—­Following Asiatic usage they regarded their king as the representative of God on earth and gave him blind obedience.  He was absolute master of all his subjects, he led them in battle, and at their head fought against other peoples of Asia.  On his return he recorded his exploits on the walls of his palace in a long inscription in which he told of his victories, the booty which he had taken, the cities burned, the captives beheaded or flayed alive.  We present some passages from these stories of campaigns: 

Assurnazir-hapal in 882 says, “I built a wall before the great gates of the city; I flayed the chiefs of the revolt and with their skins I covered this wall.  Some were immured alive in the masonry, others were crucified or impaled along the wall.  I had some of them flayed in my presence and had the wall hung with their skins.  I arranged their heads like crowns and their transfixed bodies in the form of garlands.”

In 745 Tiglath-Pilezer II writes, “I shut up the king in his royal city.  I raised mountains of bodies before his gates.  All his villages I destroyed, desolated, burnt.  I made the country desert, I changed it into hills and mounds of debris.”