chapter 11.

Cumbria and Cambria (Wales), the two states long maintained by the Britons, against the Angles and Saxons, bore, in reality, the same name, Cumbria being the more correct form of it. The earliest development of the so-called Welsh poetry seems to have been in Cumbria rather than in Wales. Taliesen and Aneurin were Cumbrian bards, and Arthur, if any historical personage stands behind his kingly shadow, was probably a Cumbrian hero.

_J. Rhys, Celtic Britain._

ALSO IN: _W. F. Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales._

See, also, KYMRY, ALCLYDE, and SCOTLAND: 10TH-11TH CENTURIES.

CUNARD LINE, The founding of the.

See STEAM NAVIGATION: ON THE OCEAN.

CUNAXA, Battle of (B. C. 401).

See PERSIA: B. C. 401-400.

CUNEIFORM WRITING.

The characters employed for the written languages of ancient Babylonia and Assyria, have been called cuneiform, from the Latin cunens, a wedge, because the marks composing them are wedge-shaped. All knowledge of those characters and of the languages expressed in them had been lost for many centuries, and its recent recovery is one of the most marvelous achievements of our age. "Travellers had discovered inscriptions engraved in cuneiform, or, as they were also termed, arrow-headed characters, on the ruined monuments of Persepolis and other ancient sites in Persia. Some of these monuments were known to have been erected by the Achæmenian princes--Darius, the son of Hystaspes, and his successors--and it was therefore inferred that the inscriptions also had been carved by order of the same kings. The inscriptions were in three different systems of cuneiform writing; and since the three kinds of inscription were always placed side by side, it was evident that they represented different versions of the same text. ... It was clear that the three versions of the Achæmenian inscriptions were addressed to the three chief populations of the Persian Empire, and that the one which invariably came first was composed in ancient Persian, the language of the sovereign himself. Now this Persian version happened to offer the decipherer less difficulties than the two others which accompanied it. The number of distinct characters employed in writing it did not exceed forty, while the words were divided from one another by a slanting wedge. Some of the words contained so many characters that it was plain that these latter must denote letters and not syllables, and that consequently the Persian cuneiform system must have consisted of an alphabet, and not of a syllabary. It was further plain that the inscriptions had to be read from left to right, since the ends of all the lines were exactly underneath one another on the left side, whereas they terminated irregularly on the right. ... The clue to the decipherment of the inscriptions was first discovered by the successful guess of a German scholar, Grotefend. Grotefend noticed that the inscriptions generally began with three or four words, one of which varied, while the others remained unchanged. The variable word had three forms, though the same form always appeared on the same monument. Grotefend, therefore, conjectured that this word represented the name of a king, the words which followed it being royal titles." Working on this conjecture, he identified the three names with Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes, and one of the supposed titles with a Zend word for "king," which gave him a considerable part of the cuneiform alphabet. He was followed in the work by Burnouf, Lassen and Sir Henry Rawlinson, until, finally, Assyrian inscriptions were read with "almost as much certainty as a page of the Old Testament."

_A. H. Sayce, Fresh Light from the ancient monuments,