CUMBERLAND ISLAND-CUMMING.

pects.

CUMNOCK-CUNEIFORM.

C.'s works are very voluminous: the chief are Voices of the Night, Voices of the Day, Voices of the Dead, Apocalyptic Sketches, and Expository Readings in the Old and New Testament.

convincing to men who are moderately impressed crown, as a descendant, through king Donald Bane, with the grandeur, complexity, and mystery of the of the old Celtic dynasty. His son, Red John C., Divine Providence; but it is greatly relished and was one of the three wardens of Scotland, and greedily swallowed by that large portion of the distinguished himself by his gallant resistance to community who love to see all things, even the the English. He fell under Bruce's dagger, before 'oracles of God,' presented under melodramatic as- the altar of the Franciscan friars at Dumfries, in 1306; and his kindred went down, one after another, in the struggle to avenge him. John C., Earl of Buchan, was defeated by Bruce in a pitched battle, near Inverury, in 1308, when his earldom was wasted with such relentless severity, thatwe are told by the poet who sang the victories of Bruce-for sixty years afterwards, men mourned the desolation of Buchan. Such of the Cumyns as escaped the sword, found refuge, with their wives and children, in England, where, although they of the English court, they married into the best were so poor as to be dependants on the bounty families, so that, in the words of Mr Riddel, their blood at this day circulates through all that is noble in the sister kingdom, including the numer ous and royal descendants of King Henry IV.' The of the Lord of Badenoch, who was the head of the Earl of Shrewsbury seems to be the representative

CU'MNOCK, OLD, a town in the south-east of Ayrshire, on the left bank of Lugar Water, and on the Glasgow and Dumfries Railway, 16 miles east of Ayr, in the middle of the district of Kyle. Pop. of town, 2395; of parish, 3721. It was once famous for the manufacture of wooden snuff-boxes, with invisible wooden hinges,' 2500 to 3500 being made yearly, but this business has for many years been almost wholly in the hands of the Mauchline manufacturers. Around Old C. there is an abundant supply of good coal, and of rich iron ore. It has also manufactures of reaping and thrashing-machines, and other agricultural implements. New Cumnock is a village 5 miles south of Old C., amid the high lands in the upper part of Kyle district. Pop. of parish, 2891. Near New Cumnock are found ironstone, antimony, smiths' and cannel coal, and plumbago.

CU'MYN, CUMMING, or COMYN, a family which rose to great power and eminence in England and Scotland. It took its name from the town

of Comines, near Lille, on the frontier between France and Belgium. While one branch remained there, and in 1445, gave birth, in its old château, to the historian Philippe de Comines (q. v.), another followed the banners of William of Normandy to the conquest of England. In 1069, the Conqueror sent Robert of Comines, or Comyn, with 700 horse to reduce the yet unsubdued provinces of the north. He seized Durham, but had not held it for 48 hours, when the people suddenly rose against him, and he perished in the flames of the bishop's palace. His nephew, William, became Chancellor of Scotland about 1133, and nine years later, all but possessed himself of the see of Durham. The chancellor's nephew, Richard, inherited the English possessions of his family, and acquired lands in Scotland. By his marriage with Hexilda, Countess of Athol, the granddaughter of Donald Bane, king of the Scots, he had a son William, who, about 1210, became Earl of Buchan by marrying the Celtic heiress of that great northern carldom. By this marriage, he was father of Alexander, Earl of Buchan, who, by marrying a daughter of Roger de Quenci, Earl of Winchester, acquired the high office of Constable of Scotland, with great estates in Galloway, Fife, and the Lothians. By a previous marriage with a wife whose name has not been ascertained, William C. was father of Richard -whose son John became Lord of Badenoch-and of Walter, who by marriage became Earl of Monteith. By other marriages, the family obtained, for a time, the earldom of Angus and the earldom of Athol, so that, by the middle of the 13th c., there were in Scotland 4 earls, 1 lord, and 32 belted knights of the name of Cumyn. Within 70 years, this great house was so utterly overthrown that, in the words of a contemporary chronicle, there was no memorial left of it in the land, save the orisons of the monks of Deer' (a monastery founded by William C., Earl of Buchan, in 1219). The Cumyns perished in the memorable revolution which placed Bruce on the throne of Scotland. Their chief, the Lord of Badenoch, had, in 1291, been an unsuccessful competitor for the

race.

CUNA'XA, a place in Babylonia, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, about forty-five miles north from Babylon, noted for the battle fought there (401 B. C.) between Cyrus the Younger and his brother Artaxerxes Mnemon, in which the former was killed.

Within the

CUNDINAMA'RCA, the central department of New Granada, or at least of what lately existed under that name, comprises the provinces of Mariquita, Neyva, and Bogota. It occupies large portions of the basins of the Magdalena and the Cauca, having an estimated area of 350,000 square miles. The population, of which we can only guess the amount, appears to be equally divided between whites, aborigines, and half-breeds. province of Bogota stands the city of the same name, once the capital of Colombia, and still the capital, at least nominally, of New Granada. Pop. 517,648. C. derives its name from an old American goddess, and before the conquest of the land by the Spaniards was one of the chief regions of native civilisation. There are still to be met with here, ruins of old buildings, broken statues of the gods, and other monuments of a worship that has wholly passed away.

CUNEIFORM, Cuneatic, Wedge-shaped, Arrowheaded, (Fr. Tête-à-clou, Ger. Keilförmig), are terms for a certain form of writing, of which the component parts may be said to resemble either a wedge, the barb of an arrow, or a nail. It was used for monumental records, and was either hewn or carved in rocks and sculptures, or impressed on tiles and bricks. The first date that can be assigned to it is about 2000 B.C., and it seems to have died out shortly before or after the reign of Alexander the Great. It appears to have been employed first in Assyria and Media, and to have thence spread over the whole of that vast portion of Asia which formed the Persian monarchy under the Achæ menida. For nearly 2000 years after its extinction its very existence was forgotten. Although the immense ruins found all over that ancient kingdom, and principally those of splendid palaces and tombs, which, at a distance of about 12 miles from Shiraz, designate the site of ancient Persepolis, had at all times attracted the attention of Eastern travellers, still no one seems to have dreamed that those strange wedges which completely covered some of them could have any meaning. Garcia de Sylva Figueroa, ambassador of Philip IU,

It was

CUNEIFORM.

of Spain, who, on a visit to Persepolis in 1618, first became possessed with the firm conviction that these signs must be inscriptions in some lost writing and, perhaps, language, and had a line of them copied. Amongst subsequent travellers whose attention was attracted to the subject, Chardin, after his return to Europe in 1674, published three complete groups of cuneiforms, copied by himself at Persepolis, together with a comparatively long and minute account of the mysterious character. He likewise declared it to be writing and no hieroglyphs: the rest, however, will always be unknown.' Michaux, a French botanist, sent, in 1782, an entire altar, found at Bagdad, to Paris, covered with inscriptions, and bearing a large wedge-evidently an object of worship-on its top. Ever since, the materials for the investigation of a subject, the high importance of which by that time was fully recognised, have been rapidly accumulating. Sir H. Jones, Ker Porter, Robert Stewart, Sir W. Ouseley, Bellino, Dr Schultz-up to Rich and Botta, Flandin, Rouet, Layard, Oppert, and, above all, Rawlinson, each in his turn brought back more or less valuable materials from his eastern travels; and, naturally enough, those explorers are among the foremost to engage in the study of the records they had brought to light.

(1798), and Münter of Copenhagen (1800), affirmed
and further developed this conjecture. The latter
went so far as to divide the characters and inserip
tions into alphabetical, syllabic, and monogram ·
matical, and to assume two different languages-
Zend for inscriptions of a religious, Pehlvi for those
of a political character. The real and final discovery,
however, is due to Grotefend of Hanover, and dates
from 1802. On the 7th of September of that year,
he laid the first cuneiform alphabet, with its equiva-
lents, before the Academy of Göttingen-strangely
enough, in the very same sitting in which Heyne
gave an account of the first reading of hieroglyphs.
The process by which Grotefend arrived at that
wonderful result is so supremely interesting, that
we cannot omit to sketch it briefly. He fixed upon
a Persepolitan inscription of what was called the
first class, and counted in it thirty promiscuously
recurring groups or combinations of cuneiforms.
These groups he concluded to be letters, and not
words, as a syllabarium of thirty words could not
be thought of in any language. Then, again, a certain
oblique wedge, evidently a sign of division, which
stood after three, four, five, up to eight or nine such
groups or letters, must shew the beginning or
end, not of a phrase, but of a word. Tychsen and
Münter had already pointed out a certain combin-
ation of seven characters as signifying the royal
title. Grotefend adopted this opinion. The word
occurred here and there in the text, and after the
first words of most of the inscriptions, twice; the
second time with an appendage, which he concluded
to be the termination of the genitive plural, and he
translated these two words, without regard to their
phonetic value, King of Kings.' He then, in con-
tablets, found them repeated in what he assumed
to be a filial relation; thus: There were three dis-
tinct groups, words, or names, which we will call X,
D, and H, and this is how they occurred: 1, X,
King of Kings, son of D, King of Kings; 2, D,
King of Kings, son of H; but the 3, H, was not
followed by the word King. H, therefore, must have
been the founder of the dynasty. Now the names
themselves had to be found. Grotefend, unlike
his predecessors, had no recourse to philology, but
to archæology and history. The inscriptions in
question were by that time proved to belong to
the Achæmenian dynasty, founded by Hystaspes
group H. He was followed by Darius, King of
Kings, son of Hystaspes,' or Darius Hystaspis
group D; he, again, by Xerxes, King of Kings, son
of Darius, King of Kings
group X--and the
problem was solved. It could not have been Cyrus
and Cambyses, as the groups did not begin with
the same signs (C); nor Cyrus and Artaxerxes, the
first being too short for the group, the second too
long-it could only be Darius, Xerxes, Hystaspes

Shrouded in comparative mystery though certain portions of these characters and the language they represent still be, it is highly interesting and instructive to notice the opinions first entertained of them by the wise and learned in Europe. In the Transactions of the Royal Society of June 1693, they first appeared from a copy made by Flowers, and they are held to be the ancient writing of the Gaures or Gebres, or a kind of telesmes'-an expres-paring the words preceding the royal titles in two sion no less unintelligible than the subject it tries to explain. Thomas Hyde, the eminent Orientalist, declared them, in his learned work on the religion of the ancient Persians, which appeared in 1700, to be nothing more or less than idle fancies of the architect, who endeavoured to shew how many different characters a certain peculiar stroke in different combinations could furnish, and reproved the authors of all those so-called Persepolitan inscriptions' very strongly for having misled so many wise men, and taken up so much of his own precious time. Witte, in Rostock, saw in them the destructive work of generations upon generations of worms. Generally, they were pronounced to be talismanic signs, mysterious formulæ of priests, astrological symbols, charms, which, if properly read and used, would open immense vaults full of gold and pearls -an opinion widely diffused among the native savans. The next step was to see in them a species of revealed digital language, such as the Almighty had first used to Adam. Lichtenstein read in some of them certain passages from the Koran, written in Cutic, the ancient Arabic character; in others, a record of Tamerlane; and was only surprised that others should not have found this, the easiest and clearest reading, long before him. Kempfer was not quite sure whether they were Chinese or Hebrew characters. That they were Runes, Oghams, Samaritan, Greek characters, were some of the soberest explanations.

It was Karsten Niebuhr who first shewed the way, to the more sensible portion of the learned, out of this labyrinth of absurdities. Without attempting to read the character itself, he first of all established three distinct cuneiform alphabets instead of one, the letters of which seemed to outnumber those of all other languages together. The threefold inscriptions found at Persepolis he thus took to be transcripts of the same text in three alphabets, in a hitherto unknown language. Tychsen of Rostock

=

=

=

of course, in the orthography of their, not of our time; and wherever in these names the same letters recurred, they were expressed by the same combinations of signs. A further proof of the correctness of the reading was furnished by a vase in Venice, bearing a cuneiform and a hieroglyphical inscription, which were both read at the same time independently: 'Xerxes.' Innumerable difficulties, however, remained, and remain up to this moment. Grotefend had, after all, only read-and not altogether correctly-three names, which did not contain more than twelve letters--the rest being mere conjecture

and there were many more in this alphabet. The two other alphabets, with an infinite variety of letters, had hardly been properly approached yet. Moreover, the discovery of Grotefend was in itself so startling, so extraordinary and bold, that no one ventured to follow it up for the next 20 years, when

CUNEIFORM.

Cuneiform writing, as we said before, was used for monumental records only, a cursive writing-cylinders, barrels, prisms, of a phonetic, syllabic, from right to left-being used for records of minor importance. The inscriptions are mostly found in three parallel columns or tablets, and are then translations of each other in different alphabets and languages, called respectively Persian, Median, and Assyrian; the Achæmenian Kings being obliged to make their decrees intelligible to the three principal nations under their sway, as in our days the Shah of Persia would use the Persian, Turkish, and Arabic languages, in order that he might be understood in Bagdad and Teheran.

The second kind is called the Median, because it takes the second place in the trilingual inscriptions, under the conquering Persians, but over the con- As to the origin of the character, we will briefly quered Assyrians, and as the Medes stood somewhat state, in conclusion, that nothing certain is known, in that relation to these two nations, that name or is likely to be known for some time. It is was selected. Another name, Scythic,' has been not unlikely, however, that it was hieroglyphic, proposed, or, by way of compromise, Medo-Scythic,' although neither the fishes nor the bees, which these and the language supposed to have been spoken letters are supposed to have been originally, seem to by those innumerable Tartaro-Finnic tribes which have more in their favour than the worms, which occupied the centre of Asia-has been pronounced were said to be their unconscious authors, The to be a Turanian dialect. But the process of con- following is the opinion of Rawlinson on this point: structing out of such slender elements as Samojed That the employment of the cuneiform character and Ostiak words, a so-called 'Scythic,' is somewhat originated in Assyria, while the system of writing similar to the attempt of reconstructing Sanscrit | to which it was adapted was borrowed from Egypt,

CUNNINGHAM-CUPAR-FIFE.

will hardly admit of question. Whether the cuneiform letters, in their primitive shapes, were intended like the hieroglyphs to represent actual objects, and were afterwards degraded to their present forms; or whether the point of departure was from the Hieratic, or perhaps the Demotic character, the first change from a picture to a sign having thus taken place before Assyria formed her alphabet, I will not undertake to decide; but the whole structure of the Assyrian graphic system evidently betrays an Egyptian origin. The alphabet is partly ideographic and partly phonetic, and the phonetic signs are in some cases syllabic, and in others literal. Where a sign represents a syllable, I conjecture that the syllable in question may have been the specific name of the object which the sign was supposed to depict; whilst in cases where a single alphabetical power appertains to the sign, it would seem as if that power had been the dominant sound in the name of the object.'

In order to give the reader some idea of the appearance of the cuneiform character, we subjoin the name of Darius (Dariyavas, Tariyavaus), written in the Persian, Scythic, and Assyrian alphabets :

Persian.

Scythic.

Painters, a Life of Burns, and a Life of Sir Daviu
Wilkie. His death took place in London on the
29th of October 1842. As a Scotch poet, he
ranks, perhaps, after James Hogg.
His songs,
although disfigured by false taste, mannerism, and
a superabundance of ornament, have true lyrical
impulse and movement.

CUNNINGHAM, PETER, a littérateur of some note, son of Allan Cunningham the poet (q. v.), was born at Pimlico in 1816. Since 1834, he has held a government situation. His chief writings are the Handbook of London, the Life of Drummond of Hawthornden, the Handbook to Westminster Abbey, the Life of Inigo Jones, Modern London, &c. He has, besides, edited Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and the works of Oliver Goldsmith, the Songs of England and Scotland, and the Letters of Horace Walpole. C. has also contributed extensively to Fraser's Magazine, the Athenæum, Household Words, &c.

CUNNINGHA'MIA, a genus of trees of the natural order Coniferæ, nearly allied in botanical characters to the true pines and firs, but in foliage having considerable resemblance to the Araucarias. C. Sinenois is an evergreen tree, with narrow ovatolanceolate, stiff, and sharp-pointed leaves, common in many parts of China, but too tender for the climate of Britain.

CUP, DIVINATION BY, a mode of foretelling events, practised by the ancient Egyptians, and still

EYYYYYYYYY prevailing in some of the rural districts of England

Assyrian.

EYY YYY = N «-K

and Scotland. One of the eastern methods consisted in throwing in small pieces of gold or silver leaf into a C. of water, in which also were placed precious stones, with certain characters engraved upon them. The infernal powers were then invoked, and returned answer, either in an intelligible voice,

his tea-cup after pouring out the last of the liquid. Few people now, however, even among the most ignorant of those who practise and are practised upon by C. divination, have implicit faith in the

For fuller information on this subject, see Rawlinson, The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Behis-y signs on the surface of the water, or by a representation in the C. of the person inquired tun deciphered and translated, &c. (Journal As. Soc., about. By the modern method, a person's fortune 1846, &c.); Grotefend, Erläuterungen der Keilin-is foretold by the disposition of the sediment in schriften aus Behistun (Göttingen, 1854); Lassen u. Westergaard, Uber die Keilinschriften der ersten und zweiten Gattung (Bonn, 1845); Hincks, On the First and Second Kinds of Persepolitan Writing (Transact. Roy. Ir. Soc., 1846); Norris, Memoir on the Scythic Version of the Belistun Inscription (Journ. As. Soc., 1853); Rawlinson, A Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria (Lond. 1850); Oppert, Etudes Assyriennes (Journal Asiatique, Paris, 1857; and E. Norris, Assyrian Dict. of Cuneiform Inscript., vol. 1, 1868.

spare

utterance of the oracle.

CU'PAR-A'NGUS, a town on the borders of Perthshire and Forfarshire, and partly in both, is situated on the left bank of the Isla, a tributary of the Tay, 12 miles east by north from Perth, and 16 miles west-north-west from Dundee.

It

lies between the Grampian and Sidlaw Hills, in
the centre of the Valley of Strathmore, and from
its position in this valley it is popularly called
It
the capital o' the How.' Pop. in 1861, 3694.
has extensive linen manufactures, with a con-
siderable traffic in timber. Near the town are the

CUNNINGHAM, ALLAN, poet and littérateur, was born in 1785, at Blackwood, in Dumfries shire. The circumstances of his parents were humble. At the age of 11, C. was taken from school, and apprenticed to a stone-mason. He worked faithfully at his calling; but his time, and his evenings, were given to song and the remains of two Roman camps, on one of which collection of traditions. He first appeared in print stand the ruins of a monastery, built in 1164 as a contributor to Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale by Malcolm IV., and destroyed at the Reformaand Galloway Song. These contributions, purporting richly carved tombstones in the grave-yard contion. Recent excavations have exhumed numerous to be ancient ballads, were entirely the composition of the ingenious and ambitious stone-cutter. tiguous to the parish church, evidently those that The publication gained him the acquaintance of had marked the graves of the ancient dignitaries of Hogg and Sir Walter Scott. With the latter, the monastery, and which had been covered up 'Honest Allan' was always a prodigious favourite. by the ruins of the decaying edifice. On his removal to London, he became one of the best known writers for the London Magazine. He subsequently obtained a situation in Chantrey's studio as foreman, or confidential manager, and this office he held till his death. During his career, he wielded an indefatigable pen. He wrote novels, poems, and a drama. His principal prose works, apart from his fictitious narratives, are Lives of the

The abbey

revenue in 1562 was £1238, 14s. 9d. in money, and 182 chalders of victual. The classic hill of Dunsinane is situated about five miles to the southwest of C., and the dilapidated castle of the 'bold Pitcur,' who fell in the battle of Killiecrankie, in 1689, is within a distance of two miles.

CUPAR-FIFE, a royal, parliamentary, and municival burgh, and the county town of Fifeshire,