Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/179

 service rendered bv Niebuhr to the study. Its formation was not so simple as might be supposed, and it would have been difficult to accomplish it except by a minute study of the momuments themselves. The inscriptions had hitherto been so imperfectly copied that no mere collation of them, however carefully made, could have succeeded in eliminating the whole of the faulty signs arising from the errors of the transcriber. The accidental addition or omission of a wedge, or an alteration in its direction, had the effect of magnifying the apparent number of the letters. It is a singular proof of the accuracy of Niebuhr's judgment that he should have been so successful in this first attempt to distinguish between the genuine and the defective letters. In his list of forty-two signs, he has only introduced nine that are not true letters, including the sign that was afterwards found to be the mark of separation between the words. On the other hand, amid all the conflicting signs found in the copyists, he passed over only two that are genuine: one is included by Grotefend in his list of defective signs: the other  was first added to the alphabet by Rawlinson. It proved of great advantage to concentrate the attention of scholars upon signs that were for the most part genuine, and to save them the dissipation of energy that would have resulted if they had been left to wander unguided among the inscriptions themselves. Niebuhr rendered a farther service by separating each group of wedges that formed a letter by a colon, an idea he copied from the Zend; and the eye thus soon becomes accustomed to recognise the complicated combinations