Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/180

Rh that belong to each other. While he contributed so much to the correct apprehension of the alphabet, it is singular that he never remarked that the words themselves are regularly separated from each other by a diagonal wedge.

This fundamental fact also escaped the notice of Tychsen, who was the first to make a serious attempt at decipherment. Tychsen's family was of Norwegian descent, but he was born in the small town of Tondern, in Schleswig Holstein. in 1734. Although of humble origin, he was sent to the University of Halle, where he early acquired a taste for Oriental languages. He was appointed a lecturer in the University of Bữtzow (1760) and subsequently transferred to the more important post of librarian and curator of the Museum at Rostock (1789). He attained a great reputation by his knowledge of Hebrew and Rabbinical archæology; and he was the first to lay the foundation of modern Biblical criticism. His Oriental studies embraced Arabic and Syriac; and he also wrote on the Cufic inscriptions preserved in Venice and London. His works include six volumes of archæological papers, which he calls 'Pastimes of Bữtzow,' 'A History of the Rostock Library' (1790), and two treatises on Arabic and Syriac (1791 and 1793). He is also mentioned as having written a treatise on Zoroaster. His opinions on cuneiform are contained in a curious tract entitled 'De Cuneatis Inscriptionibus Persepolitanis Lucubratio' (1798). He agreed with Niebuhr that the inscriptions are to be read from left to right, and that the three columns contain three different kinds of writing, which he thought concealed three different languages, probably the Parthian, Median and Bactrian. He recognised that the characters in the