Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/185

 Münter did not profess to l)e able to transliterate and still less to translate the inscriptions. His pretensions were limited to a very tentative endeavour to assign values to thirteen characters; and of these, four were not derived from Niebuhr's list, and they turned out to be merely errors of the copyist. Having fixed the date of Persepolis and presumably therefore of the inscriptions, he inferred that the language must be closely allied to the Zend or the Pehlevi. He made a minute investigation of all the cuneiform inscriptions that were known in his day in Europe, and studied Kaempfer and Le Bruyn with the same attention as he studied Niebuhr. He accepted Niebuhr's division of the Persepolitan inscriptions into three different kinds of writing; and he conjectured that the first was alphabetical, the second syllabic, and the third ideographic. The latter he thought bore some resemblance to Chinese. He saw that the language of the first column admitted of too many vowels to be closely related to the Pehlevi. He was, on the whole, disposed to think that the three columns contained translations of the same text into different languages, which might probably be Zend, Pehlevi and Parsi. On this point, however, he did not consider the evidence sufficient to exclude all doubt. Indeed, he said the three columns might turn out to be in the same language, expressed in different characters. He studied carefully the inscriptions that occur on vases, cylinders and bricks from Babylon, a few of which were then beginning to find their way to the European museums and the private collections of Sir W. Ouseley and Mr. Townley. The most important of these was upon the vase described by Caylus, which,