Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/186

Rh in addition to the cuneiform inscription, was also inscribed with Egyptian hierogiyphics. Tychsen pronounced the latter to be Phoenician, and he believed that the urn itself had formerly contained the ashes, of his friend Aksak. Münter made the more important remark that the characters on the Babylonian relics were nearly identical with that of the third Persepolitan column.

Meanwhile, he devoted his attention exclusively to the simplest form of writing, which is found in the first column; and he speedily recognised that the diagonal wedge which occurs so frequently was evidently intended to separate one word from the other. He compared it to the cypress tree that divides the groups in the procession on the sculptured staircase seen at Persepolis; and adds that in one of the old Hindu alphabets the words are similarly separated by a small oval. This discovery, now announced for the first time, had till then escaped the observation of Tychsen, who, it will be remembered, fancied he found three different words enclosed within the same diagonals. In order to find values for the cuneiform letters, he had recourse to a twofold method. He sought out the signs that recurred the most frequently and that were the most uniformly repeated in the same word, for he concluded that these would naturally turn out to be vowels. He soon identified three in particular that were constantly recurring: the first in almost every word, and occasionally several times in the same word. In the inscriptions analysed, he found that the first was repeated 183 times, the second 146, and the third 107 times. He then proceeded to compare the forms of