Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/188

Rh thus limited to finding correct values for two signs (α and b)

Like Tychsen, he was attracted by the frequent repetition of the word of seven letters. In one short inscription it may be found five times, and it is repeated at least twenty-eight times in the inscriptions copied by Niebuhr. He also observed that the same seven letters occur frequently with a terminal addition of three or four other letters, and this word is immediately preceded by the simpler form in seven letters. He concluded that the additional letters must be an inflexion: not, as Tychsen thought, an independent word, such as 'pius' or 'perfectus.' Münter confessed his inability to read the word, but he regarded it as the key of the whole alphabet. His first impression corresponded with that of Tychsen, in so far as he supposed it to be a proper name. But its recurrence so frequently seemed to discredit this supposition, particularly as no name of any king of the Achaemenian dynasty appeared to fit into seven letters. Then he assumed it must be a title, possibly 'king of