Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/189

 kings,' and in that case he clearly saw that the preceding word must be the name of the king. Here he had got on the right track, for the word does in fact signify 'king.' and the one that precedes it, at the beginning of the inscriptions, was afterwards found to be the royal name; but he ultimately rejected this explanation, because in Niebuhr's Table A it followed a word of two letters, which could not possibly express the name of any of the Achaemenian kings. The passage he refers to happens to be erroneously copied, for a diagonal wedge has been introduced where there should be a letter, and Münter was minded by this unfortunate mistake. He thus abandoned an hypothesis that, if persevered in, might have led to some result. He may also have thought that the word of seven letters was too long to be simply 'king,' and consequently he made the unfortunate guess that it signified 'king of kings.' This assumuption stood greatly in the way of his arriving at the correct meaning. The truth is that the two words already referred to as occurring together are required to make up the signification of 'king' of kings,' the second being merely a repetition of the first with the addition of the genitive termination, corresponding to 'rex' and 'regum.' Münter could derive no assistance from a Zend grammar, for at that time none had been written. What information he collected by his own study afforded him no hep in the present matter. According to his transliteration, he knew three out of the four letters with which the longer word terminates: these were e; an unknown sign, possibly a j, followed by ea; but Zend could not guide him to the signification of the inflexion 'ejea.' The transliteration was at fault, for the four letters are really 'anam,' which corresponds exactly to the Zend