Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/196

Rh concerning which so much noise was being made in fact not older than the seventh or eighth century A.D., and that the characters bore a 'striking resemblance' to Cufic. Nothing more was necessary than to remove the arbitrary additions of unnecessary wedges, in order to detect the Cufic symbols they concealed. Unlike most other scholars, he chiefly studied the Babylonian bricks and the most complicated of the Persepolitan systems; and he regarded an entire group of characters as only one letter. Having reduced it to the necessary simplicity by simply dropping out all the inconvenient wedges till he could discover something that suggested the appearance of a Cufic letter, he was enabled to draw up an alphabet by which he read all the cuneiform inscriptions with the greatest ease. He then discovered that the language was an ancient form of Arabic and should be read from right to left. He was quite surprised that Hager should have been so deluded by wild dreams of Belus and Semiramis that he failed to see that his bricks 'contained only a few miserable sentences in Arabic.' What the Arabic words really were he did not consider it necessary to disclose to the public, but he communicated a few of them to De Sacy, who pronounced that they were not Arabic at all. Lichtenstein was good enough to translate Hager's brick, and found that it was a prayer; from thence he passed on to Niehuhr's inscriptions, and selected the difficult specimens (C, E, and L, Pl. 24). From C he obtained the most astonishing result. The words ran as follows: 'The King, the Sovereign, Prince of all Princes, the Lord Saleh, Jinghis, son of Armerib, governor-general for the Emperor of China, Orkhan Saheb.' Encouraged by this striking success, he next took in hand the long