Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/197

 inscription on the Caillou Michaux. It was written, he says, in Armenian, and contains an exhortation addressed by a priest of the 'Temple of the God of the Dead' to certain women mourning their departed friends. De Sacy, from whom our information is taken, gives more than a page of this pious effusion, which he says is not more than a sixth part of the translation. It is needless to say that the whole is a pure invention. Indeed it does not clearly appear whether the Memoir was intended by Lichtenstein as a jeu ď esprit, or whether it was simply an impudent imposture. It is certainly curious that he succeeded in getting himself treated seriously. Besides the solemn review and confutation by De Sacy from which we quote, we find so late as 1820 that Grotefend still thought it necessary to combat his theories, and De Sacy even at that period classified together 'the conjectures of Lichtenstein and the labours of Grotefend' as equally open to suspicion.

We now come to the scholar to whose ingenuity we owe the first real success that was achieved in deciphering the cuneiform letters.

George Frederick Grotefend was born at Mũnden, Hanover, in 1775. He was sent to the Universitv of Göttingen in 1795, where two years later he obtained a tutorship. He applied himself to the study of philology under Heyne, and in 1803 he became Pro-Rector. Soon afterwards he was transferred to the Gymnasium of Frankfort on the Maine; and in 1821 he became Rector of the Lyceum at Hanover, where he died in 1853. He was always an industrious student, but he failed in