Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/201

 that the name in B, which was presumably in the nominative case, also occurred in the third line of G with a case-ending', followed by the word for 'king,' also with a case-ending. The termination differed from that already observed in the phrase 'king of kings,' and it marked, no doubt, the genitive singular, as the other denoted the genitive plural. Referring to his Pehlevi model, he inferred that the passage indicated the relationship of the two monarchs, and that the king of the second inscription [G] here declared himself to be the son of the king of the first inscription (B). This little bit of ingenuity solved the whole mystery. In the corresponding place in B he found another word in the genitive case, which was no doubt the name of the father of the king of that inscription; and he remarked that this name was not followed by the royal title. He had thus discovered the cuneiform signs that, with little doubt, expressed the names of three Achaemenian princes, and he had recognised that these personages stood to each other in the relation of father, son and grandson, and that the first was probably not of royal rank. That is to say, from 'G' he found that 'King Z' was son of 'King Y'; and from 'B' he found that 'King Y' was son of 'X' without the addition of 'King.' It only remained to determine who these three princes were most likely to be: and as the Achaemenian dynasty was a short one and their names already known from history, the task was not a difficult one. The two kings at the head of the inscriptions could not be Cyrus and Cambyses, because their names did not begin with the same cuneiform letter; they could not be Cyrus and Artaxerxes, because there is no such discrepancy in the length of the cuneiform words. There thus only remained Darius and Xerxes for the names occurring first in the two inscriptions; and this result was con-