Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/202

Rh firmed by the absence of the royal title from the name of the father of the king in one of the inscriptions, for he recollected that Hvstaspes is not called king by the Greek writers. He assumed, therefore, that the first word in B was Darius (and it must have been satisfactory to notice that the second letter, α, was precisely the α of Münter) and the other Hystaspes; while the first word in G he assumed was Xerxes.

From these three known words he now set himself to get at least the approximate values for the letters they contained. According to De Sacy, Grotefend first transliterated Darius and then Xerxes, from which two names he obtained the word for 'king,' and finally he transliterated Hystaspes. But according to Grotefend's own account of the matter, he fastened in the first instance on the word that should read 'Hystaspes.' It consists of ten cuneiform signs,including the inflexion. He learned from Anquetil's Zend-Avesta that the Zend form of the name was Goshtasp, Gustasp, Kistasp. Placing a letter of the name under each cuneiform sign, he arrived

at the following result: ·   ·    ·  ·  ·  ·

Here, then, were seven letters of the cuneiform alphabet for which values were provisionally assigned and three left over for the genitive termination. The word for Darius also consisted of seven letters, which he at first

read thus: ·  · ·  · ·  ·

The process so far was confirmed by the repetition of the same letters α and sh in both words in the position in which they were to be expected. There was more difficulty with Xerxes. The cuneiform word consisted of seven letters:

· ·  ·  ·  ·  of which he already – sh – e r