Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/204

Rh reached that he completed 'Darius' by the addition of h. He was led to decide for e as the value of the fifth letter, by the pronunciation of the name of Darius in Hebrew. The form for Xerxes must have seemed at first sight rather disconcerting; but by the time the Appendix was republished, in 1824, Grotefend was able to announce that his conjecture was fully confirmed by Champollion, who spelt out the hieroglyphics for Xerxes on the Vase of Caylus to read Kh sh h a r sh a.

The result of his labours on the three proper names was that he arrived at the values of thirteen cuneiform signs: G o sh t a s p from Goshtasp or Hystaspes ; D r e u from Darius, and kh and h from Xerxes. Of these thirteen letters, nine turned out ultimately to be correct; but the a had been previously recognised by Tychsen and by Mὓnter: so that Grotefend now added eight correct values to the cuneiform alphabet, viz. sh t s p — d r u — kh.

He did not, however, rest satisfied with this achievement. He sought to transliterate and translate the remainder of the two inscriptions, but in this his fortune failed him. He does not explain in his own Memoir the method he pursued, but de Sacy has given us an insight into the process which no doubt rests on good authority. We may suppose that he kept the Pehlevi inscription before him and continued to be guided by its analogy. He accordingly expected to find that the word after 'king' would express some honorary epithet corresponding to 'magnus' in the example before him. It was in fact composed of four letters of which he already knew the first and third, e — r —. The nearest word in Zend to suit his purpose was e gh r e, 'strong.' He therefore considered