Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/206

Rh list and are due to defective copying. Two others occur in Niebuhr's list, but are also defective (e,, and r, letter No. 8), so that there remain thirty-two genuine signs for which he has now found values. Several signs are, however, allotted to express the same sound. Thus he gives three signs for e (Nos. 3 [defective], 4 and 10) besides the sign for e or a which he generally transliterates e. He also gives three signs for o (Nos. 12, 16 and 23). It was afterwards found that these signs, which he took to be synonymous, are very far from being so: for example, not one of his three signs for o has that value, being respectively i, ch(a), and m[a). Indeed, among all the additions we are now considering he only succeeded in arriving at two correct values, [[Image:OldPersian-FA.svg|40x20px]], ƒ (No. 39) and [[Image:OldPersian-HA.svg|40x20px]], a (No. 41), if indeed the second may be allowed to pass. Its true value is the aspirate h. But, as we shall afterwards see, it takes an inherent a, and it is very commonly used to express the sound ' Ha,' the vowel a being altogether omitted. In an inquiry of this kind it is necessary to admit approximate values as correct; and in the present case the value allotted to this sign by Grotefend ultimately led to the important identification of the word 'Achaemenian.' Here the first syllable, 'Ach,' is represented by the two signs for h and kh; and before it was known that the first letter had the sound of 'Ha' it was a comparatively slight error to drop the aspirate and set it down as a. We have therefore added this letter to the number of Grotefend's correct discoveries. He also observed that the word for 'king' is often represented by an ideogram [[Image:OldPersian-XSHAAYATHIYA.svg|40x20px]] which, like the word, is subject to inflexions. This discovery he, however, generously attributes to Tychsen; but we have not found it in the 'Lucubratio.'