Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/207

178 De Sacy was not aware of the origin attributed to it, and he has given the credit entirely to Grotefend himself.

Soon after the completion of the alphal^et, but still before the appearance of the Appendix in 1815, he was induced to change the value of two of the signs. One of these he now fixed correctly, k (25), and the other approximately sr (40).

It will be recollected that Sir William Ouseley visited Murgab in 1811 and made a copy of the inscription that is found repeated there several times. His book did not appear till 1821; but Grotefend had the advantage of seeing a copy of the inscription in time to include it in his Memoir. According to the alphabet as it then stood, the transliteration would render z u sch u d sh; but if we follow his own account, he saw reasons, which he does not explain, to change the first letter from z to k and the third from sch to sr; with the result that he produced k u sr u e sch, which he read 'Kurus.' He does not mention the change of the d into e, but a more correct copy of the same inscription showed that that sign did not exist in the original, which consists of five signs only. After he had arrived at this result, he tells us, he came across the French translation of Morier's first Memoir, published in 1813, where, it will be recollected, that acute traveller suggested that Murgab was Pasargadae, the city of Cyrus. This confirmation of his own studies was certainly satisfactory, though the sequence of events as he describes them is remarkable. Grotefend had now contributed eight correct values from the inscriptions B and G, two from the Murgab inscriptions, and two