Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/209

180 translation of the second paragraph of A he gives thus: 'Xerxes the Monarch, the valiant King, the King of Kings, the King of all pure nations, the King of the pure, the pious, the most potent assembly, the Son of Darius the King, the descendant of the Lord of the Universe, Jemsheed.' The H of Darius ran to much the same effect and also culminated in Jamshid. Subsequently he attempted the inscription on the windows of the Palace of Darius that remained for so long a stumbling-block to his successors, and also the one on the royal robe in the Palace of Xerxes given by Le Bruyn (No 133). He likewise allowed the complete translation of the Le Bruyn No. 131 to appear in the Appendix to Heeren in 1815. Many of these attempts excited well-deserved ridicule, and even in 1815 we find him much less eager to gratify public curiosity, and perhaps less confident in his own ability to do so adequately. He willingly furnished Heeren with the transliteration of the texts, but it was only by special request that he added some of his translations. 'If I have,' he says, 'as a decipherer established the value of the signs, it belongs to the Orientalist to complete the interpretation of the writing now for the first time made intelligible.' He, however, still thought he could answer for the general sense of his rendering, though not for its verbal accuracy, and subject to that limitation the window inscription and the Le Bruyn plate No. 131 appeared in 1815. In the later edition of 1824 they are, however, suppressed.

We have now given an account of this once famous discovery and the results that were first attained. We have credited Grotefend with having found correct, or