Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/210

Rh at least nearly correct, values for twelve characters; and the achievement may be allowed to merit the fame it still confers upon its ingenious author. Each step in the process now appears simple enough, and it is not easy for us to estimate the full magnitude of the difficulties he surmounted. They can indeed only be realised by remembering how completely a man like Mὓnter had failed. Yet it is exceedingly curious to consider how so ingenious a person was baffled when he might seem to be on the point of farther success. Grotefend was harassed by the continued recurrence of the two words he transliterated 'Bun Akeotscheschoh.' There was, of course, no punctuation to guide the translator, and he constantly connected these two words together. His translation usually ran: 'Darii regis [filius] stirps muundi rectoris.' He was quite satisfied from the beginning that 'bun' signified 'stirps,' and in the Pehlevi inscription, which was his constant model, he had before him the very appropriate reading 'stirps Achaemenis.' No phrase, he well knew, was more likely to appear in these inscriptions than this very one. He had already arrived at the first three letters of this word, α, k, e or α, and it is strange the suspicion never entered his mind that the rest of his transliteration should be modified in accordance with the apparently inevitable conclusion that the mysterious word was in fact 'Achaemenian.' This is all the more remarkable from another consideration. De Sacy had expressly exhorted him to keep a look out for 'Ormuzd,' which was certain to occur frequently in the cuneiform, as it did in the Sassanian inscriptions. In the Le Bruyn No. 131 he found a word which, according to his alphabet read 'euroghde'; and in this with singular acuteness he fancied he