Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/212

Rh discovery. It was the identification of m and n long afterwards by Rask that to a great extent facilitated the way for farther progress towards completing the alphabet, an opportunity that Grotefend unfortunately allowed to escape him.

One of the chief services rendered by Grotefend to the alphabet was to draw up a long list of the various signs he found in the inscriptions which were evidently due to errors on the part of the copyist. These he ascertained by a careful collation of the inscriptions as they appeared in the works of Le Bruyn, Niebuhr, and others. Even Niebuhr had admitted eight of these into his corrected list of forty-two letters, but they existed in great numbers in the inscriptions, and still cleared out of the way, they presented a serious obstacle to the decipherer. Some of his detractors, like St. Martin, have accused him of wilfully excluding these signs, or of changing them arbitrarily to suit the exigencies of his own system; but the charge is entirely without foundation, as De Sacy recognised from the first.

Grotefend was of opinion that the cuneiform system was intended only for engraving, and that some other writing must have been in use for ordinary purposes. He divided the various specimens that had come under his notice into three classes. The first included the Persepolitan inscriptions; the second was to be seen upon the stone recently published by Millin, which he says partly resembles the third Persepolitan and partly the Babylonian bricks; and the third the Babylonian