Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/213

184 inscriptions, the most important being that published by the East India Company. 'These are the most complicated,' and are to be 'distinguished by the number of the strokes of union and by the eight-rayed star.' The first class—namely, the Persepolitan—he again subdivided into three kinds, according to the relative com- plexity of the writing. He considers they represent different languages: the first or simplest is the 'Zend, which is apparently the Median language'; the second the Parsi, or language of the true Persians; the third 'perhaps a Persian dialect, perhaps Pehlevi; but in consequence of the absence of prefixes it cannot belong to the Aramean family,' a reason also that excluded the two others from the same classification. He thought the first system of writing was the Old Assyrian; the second differs from it by having a greater number of oblique and fewer angular wedges; while it differs from the third system by avoiding, like the first, wedges placed diagonally, and by having more wedges that cross each other. He held that all the three systems of Persepolitan are alphabetical and not merely syllabic or ideographic; in the first system he finds words composed of eleven characters, in the second of nine, and in the other of seven. On account of the number of signs required in the second system to compose a word, he concludes that it employs separate letters for long and short vowels; and also to express the combination of a consonant and vowel. He thought the number of letters in its alphabet was about forty, and he observed that the monogram for 'king' is always used: neither here nor in the third system is the royal title ever written alphabetically. In the Plate (No. 2, 1815) he gives three short inscriptions: the Xerxes (G. Niebuhr), the Cyrus