Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/221

192 to apprehend the process by which it was reached. The explanation he has given of it greatly excels in lucidity and in logical precision the account of Grotefend himself—so much so, indeed, that we are inclined to think that Grotefend never thorou^dilv understood his own system till it was explained to him by De Sacy. The French scholar was fully acquainted with the subject, for he had himself made frequent attempts at decipherment, always, he frankly acknowledges, with a 'total absence of success.' The only point he considers tolerably certain is that the word with seven signs is the title of King. He doubts altogether that the names of the kings had been correctly ascertained, and he points out the difficulty of accepting an alphabet that contains three or four signs for e. three for o, and so on. The opinion he formed in 1803 he repeats in 1820. In his letter to M. Dorow, he confesses that he is still unable to find the names of the Persian kings or of the god Ormuzd in the cuneiform inscriptions; and he declares he does not believe that anything hitherto published on the subject is worthy of confidence.

While the cuneiform inscriptions were thus engaging the attention of European scholars, English travellers had begun the investigation of the sites of Babylon and Nineyeh that were so soon to yield such surprising results. Tn 1808, Kinneir visited Hillah, accompanied by Captain Frederick, of the Rooyal Navy; and two years later they extended their explorations to the mounds near Mosul. Kinneir's 'Geographical Memoir,' published in 1813, contains an excellent account of both these historic ruins. Soon after his visit, Mr. Rich went to Hillah and began his investigations (1811). He found the surface of the ground covered with