Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/231

202 Many of his countrymen were willing to take upon his authority what they would not accept from the German writer, and it gradually came to be believed (though even yet by no means universally) that the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes were to be read in the Persepolitan inscriptions.

The first advance in cuneiform decipherment after Grotefend was made by Rask, a distinguished Danish scholar. He was born in 1782, and at first he devoted himself entirely to Icelandic. He spent two years in the island, and on his return, in 1817, he published an edition of the Edda. Subsequently he added Oriental languages to the range of his acquirements. For a time his serious attention was devoted to Sanscrit, Persian and Arabic, while his leisure moments were diverted by the acquisition of Russian and Finnish. He then went to India for three months, to perfect himself in such trifling matters as Sanscrit, Hindustani, Zend and Pehlevi. A short visit to Ceylon was devoted to Cingalese, Pali and Elu. On his return to Copenhagen he filled two professorial chairs—those of Oriental Languages and Icelandic. He is regarded as one of the earliest founders of Comparative Philology, and the number of his writings is very large. Among them are Grammars of Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Cingalese, Acra, Lapp, Danish and Italian. But it is to the little volume 'Ueber das Alter der Zend-Sprache' that we have now to refer. ' Some writers contended that Zend is merely a dialect of Sanscrit, restricted in its use to sacred literature, and never employed as a spoken language.