Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/237

208 it occurred, and endeavour to assign to it a letter, from among those not already rigorously determined, that would produce a word for which some meaning might be found by comparing it with Zend. For example, the word with which the Darius at Hamadan begins consists of only two letters, which, according to Grotefend, would yield vu. But Burnouf could make no sense out of this, and he accordingly substituted a b for the first letter, The result was that he could not only extract a sense out of bu—which he compared with the Sanscrit bhû and bû 'to be,' but two or three other words were also rendered intelligible by the same change. The consideration, however, that finally settled the matter was the discovery of a name in the I inscription, which, upon the supposition that the letter in question was a b would yield ' Bakhtroch,' and this he had no difficulty in identifying with Bactria. Hence he altered the r of Grotefend into a b without apparently recognising that he merely restored the value originally given to that sign by Münter. -

Unfortunately, his method did not lead to very important results, for it only enabled him to add two additional values correctly. Both of these were suggested to him by the second word in this same Hamadan Inscription.

The word occurs also in the B and G inscriptions, where it was transliterated by Grotefend e gh r e. Burnouf accepted the change of the initial e into i, which was made by St. Martin, without approaching nearer to the correct value, which is in fact a v. The emendation of the second letter lay ready at hand, and