Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/238

Rh could not well be longer overlooked. Since Eask had identified the sign for m, this particular sign was the only one that required alteration in order to read Aur m z dα, and it was therefore inevitable that Grotefend's gh should at length be surrendered for z; the only wonder is that this change should have been so long delayed. The emendation of the last letter of the word displays an entirely different order of ingenuity. The letter occurs in only seven different words in all the inscriptions of Niebuhr, Le Bruyn, and Schulz but in one instance it is the initial sign in a word of which the others are t p d h u k. It was certainly no common feat of imagination that led Burnouf to see that if a k were to precede this remarkable agglomeration, the province of Kappadocia would turn up. By these means, however, he got rid of another of Grotefend's e's, and altered it into a k, which proved to be correct. Having thus changed e gh r e into i z r k, the next step was to find some similar word in Zend that mighht suggest its meaning. This, however, was not easy; the nearest he could think of was 'yazata,' which might bear to be translated 'divine.'

Such was the method that enabled Burnouf to restore one correct value, b that had been recently neglected, and to add two others, z and k, to the alphabet. He was on the point of increasing the number of correct values by two or three others, but unfortunately he hesitated to yield to his first intuition. In the twelfth line of the I inscription he found a word which, according to his alphabet he transliterated 'Arion.'