Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/241

212 turned out to be d before i and the other r before n. He was equally unfortunate with regard to h, neither of his signs for that letter being correct. He felt that the four signs for gh required explanation. He places only one among the thirty definite values in his alphabet. The others he labels as uncertain. (These are (.) He thought that a comparison of these would convince the student that they are composed of exactly the same elements, so that they seem to differ from each other only by the caprice of the engraver, who has arranged the wedges according to his fancy, while he has neither altered their form nor increased nor diminished their number. He recognised, however, the objection that all cuneiform writing consists of the same elements, and that the sole difference of one sign from another consists in the arrangement of the wedoes. He was forced to fall back upon the impossibility of assigning different values to these signs and at the same time preserving any sense in the words where they occur. The second gh he considered justified by its occurrence in the word he thought must be 'çughd, the third  because it would enable him to read 'baghem,' 'destiny,' and the fourth ) by its completing the sense of 'ghudraha,' which he thought denoted the Gordyans. In this latter case the correct transliteration is 'm'udray'; but it is not likely, even if he had read the word correctly, he would have detected in this form the name of Egypt. As a matter of fact, the first gh, which he has put in his alphabet (, 34) as the usual form, is d before u; the second is g before u; the third (, 32) is jbefore i; the fourth (, 33) is m before u.

Grotefend thought he found four and St. Martin six signs for e, but Burnouf correctly excluded that letter