Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/258

Rh (h)ôma ('excellent'), which went to join the goodly company of Jamshid and the constellation of Moro.

The name 'Katpatuk' for Cappadocia, which Burnouf had already cited with good effect, was turned to farther account by Lassen. He not only used it to confirm the sign for k with which it begins and ends; but it enabled him to find a true sign for t, by comparison with other words in which it occurs.

We have already said that Burnouf suspected that m was the true value of the sign Grotefend made an h, and that he only rejected it because he could not reconcile himself to the existence of two signs for the same sound. Lassen was less influenced by such considerations, and when he came to a word that transliterated 'A r—in,' he had no scruple in completing it by writing an m for the unknown letter. Indeed the word occurred exactly where, from geographical considerations he would be led to expect 'Armenia,' and the conclusion would have been irresistible even if it had not been confirmed bv the name 'Chorasmia' which he observed a little farther down in his list. He made the useful remark that tHe sign was always preceded by i, the full signification of which was not then apparent. We now know that it is precisely the m before i.

The discovery of the sign for d was a happy intuition, and rested on slight evidence. He found in the eighteenth line a name of which he knew four letters, α i — u s, and he divined that the unknown letter was d, which enabled him to read 'Aidus' = India. This guess was confirmed by one other instance only, where the same sign will make 'daquista,' which he thought was Zend for 'the wisest.' The word is really 'duvaishtam' and has quite another signification.