Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/262

Rh identification depended in great measure on the belief that Murgab, where it is the first letter in the inscription, represents the ancient Pasargadae, the city of Cyrus. Lassen would by no means accept this as sufficient proof, for even upon that hypothesis the inscription might not necessarily belong to Cyrus. St. Martin read it 'Houschousch' and conjectured that this name referred to 'Ochus.' Lassen accepted this view, and saw in the first two signs, which he took for αu, the strongest confirmation that they had the value of the ô long in Ochus. In 1845, when the result of his farther studies were published, we find that his original alphabet has undergone considerable improvement. He has suppressed the second signs for each of the vowels α, i and u, and the two diphthongs for the long ê and ô. that caused so much trouble, have disappeared. We hear no more of the double letters for q, nor of the second value ng which he ascribed to his initial α, now found to be more correctly h. He has also struck out the two defective signs he admitted for t and u, For the rest, the improvement consists chiefly in sweeping away the errors into which his love of Zend analogies had at first hurried him. The only addition he made to the number of his correct values was thrsuggested by Grotefend, to which, as we have said, he had previously nearly approached. The remaining signs now correctly represented are due to M. Beer and M. Jacquet, who wrote in the interval that separated the two Memoirs by Lassen.

Lassen's translations are naturally much affected by the nine incorrect values he still retained, and by the errors he introduced himself. Yet if we compare the transliteration and translation of the Le Bruyn Xo. 131, as given by Burnouf and Lassen, we cannot fail to recognise the superiority of the latter. For the 'Bu izrk' of the one we have 'Baga wazark' of the