Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/273

244 r, already assigned to by Grotefend; and completed it by determining it to be the r before u He was led to this conclusion not only by the occurrence of the letter in 'Kurus,' but also in 'paru,' which compares with the Zend for 'many' — 'the king of many lands.' He showed also that 16, the o of Grotefend and i of Lassen, is really ch; and finally 28 , the ng of Grotefend and n of Lassen, he finds to be z: which, if not correct, is a considerable improvement. He was led to this conclusion by an ingenious conjecture. The letter is found in the province Lassen transliterated u w n, and which, from his theory of the diphthong, he read q n and supposed to denote Chaona. The word occurs first in the list, and Jacquet inferred that it must refer to the capital province, Susa. He did not altogether reject Lassen's q, but by changing the n into z, he got near to what he sought, either in 'uwᵃ'zᵃ' or 'qᵃzᵃ' for Susa To sum up: Beer and Jacquet both independently found the correct values for 27 (̣̣̺) y and 41 h; ̻Jacquet added the correct value of 10  v of 16 ch or c of 26 th; and he completed the value of 40  r before u..

Beer may thus be credited with havig contributed two letters (27 and 41), Jacquet with six (10, 16, 26, 27, 40 and 41). He also suggested that the name of the first province in the I inscription referred to Susa and not to Chaonia, and that Babirus—not Babisus—was the correct reading for Babylon.

The year 1838 was memorable not only for the essays of Beer and Jacquet, but also for the appearance of Major Rawlinson among the number of cuneiform scholars. We have already related how his attention was directed to the subject while he was stationed at