Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/277

 though perhaps he might be in a position to add something to their knowledge. He observed that Lassen's newest version of the alphabet 'coincided in all essential points with my own,' but that his labours 'have been of no farther assistance to me than in adding one new letter to my alphabet and in confirming opinions which were sometimes conjectural.' Rawlinson had indeed succeeded in working out the whole of the alphabet by his own unaided ingenuity, so that he was accustomed to say that there were only two letters he owed to others: k, No. 4, which he learned from Burnouf, and y,   No. 27, from Lassen, who got it from Jacquet.

On the other hand, his contributions to the general advance of the study were necessarily limited. By the time he became known to European scholars they had on their part advanced so far that only four letters of Niebuhr's list remained for which a correct or approximate value had not been found. These were:

The appearance of Rawlinson did not, therefore, take place till after the difficulty of the decipherment had been almost completely surmounted without his assist- ance. When his correspondence with Burnouf and Lassen l)egan, in the autumn of 1838, he was, however, still in time to rectify two out of the four incorrect values.

He found 32 in the name of Cambyses, where it occurs as the fourth sign, which he transliterated correctly as j; Kₐbujᵢy. Hincks afterwards read the