Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/290

Rh twenty-five provinces are now given correctly with the exception of two: ' Gordyaei/ which EawHnson had shown should read ' M'udraya/ Egypt; and ' Parutia/ which is not a proper name at all, but means ' east.' Neither Lassen nor Eawlinson had much success in their treatment of the new names of provinces found at Naksh-i-Tlustam, and no general agreement has even vet Ijeen reached with regard to some of them. A careful collation of the difficult passages in the subject- matter of the inscriptions is, however, sufficient to prove the great superiority of Eawlinson over Lassen, both in the actual work of translation and in the necessary emendation of a disputed text. An instance of the comparative ingenuity of the two scholars is afforded by a passage in the Xaksh-i-Eustam inscrip- tion, where the last letter of the thirteenth line is obliterated and the passage runs thus (Lassen's trans- literation):

line 13?

14 Arcahja puthra arija arija d —

59 59 15 thra The omission of the letter led Lassen into one of the greatest blunders hi his revised translation His " progenies Arc^is ' commits him to a definite historical error, while the rendering of the following words ' arija arija ' is merely an instance of aberration to which the greatest scholars are occasionally subject. Eawhnson. who greatly excelled him in 'intuition,' had no difficulty in supplying the missing letter as p^ and he translated the passage correctly: ' son of a Per- sian, an Arian, of Arian descent,* in the place of ' Pro- genies Arcis, a venerabihbus stirpis auctoribus oriundi ' I Lassen's knowledge now enabled him to point out several instances in the Inscription of Artaxerxes Ochus