Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/306

Rh share in the general progress of the studj' ; and then not more than four characters remained to be correctly identified.

We have ah'eady seen with what conspicuous success Rawhnson had found the true vahies of two of these, so far back as 1838. One still gave Lassen a great deal of trouble, and he had variously valued it as k (1836), ich (1839), Ich (1844). In his letter to Kawlinson he preferred to leave it undetermhied (1839).' Kawlinson suggested that it had the sound of t before i, which is so nearly correct and so gi^eat an improvement upon all previous attempts that it might almost be conceded to him as an approximate value if he had announced it earlier. He acknowledges that he remained long in doubt concerning it, and there is no evidence, as in the case of the other two letters, that he su<ri^ested the emendation to Burnouf.- Before his alphabet appeared, in 1846, the true value had Ijeen already fixed by Holtzmann in 1845 as d before i.

It tlius appears that Eawlinson had a real aptitude for unravelling this kind of puzzle. Only four letters were left to him by his predecessors ; and of these he 'determined two correctly and one nearly correctly. The fourtli, 28 {^{^ the z of Jacquet, he improves to an approximate correct value jli in his first alphabet ; and ui his second he gives it correctly as jf before a : a correction made simultaneously by Hincks. He may also claim the merit of having restored the sound of k (he writes kh) to 25 (^). The value of this letter had lonof before been fixed bv Grotefend, but since then it had passed through many vicissitudes. St. Martin thought it was h ; Burnouf made it y ; and Lassen thought, in 1836, it stood for the a in the diphthong aw,

» J.jR.A.S, X. lOyTiotp. - See ib. p. 8, note.