Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/317

288 sense. Sometimes, as in the fourth column, the sense was so ol)scure that he feared his ' restorations will be considered rather bold tlian felicitous.' ^ Occasionally his courage failed him aUoc^ether, and he was oblifjed to confess that ' I cannot restore the [passage] even conjecturally.' It is remarkable how uniformly success- ful his ' conjectural restorations ' were found to be. He imposed the most admirable restraint upon the intuitive faculty with which he was so eminently gifted; and his emendations exhibit a patience and sobriety that many scholars enii^awd in similar work mii^ht advantageously study. When he had sur- mounted the imperfections of the text so far as possible, he set Inmself to the task of translation, and achieved the most notal)le success in this department of literature. Wlien we consider that he had to unravel the intricacies of long sentences, determine the gram- matical relations of multitudes of new words and fix their meaning by a patient comparison with Zend or Sanscrit analogies, the unfailing divination he displays is absoUitely marvellous. A careful ('omparison of this first translation with that now accepted as correct will show com))arati\'ely few alterations, although the labours of many scholars have since been devoted to a ri^rorous study of the sain(^ text. The main l)ody of the translation remains the same, word for word, down to the minutest particulars. Some doubtful passages, concerning which IJawlinson himself entertained doubts, have been cleared up; but it rarely happens even in these that the original translation was hi fault as to the general meaning.

The loiiu list of commentators begins with Benfev, whose tract on the subject was sent to the press in

January 1847, when he could only have seen the first • *■

' J. It. A. .V x. p. Ivii.