Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/327

298 CHAPTER V

DECIPIIKRMKM OF THE SECOND OR SUSIAN COLUMN — WESTEKGAAKD TO OPPERT A.D. 1844-o2

The sijiiial success that had been achieved in the deciphennent of the Persian column of the Achae- menian inscriptions greatly facihtated the accomphsh- ment of the difficult task that still remained. In the other two columns it was comparatively easy, especially in the short inscriptions, to identify the combinations of signs that corresponded to the proper names in the Persian, and to check them by their recurrence in the positions where they were again to be expected. The satisfactory application of this process left no doubt that the writing- in both colunms was from left to ri<xht ; and that they were translations of the same text. When the groups of characters composing the proper names were ascertained, the next process was to separate them into letters or syllables, and to identify each with the corresponding letter in Persian. The result of this hiquiry was to show clearly that the writing was partly syllabic and to raise the suspicion that it was also partly ideogra})hic. It was seen that the signs were too numerous to be limited to an alphabet, and that long words could be exj)ressed with compara- tively few signs. In some cases its ideographic character was illustrated 1)V the occurrence of only one si^n to represent an entire word — such as 'King.' It was also observed that in the second column a vertical wedge usually prec'eded proper names as a determinative.