Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/329

300 were the G of Niebuhr, the inscriptions at Murgab and on the Cavlus vase. These he arranired word for word in parallel colninns opposite to one another. He used a full stop to indicate the conil )ination of wedges that went to form each letter or S3dlable; indeed at that period it required scarcely less skill to divide the words into letters than to distinguish the words themselves. No attempt was made to assign values to the characters, and for manv vears no farther proi^ress was made. In 1837 he still thouglit the three columns represented dialects of Old Persian, though they mii>iit not exactly correspond to Zend, Pehlevi and Parsi. The two first he considered nearer to eacli other as regards Ian- guage; but he remarked that the two latter presented a closer reseml)lance to one another as regards the writini^. Still he said the resemblance was by no means so close as that between the third column and the Babylonian inscriptions. He saw hideed that the writing of the third column was a mere simplification of the ll^bvlonian; and he liasarded the useful con- jec'ture that the writing of the second might be only an arbitrary modification of the third. He would not even yet admit that either could be, strictly speaking, described as syllabic; and he entirely rejected the idea that the third was a Semitic lanaua^e.^

But the study was now upon the point of entering on an entirely new phase. We have already seen the success with which Burnouf and Lassen applied the discovery made by Grotefend to the lonii* list of names in the I inscri})tion. The visit paid in 1843 by Westergaard to Xaksh-i-Pustam resulted in the re- covery of a farther list of provinces from the Tomb of Darius. On his return to Germany, lie made over his copy of the first column to Lassen, who was best

1 Beitriige, 1837, p. 39.