Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/330

Rh qualified to turn it to arcount, and he devoted himself to an attempt to decipher the language of the second column. The result appeared in the 'Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes ' of 1844; and the same year, in English, in the ' Memoires des Antiquaires du Xord.' ^ In 184G, the Memoir was republished m German, along with Lassen's Second Memoir, and this, as the latest, must be regarded as the mqst authorita* tive version." The investigation is based upon an analysis of the various jDroper names contained in the inscriptions. Westergaard began with the well-known names of the Kings which Grotefend had turned to such good account, and afterwards reviewed those of the provinces recently deciphered by Lassen. From these he obtained a sufficient number of values to attempt a transliteration of the more common words occurring in the Persian version, and especially in the well-known form that opens so many of the inscrip- tions. He has given us a transliteration of this passage, which is the first ever made into Eoman characters of a Susian inscription."^ His work was necessarily based upon Lassen's defective decipherment of the Persian signs; and it was therefore inevitable that it should re- produce the same erroneous values. He transliterated all the various inscriptions, beginning with those of Xerxes as the shortest and simplest, and 2)roceeding to those of Darius, including the one at Naksh-i-Rustam, which he was the first to copy.** It is curious to (!oin- pare the earliest attempts at transliteration with those subsequently made by Oppert and Weisbac^h. It will


 * Copenhagen, 1844.

' Bonn, 1845. Westergaard wrote a later essay on the same subject in Danish, which we have not been able to consult (Kjubenhavn, 1866). ^ Copenhagen edition, pp. 330, 338.

seen at page 347. Cf. with Weisbach, Die Inschriften Zweiter Art, p. 82.
 * lb. pp. 340, 3(34. The E inscription from the seventeenth line may be