Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/331

302 he seen that few of the words in his glossary could now be recognised. He had little opportunity of displaying his skill as a translator, for in this department he implicitly followed Lassen's rendering of the corre- sponding Persian column, and we find the same errors in both, from ' Arça ' downwards; but he concludes with the K inscription, which has no Persian counterpart, and here he achieved a respectable success. He was able to make out sufficient to show that Darius laid claim to the foundation of the Persepolitan platform. In the German edition he omits his adventurous transliterations (as well as the declination of Ku, 'king,' which it will surprise some scholars to hear takes the forms of 'Kuvoni' in the accusative singular, and 'Kuthin' or 'Kuthrar' in the genitive plural), and he has consequently lessened the interest, if not the value, of that work.

The result of his investigations was to show that the language was partly alphabetical and partly syllabic. Down to 1837, Grotefend had recognised about sixty different signs. Westergaard rightly calculated, from the relation of the vowels to the consonants, that they must exceed a hundred, but his actual identification only reached eighty-two. He noticed two other probable groups, but he was unable to decide whether they formed one sign or two. One of them has now gained admission. In consequence of the great care he exercised in the collation of his copies only four defective sicfus found their way into his list. He