Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/338

Rh two; and conversely he allowed that several characters might express the same value. lie accepted fifteen of Westergaard's correct syllabic values and added nine of his own, to which we may add fifteen others nearly correct, or thirty-nine in all ; thus, including his three vowels and five consonants, he had forty-seven signs available for transliteration, as opposed to the twenty- nine of Westergaard. Singularly enough he made little improvement in the misleading syllabic signs of his ])redecessor. Some of them, indeed, he made con- siderably worse, and added others of his own, so that, notwithstanding a few corrections, their number rose to seventeen. He, however, pointed out that there was a determinative before the words for ' ufod,' * Ornmzd ' and ' heaven,' contrary to the opinion of Westergaard ; and that the group the latter had mistaken for the vowel a was precisely that sign. He was less successful in his classification of the language, which he could not accept as Scythic. He considered its affinity was with the Aryan family, but he could not .find that any of the Indo-European languages had similar inflections.^

A few years later De Saulcv wrote two articles in the 'Journal Asiatique' on the Median, without, how- ever, making any important contribution to the subject.- His papers deserve notice chiefly on account of his eminem.'e in other departments of study, and because he was the only Continental writer whose attention was directed at that time to this special branch of inquiry.^ He thought he could recognise that it bore a close relationship to Persian, suflicient to justify the opinion of Strabo that the two lan^^ua^^es were the same. Both

^ Transactions J ib. p. 129. J. R. A, S. xii. 483.

' Journal Asiatique (4* s6rie), vols. xiv. xv. August 1849, ^lay 1850.

^ De 8aulcy was distinguished for his success in reading the Egyptian demotic cliaracter, which Mohl regarded as the greatest achievement since Champollion {Itapports Annuela ii la Societe Asiatique^ 1844, p. 36).