Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/344

Rh form till 1855. The much greater diversity of material at his command enal)led liim to dispose of many difficul- ties that had obstructed earlier scholars. In the first place, he was able to increase the number of signs from the eighty-two that had puzzled his predecessors to one hundred and three, and to all of these he endeavoured to assign values. He was successful with fifty-seven, and twenty-one others were sufficiently correct for purposes of transliteration, makhig a total of seventy-eight in addition to two determinatives. One other sign has not even yet been satisfactorily settled,^ and he still had twenty-four incorrect values. Unlike many deci- pherers, however, he was able to distinguish the grada- tions of certaintv attacliin<^ to the values he assi^jned. Those that appear in his list allied to any vowel other than a, / or it are to be regarded as questionable. He estimated their number with tolerable accuracy at about twenty. He fully recognised the true syllabic character of the language. ' Each character,' he says, ' represents a syllable which may be either a single vowel or a consonant and vowel, or two consonants with a vowel l)etween them.'- He has, however, given six signs in his list a purely consonantal value, m, i\ s and t, the two latter Ijeing each represented by two signs. "^ Four of these are correct, but the second signs for s and t are both wrong. He limited the vowels to a. i and n^ but he has also allowed e to appear in his list, because he found a sign in Median that corresponds exactly ' Xorriy, Xo. 97

eisbacb, Xo. 108.

•^ J. It A. .V. XV. o. m y orrifc i, No >. 68 W eisbacb, .NO. f)i r 78 „ 61 .y 90

„ 4') X 94 IVtt'rminative liH Xo. 60 43 ,, 42 at