Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/350

Rh of this system enabled Oppert to make a very de- cisive improvement in the SyUabarium. It will be recollected that Norris had twenty-four wrong values, and twenty-one only approximately correct. Oppert now corrects twelve of the former and eighteen of the latter. The i-esult was that he could dispose of eighty- three values absolutely and six nearly correct. He was doubtful as to the sound of one, wrong as to seven, and he omitted seven. Thus, wlien the determinatives are added, all of the 10(1 signs in Menant's list were deciphered except fifteen. lie also added a fourth to the list of determinative signs. He showed that the one mistaken by Norris for s was in fact used simply to indicate that the following letter was an ideogram (Xo. 06 of Ilincks). It had long ago been observed that a single sign was employed for ' king,' and Norris added another for ' month.' Oppert points out that the determinative before ' god ' was also aji ideogram for ' god,' and that ' man,' water,' ' animal, or ' horse ' and ' road ' were likewise indicated by ideo- graphic signs. He considered that the grammatical forms show analogy first to Magyar, then to Turkish, Mongol and Finnish. He gave it the name of Medo- Scythic, and he now considered that it was spoken by the tribes at PersepoHs and Behistun — more par- ticularly by those in the north of Media. The student of the second cohnnn had at his ('ommand some ninety- nine proper names, besides a large number of Persian official terms and titles transliterated into the Median script ; and with their assistance the pronunciation of about a hundred and forty words was already known.

The remarkable success of Oppert was due almost entirely to the successful ccmiparison of the Median and Babylonian signs ; and it had something of an accidental character, for it appeared in a work chiefly devoted to

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