Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/351

322 Assyrian and without special refei*ence to this particular branch of the subject. Indeed the attention of scholars was nowsotlioroujifhly absorbed l^y the study of Assyrian and the many new discoveries it opened to their view, that the second column fell into comparative nej^lect. Mordt- niann wrote papers upon it in 1802, and ai^fain in 1870, in the ' German Oriental Gazette,' in which he appears U) have ij^nored the results already attained, and to have given different values to some of the sioiis. He called the language Susian, in consequence of the order in which the provinces of ' Persia, Susiana and ]ia])yln * occur in the Behistun inscription, and also l)ecause Susa bears an entirelv diflerent name in the Median from that ^iven to it in the Persian, wliile the other names are alike in both. In su})port of his opinion he was the first to sIkav that the inscriptions on some l)ricks found at Susa, which were tluMi l)eiri]inin<jf to attract attention, thou<^'li written in a different dialect, wei-e evidentlv similar in speech and writing to the second cohunn.

It will l)e HH-ollected that Pawlinson visited Susa in 18o0, and ol^served a few l)ricks and a broken obelisk l)earing the pecuhar inscriptions to which wh have just referred. He considennl th(^ stvle of writinu' to be ' the farthest removed of anv from the oriiiinal Assvrian tyi)e/ and he surmised that the hmguage is 'not even, I think, of the Semitic fnmilv.'^ In 1852, Loftus collected a few other iiisci'iptions in the same character and laniiiKUie, which were st^it to Uawlinson. ^Ir. Xorris, who amiounced this acquisition in his Median Memoir, stat(*d that Pawlinson still thoui>ht that the characters weiv those of ' the Assyrian al])hal)et,' but in a different lanmiaL»(\ and that he had made out sufficient to show that they belonoed to Susian kings who wei-e anterior to Darius.^

' Bonomy, yhu-nh and its Palaces (IsSO), p. 47J) ; J. K. A, S. xii. 4^2. -■ J. R. A. S. (1S;V>), XV. 97 ; Mnnniv by Canon Kawlinson, p. 174.