Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/353

324 MordtmaiiTi and Leiiormant were successful also in showiiiir that both these two iiewlv-discovered lanofuafjes, or dialects, are closely related to Median, and belonged therefore to the Scythic family. The remarkable dis- coyery that had recently been made that a Scythic language — the Akkadian — was the primitiye speech of Chaldaea, gaye a yery unexpected extension to the range of the Turanian races ; and it was now beginning to be recognised that the civilisation of Western Asia is to be referred to them, and not, as heretofore supposed, to a Semitic people. The effect of these discoveries was to stimulate once more the flao'mni** interest in the writing of the second column, and efforts were now directed to determine the nature of its relationship to the newly-found dialects, and more particularly to ascertain the peoi)le to whom each might be attributed. The first to enter upon this new field of inquiry after Lenormant was Oppert, who submitted a tentative translation of an r)ld Susian inscri[)tion to the Congress of Orientalists in 1873. In the following year, Mr. Sayce attempted two sliort hiscriptions published by Lenormant. If we may judge by comparison with a later version given by pi)ert, no great measure of success was y(*t attained.^ Indeed three years after- wards, Oppert himself admitted that the Susian could not yet be read. The inscriptions of Malamir <*aused less difficulty, and Sayce declared that it was ' the same as the Median with a few unimportant variations.' It must ])e confessed, however, that his subsequent analysis tended to show that these 'variations' had a consider- able raniie both in urammar and voc^abularv.-

I^Ieanwhile the lanij^uai>v of the second column

• Tran.^. S. B. A. vol. iii. (1S74), p. 47i> ; Records of the FaM, O.S. vol. vii. (1«76), p. 81.

■' Tran=i. >V. B. A. loc. cit. p. 47l>.