Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/356

Rh the New Babylonian. He thinks it is more properly to be traced through the writing of Malamir to the Old Susian, and the development from the Old Babylonian of the latter was a parallel and independent process similar to that which produced the New Babylonian. But as the Old Susian character has not yet been sufficiently investigated, he restricts his comparison to the New Babylonian, and he points out some of the principles that were followed in the evolution of the new script. For example, the vertical wedge that crosses the horizontal in the Babylonian is generally placed before them in Median, and the same rule applies to the horizontal crossing the vertical. There is an evident effort to simplify both the writing and the language. The signs preserve the same signification in both, but when it happens in Babylonian that the same sign has many different values (sometimes no less than nine) it has never more than two in Median. So also the number of homophones, or different signs with the same values, are strictly limited. Indeed, he considers that the Median was an early effort to approach an alphabetical system.

We have seen that several of the errors made by Oppert in his list of 1850 were corrected from various sources before 1874. He was still left with three wrong values, five only nearly correct and four omitted altogether. Of the first class he now gives one a value that accords with that of Weisbach—11$b$ 'ko' for 'kam,' the 'gau' of Norris and Weisbach. Of the