Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/361

332 attempt is perfected by Oppert as follows: *I have made also elsewhere a book in Arian lan«^uai?e, that formerly did not exist, and I have made the text of the Divine Law (A vest a) and a commentary of the Divine Law and the prayer and the translation.' He observes truly that ' the passa^re is of first-rate im- portance,' and he adds encourajjingly : * The explan- ation which I give is sure/ It is therefore some- what disconcerting to find that the latest writer cannot get much beyond the crudity of Xorris. Weisbach reads : ' Machte icli Lischriften in anderer Weise (?) (nllmlich) auf Arisch, was vormals nicht war, und das i>Tosse .... und das ixrosse .... und das .... und das .... machte ich.' Alas for the Divine Law and the commentary and the prayers! ^

We have already said that in 1850 Oppert had aban- doned the hypothesis that the language of the second column was introduced by the Scythic hordes who were expelled by (Vaxares. He i-ecognised that it was coTinected with the ancient Akkadian, and could not, therefore, be a new importation, but an original native dialect. He considered that the Median name itself is Turanian and related to ' Mada,' the Akkadian for 'land.' He thought it is ch^ar irom Herodotus that the six tribes who composed the Median nation were not all of the same origin. The dominant caste were, he still held, of the same Indo-European race as the PiM'sians, but a large i)art of the population were Turanians, and the lanunaiie of the second column was that of the as^ricultural and nomadic tribes of Media, es})ecially those of tht^ north. He accordingly

' N orris in J. 1{. A. S. xv. 145: ])port, lirrorrh of the Past, vii. 109. Cf. Lt's Mrdt'Sj p. lo.") ; AVeisbuob, p. 77. See also the surprising expansion into * the future life/ Col. IV. par. 7 {Lf-s Medes^ p. 149), which, however, lie softens in the English version to *>lav I die as a Mazdean ' (liecords, lo<!. cit. p. 10(>). Cf. Weisbach, p. 7»3. par. 46, line 1H>.