Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/367

338 discerned three well-marked varieties of writing ; but he was able to announce that Grotefend, after a careful comparison, considered that they were all closely related to one another and to the third Persepolitan. It was soon recomiised that there are in fact only two varieties of Babylonian, and what Mr. Rich supposed to be a third is due only to the vagaries of the scribe, or, as Rawlinson explained, it 'arises from the distortion of oblique elongation.' It was long, however, before the identification of the two systems was satisfactorily established. In the fifth volume of the ' Fundgruben des Orients' Grotefend demonstrated the essential identity of the third Persepolitan and the simple Habvlonian, and in the following volume he illustrated the similarity of the two systems of Babylonian. In 1840 he succeeded in identifying a few lapidary characters with their equivalents in New Babylonian. In his contribution to the subject he endeavoured to render the names of Hystaspes and Darius into the two Babvlonian forms. In Hystaspes he seems to have succeeded in only one character — the lapidary sign for 'as' — but his spelling out of Darius was correct, both in the cursive and lapidary forms. He was able also to recognise that certain inscriptions on vases written in the cursive style reproduced in part the same text as those on the bricks written in the lapidary style. With a little farther study he would have been able, from the material collected in this Table, to draw up a short list of equivalent signs in the two systems. As it was, he left this demonstration to be accomplished by Dr. Hincks in a much more successful manner than it was