Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/376

Rh same conclusion. In his opinion, the varieties appear to be mere 'caligraphical distinctions.'

The same important discovery was soon afterwards extended, as we have already related, to include the writing in the second or Susian column of the Persepolitan inscriptions. In 1846, Hincks called attention to the similarity that existed between them. Both the Babylonian and Assyrian modes of writing, he says, 'agree in principle with the second Persepolitan,' and he farther observed that where the characters are the same, they have generally the same, or nearly the same, value in all three. It is curious that Botta was quite unable to trace the existence of this resemblance. Writing of the three columns, he says: 'The elements of the groups are in each quite different, and even when the form agrees the sound is quite different'; and this opinion was shared by Westergaard, who, as we have said, mantained that the various species of cuneiform writing 'differed from one another in the shape of nearly every letter or group.'

A good deal has been said from the time of Botta downwards as to the similarity of the various styles. There is no doubt that they are sufficiently formidable to require a special training in reading each kind, and the Assyrians themselves found it necessary to make transcriptions from the Babylonian in order to make the writing intelligible. There was a greater diversity in the writing of Babylonian than of Assyrian, in consequence of there being no standard official type in the former as there was in the Assyrian, and