Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/377

348 consequently a copyist sometimes altogether mistook a sign, and occasionally he was actually unable even to divine its meaning; indeed, so great was the diversity in the manner of writing that the Assyrian scribes made use of Tables of Variants, and in one of these no less than twenty different ways of writing the same sign have been found. On the whole, most students will be inclined to agree with Mr. Budge, who dwells more on the differences than the similarity of the styles.^ The demonstration of the similarity of the cunei-

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form writing of Babylon and Assyria was followed by the more important discovery that the languages expressed by both were the same as that of the third Persepolitan column. The Persian, now deciphered and translated, was thus found to afford a key, not only to the language of the third column, but also to the large collection of inscriptions from Nineveh. Hincks, in a Postscript of June 1840, to which reference will be frequently made, announces that he believes the third Persepolitan agrees, to a great extent at least, in language with the Babylonian inscriptions.'- In 1848, Botta endeavoured to estab- lish beyond the possibility of doubt that the Assyrian

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of Khorsabad likewise agreed with the language of Babylon and Persepolis. He showed that the same grammatical inflexions, the same personal pronouns, the same particles, and very many words agreed in all three languages. With regard to the inscriptions at Van, Botta was at first in doubt, but farther study led him to believe that here the inflexions were not the same.*^ This was subsequently fully recognised by Hincks"* and by most other scholars. It did not, how-

' Athenaum, Se])t. 20, \>^A. - Tram. li. I. Acad. xxi. 131.

•' Jot/iual Aaiatit/nc, ix. ^C7, xi. '2^'A} 71. » ./. It. A. S. 184s, ix.4l4.