Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/378

Rh ever, prevent De Saulcy from hazarding a translation of one of them on the supposition that it was written in Semitic. In 1800, Rawlinson agreed that both the Babylonian and Assyrian languages are to be included in a common categrory ; but he added that 'they can hardly be called identical, inasmuch as each dialect affects the employment of specific verbal roots and certain particular nouns and adjectives.' They are, in fact, distinguished by certain dialectical differences which have been compared in degree to that existing between the dialects of the West and North of England; but other authorities think the differences scarcely amount to provincialism.

The suggestion that the newly-discovered language would turn out to he Semitic was made at an early period of the inquiry. It had not, however, occurred to Grotefend, who described it, in 1837, as Parsi, and in 1840 he had apparently returned to his original opinion that it was Pehlevi, and he expressly rejected a suggestion of Lepsius that the writing might be compared to Phoenician. Before the decipherment of the cuneiform every conceivable hypothesis had been started as to the probable affinities of the Ancient Assyrian language."' At length, in 1845, Löwenstern recollected that the Jewish Scriptures place Assur in the same ethnological division as Heber, and he con- cluded that Assyrian must therefore have been a


 * r5 See these stated by Löwenstern, Essai de Dechiffrement, 1845, p. 12.