Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/381

352 before these ophiions prevailed. M. Luzzato, in 1850, still maintained that Assyrian was an Indo-European language; and Holtzmann that it was a Persian dialect mingled with Semitic elements. Botta long remained in doubt, and Hitziu did not hesitate to deny that it is Semitic. So late as 1858 Ewald, the German Hebraist, entirely refused to accept the gram- matical forms of Assyrian as Semitic. M. Eenan wrote to the same effect in 1859, and lie even retained his doubts in the fourth edition of his 'Langues Semitiques,' published in 1803. The recent dis- coveries were indeed peculiarly unacceptable to M. Renan. Not long before, he had laid down that mono- theism was the special 'note' of the Semitic races, and he was naturally extremely disconcerted by the unexpected apparition hi the Louvre of a profusion of Assyrian gods, according as they were dug up by M. Botta. In 1865 we are still assured that Assyrian 'though of the Semitic type, is only distantly connected with known forms of that language.'

It is much easier to determine the grammatical affinity of a language than to read it, and the place of Babylonian in the family of languages was definitely fixed before much progress was made in the work of translation. From the time that Grotefend's attention was first directed to cuneiform research, he endeavoured to include the second and third columns, no less than the first, within his sphere of inquiry. But he achieved very little success. In his Essay published by Heeren (1824) we find that he had already singled out the groups in the third column that