Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/382

Rh corresponded to Cyrus, Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes. The Babylonian, unlike the Persian, has no sign to mark the division of the words, and the difficulty attending their sej)aration was at first very great. The process was facilitated when it was recognised that each line begins and ends with a word : that is to say, a word is never divided and carried over from one line to another. In 1837, Grotefend successfully divided eight lines of the Elvend inscription, with only a slight mis- take. He also divided the B inscription of Darius nearly correctly : the exception being that at the end of his first line he seems to treat three words as one.* Nor was the difficulty confined to the separation of the words only. Some of the signs are so long that they were at first mistaken for two or more letters. Thus the siiifn for ar in the word for Xerxes was treated by Grotefend as th and r ; - and Lowenstern divided the sign for <ji into r and 5, which continued for a long time to be a source of trouble.

In 1840 Grotefend gives a Table to show the transliteration of his four royal names. He reads Cyrus ' Kho. re. s ' for ' Ku. ra. as ' ; Hystaspes ' Wi. scht. as. p ' for ' Us. ta. as. pa ' ; Darius ' Da. r. ha. a. wesch ' for ' Da. ri. ya. a. vus ' ; Xerxes ' Kh. sell. ah. th. r. sch ' for ' Hi. si'ar. si.' ^

We have here sixteen different signs with their values attached ; and of these only three [as^ da^ a) are absolutely correct ; though the others give the con- sonantal values. These values appeared substantially in his tract of 1837, with the addition of 'wo-hu' for the signs that read * rabu.' ** Hincks, writing in December 1846, makes the very liberal admission that

1880, 1). 28l>. lieilruf/e, PL IIL ; Menant, p. 1^78.
 * lieitriiyey 1837, PI. I. ; cf. Menant, Mamiel de la Languc Assynenne^

2 Beitriige, 1840, Plate, p. 05. ^ lb. p. 65. * lb. 1837, Pl.R-.

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