Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/386

Rh Lowenstern guessed the name of the Kliorsabad king correctly, but his transliteration was entirely at fault. Two years later, Longperier pointed out that he had omitted the first sign of the name altogether ; and Kotta protested against the separation of the second si<n\ into two, in order to evolve r and s.^

In June 1846 Hincks began the series of contri- butions to the subject which he continued down to the time of his death, twenty years later. In his first paper he tells us he had just begun to apply himself to the third Persepo]itan, which, he says, he found to agree in ' character and, to a great extent at least, in language with the Babylonian inscriptions, and to the Assyrian writing hi Schulz's hiscriptions.' 'In both,' he says, ' some of the characters represent elementary sounds and some [represent] combinations. In both, two or more characters are used to represent the same sounds. In both, no vowel is omitted ; but vowels and consonants are repeated in two consecutive characters.' He also ' found it to be a general rule, though it admits of some exceptions, that when a cliaracter occurred in two or moi*e alphabets, it had the same value, or nearly so, in all of them. Thus the pa of the second Perse- politan is pa in Assyrian, and ha in Babylonian. He claimed to be al)le to read the names of 'Babylon' and 'Nineveh' on certain bricks that had been brought from those places. -

A few months later he was able to aimounce that he had 'made considerable piogress in deciphering the Babylonian cursive and also the lapidary character of the East India House inscrij)tioii.' He found that the writing

^ * Lettre de Longperier,' Stpt. 1847, in Rtvue ArcJieolotjiquet 1848, p. 50.3.

- Postscript, written June lS46, to pa])er * On the First and Second Kinds of Persepolitan Writing,' Trann. li. I. Acad. xxi. 131.