Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/397

368 occupied with this subject, wlu) were gifted with any real penetration into its difficulties.

Botta succeeded in dividing nearly the whole of the Bull inscription correctly into its words, but the diffi- culty of this task was still so mxmt that even he oc- casionally fell into error. He also first pointed out that the sign Luwenstern mistook for two signs was one and indivisible. He detected the determinative sign for ' country ' that is used in the Khorsabad inscription, and he made the important suggestion that the phonetic value of the sign for ' king ' is ' sar.' ^ Longperier at once connected this word with its Hebrew equivalent, and showed that it is used to express the first syllable in the name of the Khorsabad kiu^ * Sar-^in.' He made an attempt to decipher an inscription on the leg of the Khoi-sabad bull, and he was the first to recognise ' Assur.' His translation runs thus: 'Glorious [is] Sargon, King, great King, King of Kings, King of the country of Assur.' - He also showed that ' great ' might be exi)ressed by one sign only,*'^ which added another stej) to the dis(*oyery of the phonetic* complement be^un by Lowenstern. This sliort contribution to the ^Kevue Archcologique' shows that Longperier possessed to a high degree a true ai)titude for these studies; and if he had Ix^en able to pursue them, he might have vindicated for France a more favourable position than it was lier fortune to ol)tain. The difficulty in these matters of re(H)gnising truth from error was nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the case of the identi- fication of ' Sargon ' by Longperier. So far was the correctness of this inoenious suggestion from e^aining

^ Journal Asiati^/ue, ix. 378; * JjCttrt' a I^etronno/ Eevue Avchcologiquey 1848, p. 466.

- Cf, Rev, Archvol. 1S48, p. 504.

^ Rev. ArcheoL ib. p. 50;^. See Oppert, Erpi'ditioUy p. 123.