Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/399

370 Syllabarium.^ He has also definitely arrived at the (*onviction that the Assyrian (characters are whoUv syUabic or ideo<»Taphi(* — in a large number of oases they are both. He will not now admit that any of them represents a simple consonant. He has still no doubt that there are many homoplumes. Many (characters appear to have precisely the same values, ' though much fewer than mi^ht be inferred from a mechanical com- ])arison of inscriptions and observance of interchanges." He recognises the existence of poly])liones, already described l)v Lowenstern in 1847 as Miomotvpes.'

kindred values, the distinction between which would appear not to have been considered so great as to require different modes of re])resenting them.' This discovery was so i)erplexing that he doubted how best to present it to the readei*: ' Whether it is more desirable to give different values to the sjmie character, or to o;ive it one value ou\y, with a warninof to the reader that he may, under certain restrictions, substitute another for it at his ])leasure.'
 * Many characters ' he savs, ' admit of two or more

But the chief im])ortance of his present essay con- sists in the light it throws for the first time on the nature of the ideograms. The earliest inquirers leant to the opinion that the language was at least partly monogrammatic, though Grotefend was indined to regard these signs more in the light of al)breviations. He, however, distinctly ])inte(l out the existeiute of ideograj)hic diaracters in the sliorter insci-iptions at Persepolis. In 184f) (Deceml)er) Hincks i-ecognised a siirn that was used 'by al)breviatin for the word "uod"'; and he noticed that ' l^esides having a phonetic value, it is used as a non-phonetic* initial before the name of Ormuzd.' In the same essay he <raye numerous other

^ *0n the Khorsabad Inscription/ Trans. R. I, Acad, xxi'i, 12.