Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/408

Rh January 19 and February 10, 1850, he read papers before the Asiatic Society ^Ou the Inscriptions of Assyria and Hal)ylon,' and these, with a few additional notes, were })uljhslied in March of that year.

He tells us he had found more than ei<i:hty proper names in the trilinf»'ual insci'iptions, includinj^ those in the Behistun ; and 'by a careful compaiison of the duplicate forms of writing' them in the Persian and Babylonian colunuis he had been able, by means of the former, which were known, to determine the values of about a hundred Hal)vlnian characters. The next step was by a collation of the inscriptions to ascertain 'the homophones of each known alphabetical power.' By this means he " added nearly fifty char- acters to those previously known through the Persian key.' He confessed that his knowledge of the Baby- lonian characters was at present limited to these one hundred and fifty characters.* From the direction of his studies we may infer that these signs were chiefly taken from the trilingual inscriptions ; and in that case they would l)e practically exhaustive ; but they would amount to less than one half of those in general use in the Assyrian text.- The same process of com})arisou with the Persian translation enabled him to draw up 'a list of about two hundred Babylonian words of which we know the sound approximately and the meaning certainly.' i^ut in addition to these, he was able, by ' an extensive comparison of similar or cognate phrases, to add about two hundred meanings certainly, and a hundred more, probably, to the vocabulary already ol)tained through the Babylonian translation/ He was

' J. R,A. S. xii. 404.

• Mr. King has given a list of 329 signs {First Steps in Asttyrian, p. cxxxii.). Conder reckons about 550 in all (* On llittite Writing,' J. li.A. *S'. 1893, p. 829).