Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/424

Rh disposal of the decipherer. It had also been proved conchisively that ' the characters all represent syllables and were originally intended to represent a non- Semitic language.' In opposition to the system that still found an advocate in De Saulcy, it was shown that ' instead of the vowels being unrepresented, or only represented by points, as in all Semitic writing that was first applied to a Semitic language, we have in the cuneatic inscriptions every vowel definitely ex- pressed.' This new Syllabarium demonstrates for the first time how extensively polyphony prevailed. Indeed one of its chief merits consists in the eimmeration of the different values expressed by the same sign. This had been done to a slight extent l)y Uawlinson, who puts the i)olypliones hi an aj)h)getic manner in a S(^parate column, under the lieading ' riionetic Powers arising from Ideographic; Values/ This excited the contemptuous criticism of I)e Saulcy, who was still so far from appreciating the true nature of the language tliat he declared: 'Either this'language was for th(» Assyrian an inextrical)le (jdr/iis, or one or other of tli(\se values nuist be chosen." ^ The present Memoir of llincks, which must soon after have fallen into his hands, ought to have convinced him that the former alternative is the onlv one available. Indeed the nunil)er of polyphones is so great that the two hundred and fiftv-four characters which llincks now deals with express no less tlian tliree hundred and forty-four difl'erent values. In the Appendix to the Khoi'sabad inscription (January 11), 18-jO) it will be recollected that he gave seventy-one simple syllabic values, of which we found fifty-seven correct. In a lithographed paper, presented to a mec^ting of the British Association in the course of the same vear, ]w added to their

> Jirrue Orif-ntale, ISo^, ii. lOJ.