Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/432

Rh It was designed at the same time to show that not one of the iieneral resuUs reached in the two Memoirs of 1849 had now to be abandoned, and also to establish liis legitimate right to a large share of priority of discovery to which De Saulcy says he attached great value. We have already disposed of his claims to priority so far as regards the consonantal values of the Babylonian signs found in the trilingual inscriptions, and we are at a loss to imagine in what other directtion he fancied that he had achieved priority. So fiir indeed from his studies having ever been in advance of his contemporaries, they uniformly lagged far behind, and he evinces a singular inabilitv even to follow the results obtained by their genius. A remarkable instance of tliis is seen in his rejection of Longperier s reading of 'Sargon' hi the Khorsabad hiscription. 'The M, k or //,' he writes in 1802, 'is in reality a d' \ and in the Table he ])ublislied in 18-34 it is actually found under that heading. He reirrets that lie is obliged to renounce all hope of iinding the ' Sargon of the Bible' at Khorsabad ; and he reads ' Sardon ' instead.

De Saulcy still adheres to his alphabetical interpre- tation, and it is no doubt the svUabarium of Eawlinson that is ' the essential error ' he sets himself to remove. Ilis transliteration accordhiirlv consists, as the reader will liave observed, of an innnense airglomeration of consonants which the student is left to brim*" within the ])OssiI)ilities of liuman utterance as best he may. It is clearly a comparatively easy task to arrange a number of signs according to the simple consonantal sounds they contain. Hincks reached this point in 1847, and De Saulcv's latest effort seems to carrv us back to that rudimentary stage of the inquiry. Here we find the signs distributed among the various classes of gutturals, dentals and so on, exactly as in Hincks's Table seven

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