Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/435

406 contributed to the subject evinced no little aptitude in this direction; but De Saulcv was sin<rularlv deficient in the special qualifications it required. It would have been more worthy of the position he occupied in other departments of study if he could have restrained the irritation that the consciousness of the waste of so much effort could not fail to produce. It was lamentable that he should iVet fully pretend to have anticipated the dis- coveries of liawhns(jn, or that he should have presented his own crude performance as a possible rival to his. It would almost seem, from the extreme raritv of his pamphlets, that he endeavoured to suppress the evidence of his failure, and it would l)e well if liis countrymen were to allow his work in this department to pass out of the reacli of farther controversv.

The translation of the Balndonian Column of the Behistun inscription was apparently tliou^ihtat the time to dispenx' with the necessity of any special publication of the Semitic columns of the other Achaemenian inscriptions at Pei"se[)olis and Xaksh-i-Eustam. De f^aulcyhad indeed devoted himself to this portion of the su])i(M*t in ]S4t), and ]\I(^nant informs us that 'all the trilin^iual inscriptions then known were already trans- lated/ ' But they do not ap{)ear to have attracted the attention of any more com{)etent scholar till 1859^ when M. Oppert pul)lished a portion of them in the second volume of his ' Expedition en Mesopotamie.' lie <iave the text, with transliteration and translation of the Window inscription L and B (Darius); D and E (Xerx(\sj. and the unilinoual II (Darius) from Persepolis; the lon/i' inscription and the three short ones at Naksli- i-liustam, the Kof Xerxesat Van, and the S of Artaxerxes Mnemon at Susa. He also i^ave a new translation of the Behistun inscription without text or transliteration.

' Lcmgues perdueSf p. 140.