It is a very singular circumstance that Grotefend seems to have spent the whole of his ingenuity upon his first efforts; from that time he was unable to make any farther contribution of importance, and the work of decipherment was carried on entirely by other scholars. Yet he never withdrew his attention from the subject, and when he died, in 1853, all the difficulties of the Persian column had been overcome with but little farther assistance from him, and sufficient was already known of the Babylonian to disclose a wonderland of new and unexpected knowledge. Grotefend made a careful study of all the available inscriptions as they came to light, and from first to last his interest in them never flagged.

We have already seen how carefully he analysed the three Persepolitan columns, seeking out in each the signs that might be supposed to correspond to each other. The classification of the Babylonian inscriptions as they now began rapidly to accumulate afforded him fresh material for the exercise of his ingenuity. It seems to have been some time before he would admit the practical identity of the writing of the third Persepolitan column with that of the simplest of the Babylonian styles. According to his earliest classification the three Persepolitan systems were kept entirely apart from the two that had been remarked at Babylon. But it was not long before the similarity of the most complicated of the Persepolitan with the simplest of the Babylonian became apparent. This was fully recognised by Rich, in 1811, and we cannot suppose that Grotefend was far behind.[330] Rich was the first to announce that Grotefend had come to the important conclusion that the two or three different forms which had been observed at Babylon were mere varieties of one and the same method of writing, analogous to our Roman and Gothic character. Grotefend’s attention was now chiefly directed to the Babylonian inscriptions, mainly in consequence of the articles contributed by Rich to the ‘Fundgruben des Orients,’ and afterwards by the constant correspondence he maintained with Bellino, the German secretary Rich had brought out with him to Bagdad.[331] Grotefend now abandoned the idea that the third column was written in Pehlevi. He described the language as Median Persian, and he called it the ‘Babylonian column.’ He showed also that the many differences in the writing of the simple Babylonian were due no doubt to the idiosyncrasies of the engravers; but they added greatly to the difficulty of the decipherment.[332] He noted also the frequent occurrence of different ideograms for the same word, such, for example, as for ‘son.’ He sharply contrasted it with such writing as is found in the India House Inscription which he called ‘the complex’ (zusammengesetzt). Mr. Rich had lately obtained several specimens of cylinders; two of these were found on the site of Nineveh and a few others at Borsippa. The account he gave of them in the ‘Fundgruben’ speedily attracted attention, and the facsimile of one in red jasper from Nineveh was published by Dorow in 1820. Grotefend called attention to the well-marked differences in the cuneiform writing that characterise these specimens, and which remove the third Persepolitan still farther from them than even from the most complicated Babylonian.[333] These opinions he expressed in his letter to Dorow, and in a tract on the ‘Elucidation of certain Babylonian Cylinders’ included in the same publication (1820).[334]

After his promotion, in the following year, to the rectorship of the Lyceum at Hanover (1821) other studies began to engage his time. He wrote a History of his Academy (1833); he edited the fragments of Sanchoniathon (1836); and he dabbled somewhat deeply in such matters as the Oscan and Umbrian languages (1835-1838). He had not, however, entirely forgotten his old subject, and in 1832 he attempted a translation of the I inscription, which he sent to the ‘Göttingen Gazette.’ He recognised that it contained a list of geographical names, which, however, he was unable to render correctly; but he had the merit of attracting the attention of other scholars to their existence, and it was from them that Lassen was afterwards enabled to make such remarkable progress.[335] In 1837 he began to contribute a succession of papers to the Scientific Society of Göttingen on his old subject, many of which were afterwards republished in separate form. He was now sixty-two years of age, and his mind was, no doubt, less able to grapple with the series of discoveries that were just on the point of being made. In the previous year (1836) Burnouf and Lassen had simultaneously published their Memoirs on the cuneiform decipherment that soon carried the subject far beyond the point at which Grotefend had left it some thirty years before. Grotefend accepts the general results, but without much evidence of enthusiasm.[336] The reading of ‘Auromazda’ is now satisfactorily established; but he clings to his ogh with unabated affection.[337] On the other hand, he suggests the surrender of the sr in ‘Kurus,’ and reads r or rh. As regards ‘Achaemenian,’ the utmost he will concede is that the Greeks probably derived it from ‘Akhâosô-schôh,’[338] and to do this he reluctantly softens his tsch to a soft c to give the s; but he will on no account admit the true reading, n.[339] He still contends that the languages of the three Persepolitan columns are related to each other, but he sees that the first, though resembling Zend, is not identical with it. He entirely rejects the idea already broached that the third is Semitic, and he adheres to his conviction that none of the three can be called syllabic or ideographic in the strict sense of those terms.[340]

Notwithstanding the tenacity with which he adhered to some of his old errors, his later contributions were not entirely without result. He devoted great attention to the comparison of the language of the first with those of the other two columns, and in this task he exhibited a considerable amount of penetration.[341] For example the word ‘adam,’ which is constantly recurring in the Old Persian, continued to be translated, even by Lassen in 1836, as ‘posui.’[342] It was Grotefend who first observed that it was rendered in the other two columns by words that were certainly elsewhere used for the pronoun, ‘mân, manâ,’ and the suggestion led to the recognition of ‘adam’ as the first person singular, ‘ego.’[343] The writings of Burnouf and Lassen revived an interest in cuneiform studies, and Grotefend was enabled for the first time to publish inscriptions which he had received twenty or even thirty years before from Bellino, and which had lain till now unseen in his desk. He was still regarded as the chief authority upon the subject, and newly discovered inscriptions were invariably forwarded to him. Among these he received one that had recently found its way to the British Museum, and in which he was able to read the name of Artaxerxes, a king not previously met with in the inscriptions (1837). But his chief triumph in this respect was the publication, in 1848, of an inscription of Sennacherib. The original cylinder was said to have come from Kouyunjik,[344] but Bellino had long ago made a copy of the inscription and the cylinder is now called after him. When the inscription was at length translated by Mr. Fox Talbot in 1856, it was found to relate the first two years of the Annals of the King. Grotefend caused an admirable engraving of it to be made on copper, and this, said the translator, not without a tinge of irony, ‘was, I think, the greatest service that painstaking savant rendered to the science of archæology.’[345]

Grotefend continued to write upon these subjects down to his death in 1853. He endeavoured to keep abreast of the new discoveries in Assyria. He was familiar with the writings of Botta and Layard. He studied the disquisitions of Westergaard, Hincks, and Rawlinson. He contributed articles on the builder of the Khorsabad Palace; on the age of the Nimrud Obelisk; on the foundation and destruction of the buildings of Nimrud; and on inscriptions found at Babylon and Nimrud. When M. Mohl, the well-known secretary to the French Asiatic Society, visited him shortly before his death, he found his table littered with inscriptions, chiefly those received from Bellino in the early years of the century.[346] He professed to have given up his Persepolitan studies in favour of the new Assyrian inscriptions; and he saw no reason why he should not succeed in unravelling their mystery. It is somewhat pathetic to observe the old man of seventy-eight, still animated by the recollection of a success he had achieved fifty years before, but had never been able to repeat, vainly hoping that at the last moment he might be rewarded by another fortunate guess that would redeem the long failure of so many years. The new discoveries were coming upon him with extraordinary rapidity and magnitude, and he could not but feel crushed and helpless beneath such an accumulation of fresh materials. The solution of the difficulties they involved had passed into younger and abler hands than his, and he had to comfort himself as best he might with the recognition so freely accorded to him, that he had laid the foundation upon which others were now building; and with the assurance that the recollection of his services would not wholly pass away from the remembrance of men.[347]

Grotefend’s method of decipherment, when it first appeared, met with a varying degree of success in different quarters. In Germany, as we have seen, it was at once adopted by Tychsen, who became one of its chief exponents; and it also secured the favour of Heeren, who allowed it to share in the wide popularity accorded to his own writings. But even in Germany it was some time before it gained general recognition. The theory of Lichtenstein, absurd as it may now appear, continued to command attention, and even in 1820 Grotefend still thought it necessary to defend his own opinions against those of his rival.[348] His views, however, gradually gained the ascendant, and in 1824 he felt he could now allow the controversy to drop; and in the new edition of Heeren he left out a large portion of the criticism he published in 1815. Since then his merits have been fully acknowledged by his own countrymen, who are rarely disposed to underrate any of the achievements of their kindred. In England his system never had to contend with the rivalry of Lichtenstein. It was received at once with general approval by all who were best qualified to form a judgment. The learned Ouseley, the more brilliant Morier, Sir R. K. Porter and Mr. Rich never doubted for a moment that Grotefend had deciphered the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes. Very different was its reception in France. De Sacy, who was really the first to introduce it to the notice of Europe, could never feel any real conviction that it rested upon solid grounds. He was quite uninfluenced by the jealousies that blind the judgment of smaller men, and he would gladly have given it his approval if he could have brought himself to accept the evidence. But this he was entirely unable to do; and it was certainly not because he failed to apprehend the process by which it was reached. The explanation he has given of it greatly excels in lucidity and in logical precision the account of Grotefend himself—so much so, indeed, that we are inclined to think that Grotefend never thoroughly understood his own system till it was explained to him by De Sacy. The French scholar was fully acquainted with the subject, for he had himself made frequent attempts at decipherment, always, he frankly acknowledges, with a ‘total absence of success.’ The only point he considers tolerably certain is that the word with seven signs is the title of King.[349] He doubts altogether that the names of the kings had been correctly ascertained, and he points out the difficulty of accepting an alphabet that contains three or four signs for e, three for o, and so on. The opinion he formed in 1803 he repeats in 1820. In his letter to M. Dorow, he confesses that he is still unable to find the names of the Persian kings or of the god Ormuzd in the cuneiform inscriptions; and he declares he does not believe that anything hitherto published on the subject is worthy of confidence.[350]

While the cuneiform inscriptions were thus engaging the attention of European scholars, English travellers had begun the investigation of the sites of Babylon and Nineveh that were so soon to yield such surprising results. In 1808, Kinneir visited Hillah, accompanied by Captain Frederick, of the Royal Navy; and two years later they extended their explorations to the mounds near Mosul. Kinneir’s ‘Geographical Memoir,’ published in 1813, contains an excellent account of both these historic ruins. Soon after his visit, Mr. Rich went to Hillah and began his investigations (1811). He found the surface of the ground covered with ‘broken pans and bricks, some of which have writing on them.’[351] He was able to make a small collection of antiquities, including a curious basaltic stone covered with cuneiform characters, and these specimens eventually found their way to the British Museum.[352] The Memoir he published on the subject made its first appearance in the ‘Fundgruben des Orients,’ but was, republished in England by Sir James Mackintosh. A second Memoir, written in 1817 and printed soon afterwards, was enriched by three plates containing several cuneiform inscriptions that now appeared for the first time.[353] Rich considered there were three different kinds of writing to be found at Babylon, which he divided ‘according to the order of their complication.’[354] The first, he observed, corresponds to the third Persepolitan; and in Plate 8 he gives three specimens of it, all found upon stones resembling the ‘Caillou Michaux’ described by Millin. The second occurs rarely, and Mr. Rich says he was the first to publish an example, although Grotefend had already seen a copy of a similar kind. It is on a piece of baked clay in shape like a barrel, about 4¾ in. long and 1½ in. in diameter (Plate 9, No. 4). The third species is that generally found on bricks and cylinders, of which he gives four examples.[355] While he wrote, he learned that the three different kinds of Babylonian writing had been submitted to Grotefend, and that ‘learned and ingenious person’ had come to the conclusion that they ‘are only varieties of different modes of writing the same character, and that there is in fact but one real kind of Babylonian writing.’[356] Although Rich found a vast number of bricks at Babylon, he observed that the inscriptions were nearly all alike: in fact only four different legends had up to that time been noticed on the Babylonian bricks. The most common consists of seven lines. The others are in six, four and three lines; of these Grotefend had seen copies of the inscriptions in seven and three lines. The other two are comparatively rare. The inscribed bricks are generally about 13 in. square by 3 in. thick, and are of different colours, red, white and black.[357] They were usually found with the inscriptions downwards, and when they occur in a different position there is a strong presumption that they have been moved from their original place. The cylinders found by Mr. Rich varied from 1 to 3 in. in length and were of different materials—some of stone, others of paste or composition.[358] They are perforated to admit of the passage of a cord, and were carried about to be used for seals. Rich was among the earliest to recognise that this was their purpose; and he thus accounted for the writing being from right to left, contrary to the invariable custom. He also made the useful suggestion that, as the language of the first Persepolitan was no doubt that of the court of Darius, the languages of the other two columns were in all probability those of Susa and Babylon.[359] Rich exercised considerable influence in Germany by his contributions to periodical literature, and his cordial assent to the opinions of Grotefend was of importance at that time. We have seen that his first Memoir was published in Vienna before it appeared in London; and he continued to write to the ‘Fundgruben des Orients’ to describe the inscriptions he had procured from Babylon and Nineveh. The cylinder from Nineveh is said to have been the earliest specimen brought to light, and it was the first to attract the attention of Grotefend to the Babylonian system of writing.[360] It was published by Dorow in 1820, when inscriptions of that kind were almost unknown. Rich’s secretary, Bellino, was also in constant correspondence with Grotefend down to the period of his early death.[361] He sent him a copy of the first column of one of the inscriptions at Hamadan, which Grotefend presented to the University Library of Tübingen, where Bellino had been educated.[362] He also sent him copies of inscriptions on forty bricks in Mr. Rich’s collection, many of them of service by illustrating slight differences in the writing of words and characters.[363]

We have said that De Sacy remained unconvinced that the names of Darius and Xerxes were to be found in the Persepolitan inscriptions. Two years after he had solemnly repeated this confession, a M. St. Martin announced that he had made the same discovery as Grotefend, which he professed to have reached by an entirely different and far more scientific method: a circumstance which, if true, would have afforded a strong confirmation of the reality of the original discovery. St. Martin was born in 1791, and died of cholera in 1832, at the early age of forty-one. He rose from a comparatively humble sphere of life, and the aristocratic prefix to his name seems to have been merely assumed. He was for a time a traveller to his father, who was a tailor, but his talent for languages soon transferred him from the mercantile to the learned world, and, combined with his strong Monarchical opinions, enabled him to secure a fair amount of success. He was especially devoted to Oriental studies, and he learned Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Armenian; but his attainments seem to have struck his contemporaries as more pretentious than profound. He was appointed, when only nineteen, to be secretary to the Society of Antiquaries (1810), and at thirty-one he became Curator of the Library of the Arsenal (1824) and afterwards an Inspector of the Royal Printing House, a position that enabled him to introduce the Zend and cuneiform type. He was a very precocious scholar, for one of the writings on which his fame rests was published at the age of twenty—‘Egypt under the Pharaohs’ (1811). Seven years later his most important work appeared: ‘An Historical and Geographical Memoir on Armenia’ (1818). He is remembered also as one of the founders of ‘L’Universel’ (1829), a strong organ of the Legitimist party.

His paper on the cuneiform inscriptions was read before the Académie des Inscriptions, of which he was a member, in 1822, and it was afterwards published in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ (February 1823). A more detailed account of his discoveries was promised, but it never seems to have appeared; and the only other authoritative expression of his opinion occurs in Klaproth’s ‘Aperçu de l’Origine des diverses Ecritures’ (1832), where we are favoured with the latest development of his cuneiform alphabet. His treatment of this subject is not calculated to raise his reputation as a scholar; and it certainly exposes him to the charge of want of candour.

He is good enough to begin the account of his original discoveries by a reference to the previous labours of Grotefend, of which he had a very poor opinion. He has seen the analysis of Grotefend’s system given by Tychsen in the ‘Göttingen Gazette’ of September 1802, and the Essay of De Sacy, written in the following year. These publications, he says, produced little impression at the time, and they were farther discredited by Grotefend’s own contribution to Heeren, in 1805.[364] None of the papers since contributed by Grotefend to periodical literature have shown any improvement upon his earliest writings, and St. Martin lays it down that the contents of the inscriptions are rightly regarded as still wholly unknown. But in addition to this unfavourable opinion, which was shared also by De Sacy, he brings charges of his own against Grotefend’s system that are wholly without foundation. He accuses him of frequently varying the values he assigned to the characters, whereas it was in consequence of the extreme tenacity with which he clung to the values he originally assigned that his progress was in great measure arrested. St. Martin says Grotefend attributed five or six entirely different values to the same character, and that he considered that each character is susceptible of assuming a variety of different forms, both statements being equally without foundation.[365] He affects to regard the corrections introduced into the texts by Grotefend—which is one of his most valuable services—as purely arbitrary, and he professes to believe that interpretations based upon these emendations can inspire no confidence, and can only be regarded as an exercise of the imagination. He was surprised to find that his own interpretations, which he reached by ‘proceeding in an entirely different way,’ should have conducted, so far as they went, to precisely the same result: and he will not dispute that Grotefend is entitled to the priority of merit in detecting the royal names.[366] It does not appear that St. Martin got any farther himself, and we may be permitted to doubt whether he would have accomplished even this but for the labours of the predecessor he is so careful to disparage. When we come to inquire into ‘the entirely different way’ followed by St. Martin we find that in fact it is precisely the same as that with which we are already familiar. He worked on the same two inscriptions, the B and G of Niebuhr; he treats us over again to the analogy of the Sassanian inscriptions: the well-known phrase ‘king of kings’; the genitive suffix; the position of the royal names; the evident relationship of father and son, and so on. Our original investigator continues to carry us over all the old ground. He is struck by the similarity of the wedges in the word for ‘king’ and in one of the royal names; he is guided by the Zend khsheio to the cuneiform words for ‘king’ and ‘Xerxes,’ and he tells us how dexterously he proceeded from this to the decipherment of the names of Darius and Hystaspes. In one name only he differed from his predecessor. It will be remembered that Grotefend deciphered ‘Cyrus’ in the Murgab inscription. St. Martin preferred to transliterate ‘Houschousch’ and to read ‘Ochus’;[367] but in this single attempt at originality he turned out to be wrong and Grotefend right. He has spared us all the reasons that led him to these important results, as well as many grammatical and literary considerations which he promised to publish in a more extended Memoir. One success he may indeed claim. In reading the name of Hystaspes he compared it to a Zend form ‘Vyschtaspo,’ which gave a more correct result than the ‘Goshtasp’ of Grotefend.[368] This happy accident enabled him to assign the correct value of v instead of g to one cuneiform sign; and in the second letter of the same word he substituted y for Grotefend’s o, and thereby approached nearer the correct value, which is i. These are the sole contributions he made to the work of decipherment.

It must not, however, be supposed that his treatment of the alphabet was wanting in originality. It will be recollected that Grotefend was in possession of thirteen correct values; but of these St. Martin rejected five.[369] The eight that remained added to the two he determined himself (v and y or i) gave him an alphabet of ten correct values, as opposed to the thirteen in the possession of Grotefend. He altered the values Grotefend had incorrectly assigned to nine other characters, without making any improvement upon them.[370] He confessed with admirable modesty that there were twelve characters of which he could make nothing; and this struck Lassen as being the most satisfactory portion of his work.[371] Among them Grotefend had already condemned four as defective; one he had determined correctly as f, and he had nearly approximated to two others, th for t before u (22) and dj for j before i (32). St. Martin’s alphabet in its complete form consists of twenty-five letters, represented by twenty-seven cuneiform signs.[372] But of these letters he has three different modifications of the sound of e, which alone monopolise six cuneiform signs. Three signs are allotted to h, two to a, two to ou, two to ch, and two to r. In its latest form ten of the letters of our alphabet are left without equivalents in cuneiform—b, f, g, i, l, q, u, w, x, z. He was not, however, always without a b.[373] It was probably not till after 1826 that he saw reason to substitute an m. Rask had recently suggested that the word which Grotefend transliterated ‘Akeotchoschoh’ should be ‘Aqamnosoh,’ and signified ‘Achaemenian.’ St. Martin had no suspicion of this when he first wrote his paper, and he translated the phrase ‘race illustrious and very excellent.’[374] But when Klaproth appeared, in 1832, the transliteration and translation were made to run as follows: ‘Poun Oukhaamychye,’ ‘race d’Achémènes,’ which differs from the first only by the substitution of an m where b occurred before.[375] This is a farther instance of unacknowledged borrowing. St. Martin accommodates himself to the view taken by Rask; but, as ill luck would have it, he changed the wrong letter: the sign he altered into m is in fact the n in the word ‘Achaemenian.’[376] With this our notice of St. Martin’s Memoir may fitly close. It is indeed a singular production for a scholar of repute. He begins by assuring his readers that the contents of the Persepolitan inscriptions were still entirely unknown; he censures the method adopted by Grotefend that had yielded him the names of three of the Achaemenian kings; for himself, he leads us to suppose that he is about to announce an entirely different and more scientific method. He then proceeds, without a word of warning and in simple confidence in our ignorance, to follow precisely the method he has just denounced, and he affects astonishment that it should lead him to precisely the same result. He can make no progress beyond the three names already known. In the case of the Murgab inscription he ventures to take a step upon his own account and immediately blunders into error. His alphabet is remarkable for its inferiority to the one he desires to supersede. It has at most ten correct values to Grotefend’s thirteen or fourteen.[377] Eight cuneiform letters are abandoned altogether in simulated despair. Nine are changed without being improved, and ten of the most important sounds in human language are left without expression. We do not condemn him for being inferior to his master: many pupils suffer from that disability; but we censure him for denying his obligation and for affecting an originality he did not possess. One service indeed he rendered. If he made no new discoveries in cuneiform, he at least has the merit of discovering Grotefend’s discovery to France. Many of his countrymen were willing to take upon his authority what they would not accept from the German writer, and it gradually came to be believed (though even yet by no means universally) that the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes were to be read in the Persepolitan inscriptions.[378]

The first advance in cuneiform decipherment after Grotefend was made by Rask, a distinguished Danish scholar. He was born in 1782, and at first he devoted himself entirely to Icelandic. He spent two years in the island, and on his return, in 1817, he published an edition of the Edda. Subsequently he added Oriental languages to the range of his acquirements. For a time his serious attention was devoted to Sanscrit, Persian and Arabic, while his leisure moments were diverted by the acquisition of Russian and Finnish. He then went to India for three months, to perfect himself in such trifling matters as Sanscrit, Hindustani, Zend and Pehlevi. A short visit to Ceylon was devoted to Cingalese, Pali and Elu. On his return to Copenhagen he filled two professorial chairs—those of Oriental Languages and Icelandic. He is regarded as one of the earliest founders of Comparative Philology, and the number of his writings is very large. Among them are Grammars of Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Cingalese, Acra, Lapp, Danish and Italian. But it is to the little volume ‘Ueber das Alter der Zend-Sprache’ that we have now to refer.[379] Some writers contended that Zend is merely a dialect of Sanscrit, restricted in its use to sacred literature, and never employed as a spoken language. It was also asserted that the Zend-Avesta was of comparatively recent date, possibly not earlier than the third century A.D.[380] One of the many arguments adduced by Rask to confute these theories was the similarity between the Zend and the language of the first Persepolitan column. He pointed out that, so far as it had been deciphered by Grotefend, it bore a strong resemblance to that of ‘Father Zoroaster’; and he argued that where they differed to a marked degree in their case-endings, the probability was that the divergence is due to an error in the values assigned to the letters by Grotefend. Thus, the genitive plural as given by Grotefend ends in e or a, ch (tsch), a, o, which bears no resemblance to anything to be found in Zend; and he casually threw out the suggestion that it should read a-n-a-m, which is a usual Zend form.[381] He farther showed, in support of this view, that the change of an o into m would go a long way to solve the difficulty of the word that follows ‘stirps’; and he hazarded the improved transliteration ‘aqamnosoh,’ from which ‘Achaemenian’ might be derived. The change of tsch into n, and o into m, which was at once accepted and ultimately proved to be correct, was of great importance; and both Burnouf and Lassen admit the extent of their obligations. Rask’s own studies lay in an entirely different direction, and he made no attempt to follow up his success in decipherment; but he took occasion to point out that there must be some radical error in an alphabet that assigns two different sounds—e and a—to the same sign, and two signs to the same sound, a; and he lays down the rule ‘that one letter should have only a single sound, and two or more letters can never denote one and the same sound.’ The last maxim was not, however, verified, for it is found that some letters are represented by two and even three signs, according to the vowel they precede. He added the useful warning that the language of the inscription is probably Old Persian, and not, therefore, identical with the language of Zoroaster. Hence, while they are similar, and may be usefully compared, it by no means follows that the grammatical forms and the vocabulary are always identical.[382]

We now come to the two great scholars, Burnouf and Lassen, to whom, after Grotefend, the decipherment of the cuneiform is chiefly to be ascribed.

Eugène Burnouf was the son of a distinguished father, who was a Professor at the Collège de France. Eugène was born in 1801, and died in 1852. At the age of twenty-five he acquired a great reputation for Oriental scholarship by the publication of his essay ‘Sur le Pali,’ which he wrote in collaboration with Lassen.[383] But his fame rests principally upon his Zend studies, the first of which, the Vendidad, appeared in 1830. More than a hundred years had elapsed since the first copy of the original text was brought to Europe by George Bouchier, an Englishman (1718), who had obtained it from the Parsees at Surat. Bouchier presented it to the University of Oxford, where it might be seen long afterwards chained to a wall in the Bodleian. No one, however, could read a word of it. At length a young Frenchman, Anquetil de Perron, determined if possible to overcome the difficulty. He went to Surat in 1758, and put himself under the tutorship of the learned Parsees. He was, however, surprised to find that, although they knew the value of the characters, they were completely ignorant of the language itself. Yet their sacred books were written in it, and they daily recited the meaningless sounds in their ritual. It was sufficient, they said, that God should understand the prayers they were enjoined to repeat. By an ingenious comparison with the Pehlevi and Persian vocabularies Anquetil at length arrived at a probable translation; and after his return to Paris he published a French version of the Zend-Avesta (1771).[384] His work was very unduly depreciated by Sir W. Jones, the leading English Orientalist, but it attracted a larger degree of esteem on the Continent, and a German edition by Kleuker appeared at Riga, in 1777, which enjoyed a fair amount of popularity.[385] Both the language and the subject-matter of the Zend-Avesta began to receive the attention of scholars, and those especially who were interested in cuneiform recognised their importance. Tychsen, for example, wrote on the religion of Zoroaster,[386] and Rask on the relation of the language to Sanscrit;[387] and the same conjunction of studies was preserved in later times by Burnouf, Westergaard, Oppert and Spiegel. Down to the time of Burnouf, however, the knowledge of Zend continued to be very imperfect, and Grotefend was constantly impeded in his attempt to elucidate the language of the cuneiform inscriptions by reference to the very defective work of Anquetil. Burnouf was appointed to the chair of Sanscrit in the Collège de France in 1832, and the idea occurred to him to connect his Sanscrit and Zend Studies. He found that a translation of the Yaçna into Sanscrit had been made by two Persian scholars some four hundred years before, while the recollection of Zend was still preserved; and it is entirely due to his labours upon this text that such remarkable progress was made in the study. His ‘Commentaire sur le Yaçna’ appeared in 1834; and in addition to its other merits it was at once recognised that it afforded the most valuable assistance to the cuneiform student. Indeed, Sir Henry Rawlinson admitted that it was to a great extent in consequence of the knowledge he derived from it that he was enabled to overcome the difficulties of the Behistun inscription. Burnouf’s ‘Mémoire sur deux Inscriptions cunéiformes’ appeared in 1836. It was submitted to the Académie des Inscriptions in March, and finally given to the world on June 1. He considered that the Inscriptions B and G of Niebuhr had been sufficiently worked upon; and if additional results were to be obtained they should be sought from fresh materials.[388] Although Schulz’s papers were not yet published, Burnouf obtained access to them; and found they included two trilingual inscriptions from Elvend near Hamadan, copied by Mr. Stewart, and a trilingual from Van.[389] The two Hamadan inscriptions reproduce precisely the same text, except that the name of Darius occurs in one in the place of Xerxes in the other. Comparing these with the trilingual of Xerxes at Van, he found that the first two paragraphs are the same in both; but the last paragraph of the Van inscription is not found at Hamadan. At Persepolis the whole of the Hamadan inscription is repeated on the Anta of the Porch to the Palace of Darius; and considerably more besides. But the additional portion does not correspond to that found in the last paragraph at Van. The whole of it was copied long before by Le Bruyn (No. 131). Burnouf next observed that the inscription on the sculptured stairs—the A of Niebuhr—bears a strong resemblance to those just mentioned; but the beginning is clearly imperfect. Ouseley, however, had published a five-lined inscription from Persepolis, which corresponds exactly to the Darius at Hamadan; and Grotefend pointed out that it was probably the beginning of the A inscription.[390] With this addition the A runs for a time parallel to the Hamadan, while at its close it corresponds to the Le Bruyn. Burnouf had thus a considerable number of copies of the same text, and by careful collation he sought to eliminate the errors due to the engraver or the transcriber. By these means he obtained a correct recension of the Hamadan inscription upon which his work was chiefly founded. But there was another to which he made frequent reference, especially towards the close of his Memoir. This is the I inscription of Niebuhr, which is copied from the outside wall, on the southern side of the great platform of Persepolis.[391]

It will be recollected that Grotefend had called attention to this inscription in 1832, and had pointed out that it evidently contained a long list of proper names.[392] Whether this suggestion ever reached Burnouf it is impossible to say, but it is certain he made it an early object of study; and from it he derived the cuneiform sign ‘B,’ with which he signed his letters to Lassen.

The method he pursued to determine the value of an unknown sign was to collect all the words in which it occurred, and endeavour to assign to it a letter, from among those not already rigorously determined, that would produce a word for which some meaning might be found by comparing it with Zend. For example, the word with which the Darius at Hamadan begins consists of only two letters, which, according to Grotefend, would yield vu. But Burnouf could make no sense out of this, and he accordingly substituted a b for the first letter (𐎲). The result was that he could not only extract a sense out of bu—which he compared with the Sanscrit bhû and bû ‘to be,’ but two or three other words were also rendered intelligible by the same change.[393] The consideration, however, that finally settled the matter was the discovery of a name in the I inscription, which, upon the supposition that the letter in question was a b would yield ‘Bakhtroch,’ and this he had no difficulty in identifying with Bactria. Hence he altered the v of Grotefend into a b without apparently recognising that he merely restored the value originally given to that sign by Münter.[394]

Unfortunately, his method did not lead to very important results, for it only enabled him to add two additional values correctly. Both of these were suggested to him by the second word in this same Hamadan Inscription.[395] The word occurs also in the B and G inscriptions, where it was transliterated by Grotefend e gh r e. Burnouf accepted the change of the initial e (𐎺) into i, which was made by St. Martin, without approaching nearer to the correct value, which is in fact a v. The emendation of the second letter lay ready at hand, and could not well be longer overlooked. Since Rask had identified the sign for m, this particular sign (𐏀) was the only one that required alteration in order to read Aur m z da,[396] and it was therefore inevitable that Grotefend’s gh should at length be surrendered for a z; the only wonder is that this change should have been so long delayed.[397] The emendation of the last letter of the word (𐎣) displays an entirely different order of ingenuity. The letter occurs in only seven different words in all the inscriptions of Niebuhr, Le Bruyn, and Schulz but in one instance it is the initial sign in a word of which the others are t p d h u k. It was certainly no common feat of imagination that led Burnouf to see that if a k were to precede this remarkable agglomeration, the province of Kappadocia would turn up. By these means, however, he got rid of another of Grotefend’s e’s, and altered it into a k, which proved to be correct. Having thus changed e gh r e into i z r k, the next step was to find some similar word in Zend that might suggest its meaning. This, however, was not easy; the nearest he could think of was ‘yazata,’ which might bear to be translated ‘divine.’[398]

Such was the method that enabled Burnouf to restore one correct value, b, that had been recently neglected, and to add two others, z and k, to the alphabet. He was on the point of increasing the number of correct values by two or three others, but unfortunately he hesitated to yield to his first intuition. In the twelfth line of the I inscription he found a word which, according to his alphabet he transliterated ‘Arion.’[399] It occurred in a position in the geographical list that would naturally suggest that it indicated ‘Armenia,’ and to obtain this result it was only necessary to change the sign (𐎷) which he read i into m. There was a farther reason that appeared to justify this alteration. In the Hamadan inscription the same sign occurs in bu i om, which he translated ‘excellent’; but if it were permitted to alter the i into m we should obtain bumom, ‘earth.’ The meaning of the sentence would then be: ‘He has given [or created] this earth; he has given [or created] this heaven,’ which would be an evident improvement in the sense.[400] He would not, however, allow that the alphabet could include more than one m, and he was not prepared to sacrifice the m (𐎶) discovered by Rask in the genitive termination anam. Thus he narrowly missed adding the m (𐎷) before i to the number of his correct values. So also in line 11 there occurs a word he reads ayura, but by the change of the y into th he would arrive at ‘Athura,’ the ancient ‘Aturia.’[401] This change was farther sanctioned by another name, which his system transliterated pryi; but by the hypothesis under consideration, it would become prthi, a manifest form for ‘Parthia.’ Moreover, the same alteration would introduce an important improvement in the word for ‘king,’ which would then read khchâhthôh (from the Zend khchathrô) in place of khchâhyôh.[402] Notwithstanding all these probabilities, he finally rejected the alteration and lost the addition of another correct value. It is interesting also to observe how nearly he approached the correct value of Grotefend’s h (𐎹, No. 27). He perceived that if it were changed into a y, it would yield yuna in the twelfth line, which there could be no doubt would indicate ‘Ionia.’ As it is, however, he retained the incorrect value; and he could find no satisfactory explanation of huna; for he, of course, rejected ‘Huns’ as an evident anachronism.[403] It would be tedious and unnecessary to go through the other signs to which he gave new values, for they unfortunately all turned out to be wrong. Indeed, if his services to decipherment were to be estimated by this test alone, they would not rank higher than those of St. Martin or Rask; for although he lays claim to have ascertained the value of twelve characters, eight of these are erroneous, one (the b) fairly belongs to Münter, another (the a) to Grotefend, and only two remain to be placed to his own credit: precisely the same number as were contributed by St. Martin and Rask. His alphabet gives definite values to thirty cuneiform signs and an uncertain value to three others.[404] Following the analogy of Zend, he allots a separate sign to the long and short values of each of the vowels a, i, u, and in this he considers he has reached ‘a result that should satisfy criticism.’ With respect to the consonants, however, he agrees with the maxim of Rask, and strives as far as possible to avoid according more than one sign to each. He has, however, found it difficult to avoid giving two signs to l and h, and no less than four to gh. As regards l or h, he introduces the second signs apologetically, followed by a mark of interrogation, indicating that they may be variants or defective signs. We now know there is no well-authenticated l in the language, and his first sign turned out to be d before i (𐎮) and the other r before u (𐎽). He was equally unfortunate with regard to h, neither of his signs for that letter being correct. He felt that the four signs for gh required explanation. He places only one among the thirty definite values in his alphabet. The others he labels as uncertain. (These are 𐎦, 𐎪, 𐎸.) He thought that a comparison of these would convince the student that they are composed of exactly the same elements, so that they seem to differ from each other only by the caprice of the engraver, who has arranged the wedges according to his fancy, while he has neither altered their form nor increased nor diminished their number.[405] He recognised, however, the objection that all cuneiform writing consists of the same elements, and that the sole difference of one sign from another consists in the arrangement of the wedges. He was forced to fall back upon the impossibility of assigning different values to these signs and at the same time preserving any sense in the words where they occur. The second gh (𐎦) he considered justified by its occurrence in the word he thought must be ‘çughd,’[406] the third (𐎪) because it would enable him to read ‘baghem,’ ‘destiny,’ and the fourth (𐎸) by its completing the sense of ‘ghudraha,’ which he thought denoted the Gordyans.[407] In this latter case the correct transliteration is ‘m’udray’; but it is not likely, even if he had read the word correctly, he would have detected in this form the name of Egypt. As a matter of fact, the first gh, which he has put in his alphabet (𐎯, 34) as the usual form, is d before u; the second (𐎦) is g before u; the third (𐎪, 32) is j before i; the fourth (𐎸, 33) is m before u.

Grotefend thought he found four and St. Martin six signs for e, but Burnouf correctly excluded that letter altogether from his alphabet. He, however, incorrectly admits one sign for ô long. He considers the absence of th, a form that occurs frequently in Zend, is probably due to the scarcity of documents. The want of the palatals, tch and dj, may perhaps be assigned to the same cause; though more probably it arises from the nature of the alphabet itself, for these letters are only developments of the consonants k and g.[408]

Burnouf acknowledges his obligation to Grotefend for twelve letters; but these should properly be raised to fifteen.[409] The twelve he admits include eight correct values and four incorrect. The three he leaves unacknowledged are t (24), u (36), and a (41), all of which are correct, and they raise the number of correct values accepted from this source to eleven. Burnouf attributes three of his letters to St. Martin, namely t, u and i: the first two are already accounted for from Grotefend; the i is indeed due to St. Martin, but it is wrong. Burnouf rejected the only absolutely correct value found by St. Martin, viz. v. Two letters, the m and n, he refers to Rask, from whom also he must have derived the q (25) which he erroneously substitutes for Grotefend’s k.

The twelve values which Burnouf credits to his own account include the a of Grotefend and the b of Münter.[410] There remain the two values which he was the first to fix correctly, viz. k (4) and z (18); the others are all incorrect. We have thus accounted for twenty-nine signs out of the thirty of his alphabet;[411] the other, the ng (28) of Grotefend, he treated as uncertain, but suggested h, the true value being j(a)[412] Besides the thirty just mentioned he gives three other signs, to which he hesitates to assign any value, though he thought they might all represent the sound of gh. These are, as we have already explained, the dj (32) and the ‘k?’ (33) of Grotefend, now ascertained to be j before i, and m before u. The other does not appear in Niebuhr’s list, and Lassen is the first to assign it a value, g, which turned out correct (g before u).

Burnouf dropped one letter entirely out of his alphabet (𐏂, No 13): the n that completed the bun or ‘stirps’ of Grotefend. Since Rask had found the true sign for n, a second n might well seem to be redundant;[413] and this supposition was confirmed by finding the sign written at Hamadan with three horizontal wedges instead of with two: a difference that transformed it into a p. Burnouf accordingly thought the other form was an error of the copyist, and he read pup, upon which he confesses neither Zend nor Sanscrit could throw any light; though from the context it evidently means ‘son,’ and may therefore possibly be a monogram for the Zend puthra.[414] He trusted, however, that future research would re-establish the ejected sign; in which case he proposed to give it the value of th, and to read puth. It was, in fact, afterwards found to be a genuine sign entirely distinct from p, and it has received the value of tr or thr, which has completed the transformation of bun or pun into puthra.

To sum up: of the thirty-three different cuneiform signs in Niebuhr’s list for which values have been ultimately found, Burnouf knew only sixteen correctly (two from Münter, a and b; ten from Grotefend; two from Rask and two from himself), or not quite one half.[415] Yet with such imperfect materials to work with he was able to render important service in the matter of translation. It is obvious that, according as the letters became known, and the words of the new language began to be made out, the task of finding their meaning would depend upon the knowledge of the languages most nearly akin, and upon the acumen with which the interpreter could apply the resources at his disposal. In other words, the task would pass from the decipherer to the translator; and it is in this department that Burnouf has earned the greatest distinction. Although he could command only a limited number of correct values, and consequently his transliteration was still extremely imperfect, yet his knowledge of Zend, which was greater than that of any other scholar then living, enabled him to make sense of many of these crude forms and for the first time to approach to a correct translation of the words that were not simply proper names. When he began his labours, there were apparently only two words, ‘king’ and ‘son,’ that were correctly read, in addition to a few proper names, such as Achaemenian, Hystaspes, Darius, Xerxes, Cyrus and Persia;[416] but to these both Grotefend and St. Martin had accumulated a vast number of worthless and misleading meanings, from ‘the constellation of Moro’ down to ‘Jamshid.’ Burnouf added several correct words to the vocabulary, and he was always able to avoid falling into extravagant error. He showed, for example, that the word Grotefend had taken for the conjunction ‘and’ was in reality a form of the verb ‘to give or create.’[417] He overcame the chief difficulty in the word he read ‘aqunuch’ = ‘generator,’ really ‘ak’unaush,’ ‘to make,’ and read by Grotefend ‘florentem.’[418] The word Grotefend translated ‘Dominus’ he rendered ‘this is,’ and suggested the possibility of its being ‘I am,’ which turned out to be its correct meaning. Besides these contributions, he recognised the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ (aim for avam, ‘ce’); and he added the words ‘heaven,’ ‘man,’ ‘master,’ ‘province,’ ‘world,’ and some others.[419] The great improvement in translation that resulted will be best appreciated by a comparison. The text of the first paragraph in the Hamadan inscription, translated by Burnouf, is word for word the same as that of the Le Bruyn (No. 131) translated by Grotefend, except that ‘Darius’ in the former is ‘Xerxes’ in the latter. We have placed the translation of Burnouf opposite that of Grotefend.

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A comparison of the two translations with the final version will show at a glance how vastly superior Burnouf’s rendering was to that of his predecessor. Not the least important of his contributions to the work of translation was the identification of the names of some of the provinces of Darius, which are contained in the I inscription. We have already observed that Grotefend had attempted a translation of this inscription in 1832;[425] and in 1836 he again drew attention to the circumstance that it contained a series of geographical names. The list included no less than twenty-four proper names, some of which were entirely beyond Burnouf’s power to decipher; but he made an attempt to read sixteen, and out of these eight were correct. He thus added Persia, Media, Babylon, Arabia, Cappadocia, Sarangia, Bactria and Sogdiana to the names deciphered from the cuneiform;[426] and we have seen how nearly he arrived at four more—Athura (or Assyria), Armenia, Ionia[427] and Parthia.

Among his contributions to a knowledge of the grammar, he pointed out that the change of Grotefend’s o into m brought the accusative singular into line with the Zend and Sanscrit; the genitive aha is also found in Zend, and both languages alike use it as a dative. A nominative ending in oh has also its counterpart in the Zend termination in o. He indicated the apparent barbarism that treats the nominative case as inherent in the word itself; so that the case-ending is appended to it without modification, as if we wrote ‘dominus-um’ for ‘dominum,’ or ‘dominus-i’ for ‘domini.’[428]

He inferred from the two words ‘Aurmzda’ and ‘izrk’ that cases occur in which both the vowels and the aspirate are suppressed; and he concluded that the system of cuneiform writing could not have been originally applied to express a Sanscrit or Zend language, in both of which the vowel is rigorously represented. He conjectured also that the cuneiform signs for the vowels might include an aspirate that rendered its separate expression unnecessary.[429] ‘There is therefore an evident disagreement between the language of the inscriptions and the characters in which they are written’; and this he ascribed ‘to the influence of a system of transcription of Semitic origin.’[430] The discovery that there was a marked discrepancy between the mode of writing and the characteristics of an Indo-European language, now announced for the first time, was soon to receive very ample confirmation, though it was no small surprise to most scholars when the origin of the writing was traced, not to Semitic, but to Turanian sources. In opposition to the opinion of Grotefend, Burnouf thought that the greater simplicity of the mode of writing in the first Persepolitan column indicated its later development, and he showed that the language was not identical with Zend, as Grotefend at first imagined, but a dialect less pure than Zend, and in actual process of developing into a later form.[431] Indeed it already exhibited by its interchange of letters some of the peculiarities noticed in modern Persian. He has no doubt that it was the living language of the court of Darius; and it is peculiarly interesting, inasmuch as its existence fully establishes the greater antiquity of Zend, and removes for ever all the doubts that had arisen as to the authenticity of that sacred language.[432]