ner, without any apprehension that the system adopted by M. Grotefend will eventually turn out to be false, or that any other scholar will venture to contest with him the merit of discovery."

A series of laborious investigators in the same field, has since arisen in Germany; and one and all have started from the point, and followed in the path, originally pointed out by M. Grotefend. His "kings" are their "kings;" and his alphabet the sole substratum of their alphabets, which are all based upon the proper names, Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, &c., professing only to be improved, corrected, and enlarged, by the several subsequent inquirers. And as it has been in Germany, so has it been in England: a point of fact certified by a single testimony which may well stand for all, that of the latest and most distinguished of English inquirers, Colonel Rawlinson. The following tribute from the pen of this gallant officer (to whom his country is not less indebted for his heroic services in Afghanistan, than learned Europe for his enterprize in copying, for the first time, the great arrow-headed inscriptions of Behistan or Bisitun), however lofty the scale of the structure purporting since to be erected by others and by himself, leaves Professor Grotefend in

undisputed possession of the palm of discovery, and of the title, amidst the supposed redintegrated ruins of the literature of Nineveh, Babylon, and Persepolis, of master-builder.

"Professor Grotefend has certainly the credit of being the first who opened a gallery into this rich treasure-house of antiquity. In decyphering the names of Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, and Hystaspes, he obtained the true determination of nearly a third of the entire alphabet, and thus, at once, supplied a sure and ample basis for further research."

This honourable acknowledgment is succeeded by an equally honourable testimony to the conceived merits of a more recent German inquirer, Professor Lassen, whose "identification of at least twelve characters, which had been mistaken by all his predecessors [!], may entitle him almost to contest with Professor Grotefend the palm of alphabetical discovery."

And this tribute, again, is followed by a still more honourable disclaimer, on Colonel Rawlinson's own part, of "any pretension to originality, as regards the alphabet which I have finally decided on adopting."

By these candid statements and admissions, the inquiry before us is at once simplified; and the whole question at issue reduced within the

narrowest possible limits; namely, the soundness or unsoundness of Professor Grotefend's alleged original discovery, and the consequent soundness or unsoundness of the alphabets subsequently formed on that basis.

We are thus naturally re-conducted to the fountain-head, the learned Professor's own account of his own discovery. Its rise and progress he very simply, and very clearly, de

scribes as follows:

"Let us now proceed to an examination of my own method of decyphering the first species of Persepolitan writing; after which, I shall endeavour to furnish a brief sketch of the results obtained from my interpretation, as far as they may interest the general historian. With re

gard to my mode of procedure, and manner of decyphering, they are both so excellently laid down by the Baron Silvestre de Sacy, in a letter to M. Millin (Magasin Enclopédique, Année viii. tome v. p. 438.), that I need only refer the reader to that source. But, as it might prove interesting to know how a person, without any profound acquaintance with oriental languages, has been able to decypher a species of Asiatic writing of the most remote antiquity, of which the alphabet, the language, and the contents were equally unknown, I may as well enter into

a few details relative to the history of my terpretation.

in

"Among the inscriptions of the first kind [the simplest form of the Persepolitan writing], there are two, very accurately copied by Niebuhr (vol. ii. tab. xxiv. B. and G.). They are accompanied with translations evidently made from the two other kinds of writing, which are of the same size, and, according to all appearance, of the same contents; and therefore, as the first kind is, in general, the most simple of all the cuneiform writings, my predecessors have applied themselves to decypher it in preference to the rest. From the same point, also, I took my own departure, particularly as the word recognized by Tychsen and Münter as the key of the whole alphabet, occurs most frequently in the species in question; and supposing, with Tychsen, that we must look for titles of kings in the inscriptions placed over their portraits (Niebuhr, Travels, vol. ii. pp. 112. 117.), I felt convinced that the word so often repeated, MUST SIGNIFY 'KING.' Having, therefore, arrived at the same principle with Tychsen and Münter, without perusing any work upon cuneiform writing, and without seeing any other copies than those of Le Bruyn and Niebuhr, I translated the two inscriptions, according to the analogy of those in

Pehlvi decyphered by M. de Sacy, in the following manner:

UM.)

N.N.REX.MAGNUS (?) REX. REGUM . (REX.
FILIUS .. (REGIS). STIRPS. ACHAEMENES (?) (---)

"I was thus naturally led to infer, that these two kings [?] must be father and son, because the king in Niebuhr's Pl. G. was called the son [?] of the king in Pl. B.; and because in both the translations of the other kinds of writing [?], there existed the same connection between the two names [?]. Upon this I examined Heeren's Researches, and the essay of M. Münter, in order to ascertain the particular age of the Persian kings, to which the bas-reliefs in the ruins of Persepolis belonged, and thereby to discover the names applicable to them; the only way in which I could possibly succeed in finding out the signification of certain letters; and, ultimately, by this means, elucidate the whole of them. Being fully persuaded, from an examination of the contemporary Greek historians, whose writings are the most circumstantial of any we know, that I must, in this case, look for two kings of the dynasty of the Achaemenides*,

* Colonel Rawlinson's process is simply the repetition of Grotefend's : viz. 1. the assumption of the existence, in the unknown inscriptions, of proper names; 2. the conjectural verification of the assumed names; and 3. the construction of an alphabet, based on this double assumption.