a 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 135 
The most common of these are Yaw and Yod, which express the vowels U and I, as 
well as the semi-vowels W and Y. There can scarcely be a doubt, however, that in 
some cases where these letters are now read as vowels, they were originally read as 
semivowels ; the 6th of the feminine plural was originally dwath ; the ¢ of the affix 
“my ’’ was originally ya. In other cases, these vowel letters were inserted by 
copyists at a comparatively recent period; according to Dr. Wall, in the second 
century after Christ. In the oldest Phcenician inscription extant, that on the sar- 
cophagus of Asmunezer, there are no vowel letters. The Yod of the plural number 
is never written in either the absolute or the constant form; there is no Vaw at the 
end of the third person plural, and no letter after Zayin in the demonstrative pronoun. 
All the Semitic languages with which we were acquainted previously to the deci- 
phering of the Assyrio-Babylonian inscriptions were originally written from right to 
left, and with consonants only ; and no languages other than Semitic ones were thus 
written, except under Semitic influence. It was therefore a natural supposition 
that the cuneiform writing of Babylon, where a Semitic language was believed to have 
been spoken, would be written with characters which represented the Semitic conso- 
nants. Two circumstances might have suggested doubts as to this being the case; 
the writing was directed from left to right, and the characters were far more nume- 
rous than in the Semitic alphabet ; but notwithstanding these objections, all who 
undertook the decipherment of the inscriptions before 1847, with the single excep-~ 
tion of Grotefend, referred the characters to the Semitic alphabet. The explanation 
which they gave of the large number of the characters was that each letter was repre- 
sented by several equivalent characters ; and that some characters represented com- 
binations of letters, Aleph, Vaw, and Yod being accounted vowels. Grotefend denied 
the equivalence of any two characters, and supposed that characters might represent 
consonants, combinations of consonants, vowels or syllables. Grotefend identified the 
Babylonian groups which represented the names of Darius, Hystaspes, and Xerxes ; 
and his analysis of these names might pass if no other words were to be considered ; 
and so indeed might that of the other decipherers ; but both these systems failed when 
the values of the characters used in these words were transferred to other words in 
which the characters occurred. In the latter end of 1847, it occurred to the author 
of this paper that the characters must represent definite syllables, no character re- 
presenting a detached consonant, and no vowel being left unexpressed. He consi- 
dered that the Assyrians did not analyse their words beyond syllables; they did not 
recognize consonants or vowels as constituents of syllables ; their characters repre~ 
sented simple syllables or combinations of syllables; not Semitic letters or combi- 
nations of them, as the French decipherers and Sir H. Rawlinson supposed, nor 
European letters and combinations of them, as Grotefend thought. These three 
modes of analysing the names of Darius and Hystaspes were represented in fig. 1 
of a lithographed plate, which was distributed in the Section (Plate III.). It was 
observed that, so far as respected these two names, the difference between these dif- 
ferent modes might appear unimportant ; but the problem to be solved was to analyse 
these names in such a manner as that the values of the characters deduced from these 
and other like names, when substituted in Assyrian nouns and verbs, would enable 
us to exhibit them in Semitic forms. The first two modes of analysis failed to do 
this, but the third effected it. In a lithographed plate, which was exhibited at the 
Edinburgh Meeting of the British Association in 1850, and which was published in 
the Report for that year, there were a number of groups of cuneatic characters, 
which were read syllabically as Semitic words. Though there were errors in most 
of these words, which have since been corrected by the author himself or by others, 
they were such closé approximations to the true reading of the words, that they could 
scarcely fail to carry conviction to those who were studying the inscriptions. The 
syllabic system of deciphering, which had previously been maintained by the author 
alone, is now universally adopted. 
This, then, being a settled point, it comes to be inquired, how came the Assyrians 
to write on a totally different system from what all other Semitic people used? The 
answer to this question given by the author in 1850 was, that the Assyrians learned 
their system of writing from a non-Semitic people: He then thought that this other 
people had partially adopted the Egyptian system of writing ; but he was now satis- 
fied that they had invented it independently of the Egyptians. What suggested to 
