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Westergaard held that the Median alphabet had six vowels and 

 sixteen consonants; and that the characters represented, first, these 

 twenty-two letters, and then syllables composed of the consonants 

 followed by vowels. Dr. Hincks maintains, on the contrary, that 

 there are but four vowels and five consonants ; and that, besides the 

 characters representing these nine simple sounds, there are also 

 characters representing combinations of the five consonants with 

 preceding va.A follori'ing vowels, as also combinations of the vowels 

 with each other. Again, — while according to Westergaard the vowels 

 are not all expressed, — according to Dr. Hincks every vowel is ex- 

 pressed at least once, and often more than once; it being customary 

 to write vowels twice over, at the end of one character and at 

 the beginning of the next. In accordance with this principle. Dr. 

 Hincks adds vowels, in many cases, to Westergaard's values, thus 

 making the characters to represent syllables instead of letters. 

 Notwithstanding these important differences, however, he confirms, 

 in general, the values given by Westergaard, although he differs 

 from him altogether as to five of the characters, and assigns values 

 to five more, which that writer had not valued at all. 



But it is upon his labours connected with the third Persepolitan 

 writing that Dr. Hincks's chief claim as an original discoverer must be 

 founded. Grotefend discovered that the characters, in this writing, 

 were partly expressive of syllables, and partly of letters ; to a few 

 of them, also, he assigned phonetic values ; and he ascertained the 

 fact of the correspondence of certain lapidary with certain cursive 

 characters. To this little has been added by the many archaeolo- 

 gists who have written upon the subject, beyond the mere classifi- 

 cation of the characters. At an early period of his inquiries, Dr. 

 Hincks arrived at the conclusion that the Babylonian and Assyrian 

 writing agreed with the second Persepolitan in many of the features 

 of the latter already noticed. The chief of the materials upon which 

 he has since laboured are the Achaemenian inscriptions published 

 by Westergaard, and the great inscription of the East India Com- 

 pany, containing 619 lines of lapidary characters. His first step in 

 the deciphering of these documents was, of course, to analyse the 

 proper names which occur in the third columns of the trilingual 

 inscriptions, and to compare them with their equivalents in the other 



