294 Rev. Dr. Watt on the different Kinds of Cuneiform Writing 
syllables in the uppermost legend are already written with single characters, or, 
if with two, still without any vowel-letter ; if, then, the whole of that legend were 
to be so written, only a quarter of its length could, at the most, be thereby ab- 
stracted ; and, consequently, upon a similar supposition with regard to the others, 
they would, ceteris paribus, be three quarters, instead of only half as long as 
that with which they are compared. We are, therefore, as it would appear, una- 
voidably reduced to the necessity of concluding that the characters they are written 
with, must be either contractions of alphabetic groups or ideagrams ; and those 
characters, I may further observe, are proved to be limited to signs of the latter 
kind, by the omission of the verb substantive in the principal legend,—an omission 
which, as I have shown in the case of the original Pentateuch, and, perhaps, still 
more strikingly in that of the Coptic translations of the Septuagint and Greek 
Testament,—strongly indicates a predominant familiarity of the writer with idea- 
graphic modes of designation, and thus renders probable his use of such modes in 
one, at least, if not in both, of his subordinate legends. 
A further objection to the assumption of the second and third kinds of the 
writing in question being alphabetic, is suggested by another feature in the 
appearance of the above, or indeed in that of any other specimen of the triple in- 
scriptions of the Persians. The characters are separated by a certain mark into 
distinct groups, only in the first legend of the epigraph before us. Now, if the 
elements of the second and third kinds of writing employed in this epigraph, were 
symbols, each of which was significant by itself, we can easily conceive why they 
were not parcelled into separate combinations. But if they were letters, which 
become significant only by uniting several of them together, it appears quite 
inexplicable that an insculptor, who showed himself perfectly aware of the advan- 
tage of distinctly grouping the characters in one kind of alphabetic writing, 
should not have equally availed himself of it in the other two kinds. 
13. With regard to the species of cuneatic writing called the second, or 
the Median kind, several of the characters in this, and in the sort termed 
the first kind, are very similar; and four of them, viz., TE, =y - ay : |S 
are absolutely identical. Hence it is plain that the framer of the Persian cunei- 
form alphabet introduced into it, through the force of habit, four of the elements 
of the older kind of writing, long previously familiar to him ; and, consequently, 
he must, from the same cause, have adopted, if they were therein phonetically 
