THE ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY, 1848. 477 



first Persepolitan writing. In the year 1802, Professor Grotefend, 

 of Gottingen, examined two short trilingual inscriptions, which had 

 been copied at Persepolis by the traveller Niebuhr, and succeeded 

 in identifying the names of Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes, and Hystaspcs, 

 in all the three characters. The analysis of these names, in the 

 case of the Persian, enabled him to determine the values of eleven 

 out of the sixteen letters of which they were composed, or nearly 

 one-third of the entire alphabet. 



The next step was made by Professor Bask, of Copenhagen, in 

 1826. He recognised the title Achcemenide in the inscription of 

 Niebuhr, and thus determined the values of two important letters, 

 m and n, which occur in it. But the most valuable contribution 

 made by Eask to this branch of palaeography, consisted in his dis- 

 covery of the resemblance of the extinct language to the Sanscrit 

 in some of its inflections, a discovery which has been justly re- 

 garded as the key to its interpretation. Ten years later the inquiry 

 received a fresh impulse by the simultaneous publication of two 

 works, one by M. Burnouf, of Paris, and the other by the distin- 

 guished orientalist, Professor Lassen, of Bonn. By the analysis 

 of a trilingual inscription, containing the names of the provinces of 

 the Persian empire, the values of many new characters were ascer- 

 tained, and the known alphabet was enlarged to twenty-six letters. 

 In the year 1838 the values of five new characters were added to 

 the list, two by Dr. Beer, of Leipsic, and three by M. Jacquet, 

 of Paris ; and the same writers discovered, independently, the fun- 

 damental principle which, strange to say, had hitherto escaped 

 notice, that the Persian alphabet contained but three vowels, a, /, 

 and u* 



But the most important of the researches connected with the 

 first Persepolitan writing are those of Major Eawlinson. Hitherto 

 little had been accomplished beyond the first step of the process, 

 the determination of the values of the letter*. Eask, indeed, 

 had observed the similarity of the language to the Sanscrit, and 

 this was confirmed by Lassen and Beer, the former of whom 

 proposed to employ the Sanscrit as a key to its interpretation ; 

 but, as yet, little had been correctly done on this head. In 1835, 



* This striking similarity of the Persian to the languages of the Slicmitir fypo, in 

 its vocalic structure, has been recently drawn still closer by Dr. AV.ill. in bis able 

 paper on the different kinds of cuneiform writing, published in the last volume of the 

 Transactions of the Academy. 



