478 ADDEESS DELIVERED AT A MEETING OF 



Major Eawlinson commenced his labours, in the country of the 

 inscriptions ; re-discovered for himself the greater part of what 

 had been already done by European scholars ; and determined 

 the values of, at least, four new characters. But his chief work 

 in which he has, by one great stride, surpassed all his predecessors 

 is the translation of the Persian portion of the great trilingual 

 inscription at Behistun, containing above 400 lines of cuneiform 

 writing. This inscription had been copied, in part, by Major 

 Eawlinson in 1837 ; and a large portion of the translation was 

 made by him, and communicated to the Royal Asiatic Society, in 

 1839. His philological labours were suddenly interrupted in the 

 following year, by active duty at Affghanistan ; but in the autumn 

 of 1845 he succeeded in making a correct copy of the whole of the 

 Persian inscription (together with a considerable portion of the Me- 

 dian and Babylonian), and soon after completed the translation in 

 the form in which it has been recently published. With the contents 

 of this singular record, written more than twenty-three centuries 

 since, and throwing an unexpected light upon one of the most 

 controverted questions of early history, the literary public are 

 now well acquainted. 



Dr. Hincks' first paper on Persepolitan writing was communi- 

 cated to the Academy in June, 1846, before the publication of the 

 first part of Major Eawlinson's memoir. In this paper he pro- 

 poses three general principles respecting the orthography of the 

 Persian, in which he corrects Lassen's account of that language. 

 The most important of these consists in the distinction of the 

 consonants into two classes, which he calls primary and secondary, 

 the former being those which may be used before the vowel a, 

 expressed or supplied, the latter such as are only used before one 

 of the other vowels. Dr. Hincks maintains, in opposition to 

 Lassen, that these secondary consonants are phonetically equiva- 

 lent to their primaries ; and he lays it down, " as an invariable 

 rule, that if a primary consonant precedes i or u, when a secondary 

 consonant existed of the same value as the primary one, and 

 appropriate to that vowel, an a must be interposed, either as a dis- 

 tinct syllable, or as a guna to the vowel." The Persian alphabet 

 may now be considered to be completely established. Of the 

 thirty-nine letters which compose it, Major Eawlinson and Dr. 

 Hincks are now agreed as to the values of all but one; Dr. 

 Hincks having adopted three of Major Eawlinson's values, and 



