480 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT A MEETING OF 



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 archaeologists who have written upon the 

 subject, beyond the mere classification 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 Achsemenian inscriptions published by Westergaard, and the 

 great inscription of the East India Company, containing 619 lines 

 of lapidary characters. His first step in the deciphering of these 

 documents was, of course, to analyze the proper names which 

 occur in the third columns of the trilingual inscriptions, and to 

 compare them with their equivalents in the other two. The 

 values of many characters were thus determined ; those of others 

 were ascertained by comparing different modes of writing the 

 same words in the inscriptions which commence with the same 

 formula ; and, finally, when the equivalence of two sets of charac- 

 ters, lapidary and cursive, was ascertained, more values were 

 determined by comparing the proper names in the great inscrip- 

 tion with their representatives in the other languages. By such 

 means Dr. Hincks has constructed an alphabet, or syllabary, of 

 the third Persepolitan writing, containing the values of ninety-five 

 characters, together with the corresponding lapidary characters; 

 and he has given a series of numbers from the rock inscription at 

 Yan, exhibiting the mode of expressing numerals in cuneatic 

 characters. 



Before I take leave of this subject, one more remark is 

 necessary. It has been assumed by every writer who has hitherto 

 engaged in the investigation of the cuneiform inscriptions, that the 

 writing of the second and third kinds (as well as that of the first) 

 is alphabetical. This fundamental position, however, has been 

 recently assailed by Dr. Wall, in a very able critical paper read 

 before the Academy ; and arguments of much weight have been 

 adduced to distinguish the principle of these two kinds of cunei- 

 form writing from that of the first, and to prove them to be idea- 

 graphic. It is not my duty (even if I were competent to the task) 

 to offer any opinion upon the question thus raised. I have only 

 to observe that what has been said above, respecting the progress 



