A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



Assyrians, but in so doing had made one of those essen- 

 tial modifications and improvements which are scarcely 

 possible to accomplish except in the transition from 

 one race to another. Instead of building with the 

 arrow-head a multitude of syllabic characters, includ- 

 ing many homophones, as had been and continued to 

 be the custom with the Assyrians, the Persians selected 

 a few of these characters and ascribed to them phonetic 

 values that were almost purely alphabetic. In a word, 

 while retaining the wedge as the basal stroke of their 

 script, they developed an alphabet, making the last 

 wonderful analysis of phonetic sounds which even to 

 this day has escaped the Chinese, which the Egyptians 

 had only partially effected, and which the Phoenicians 

 were accredited by the Greeks with having introduced 

 to the Western world. In addition to this all-essential 

 step, the Persians had introduced the minor but highly 

 convenient custom of separating the words of a sen- 

 tence from one another by a particular mark, differing 

 in this regard not only from the Assyrians and Egyp- 

 tians, but from the early Greek scribes as well. 



Thanks to these simplifications, the old Persian lan- 

 guage had been practically restored about the beginning 

 of the nineteenth century, through the efforts of the 

 German Grotefend, and further advances in it were 

 made just at this time by Renouf, in France, and by 

 Lassen, in Germany, as well as by Rawlinson himself, 

 who largely solved the problem of the Persian alphabet 

 independently. So the Persian portion of the Behistun 

 inscription could be at least partially deciphered. This 

 in itself, however, would have been no very great aid 

 towards the restoration of the languages of the other 



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