ORIENTAL ARCHEOLOGY 



portions had it not chanced, fortunately, that the in- 

 scription is sprinkled with proper names. Now proper 

 names, generally speaking, are not translated from 

 one language to another, but transliterated as nearly 

 as the genius of the language will permit. It was the 

 fact that the Greek word Ptolemaios was transliter- 

 ated on the Rosetta Stone that gave the first clew to the 

 sounds of the Egyptian characters. Had the upper 

 part of the Rosetta Stone been preserved, on which, 

 originally, there were several other names, Young 

 would not have halted where he did in his decipher- 

 ment. 



But fortune, which had been at once so kind and so 

 tantalizing in the case of the Rosetta Stone, had dealt 

 more gently with the Behistun inscriptions; for no 

 fewer than ninety proper names were preserved in the 

 Persian portion and duplicated, in another character, 

 in the Assyrian inscription. A study of these gave a 

 clew to the sounds of the Assyrian characters. The 

 decipherment of this character, however, even with 

 this aid, proved enormously difficult, for it was soon 

 evident that here it was no longer a question of a 

 nearly perfect alphabet of a few characters, but of a 

 syllabary of several hundred characters, including 

 many homophones, or different forms for representing 

 the same sound. But with the Persian translation 

 for a guide on the one hand, and the Semitic languages, 

 to which family the Assyrian belonged, on the other, 

 the appalling task was gradually accomplished, the 

 leading investigators being General Rawlinson, Pro- 

 fessor Hincks, and Mr. Fox-Talbot, in England, Pro- 

 fessor Jules Oppert, in Paris, and Professor Julian 



