203 



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, i, 

 and M.* 



But the most important of the researches connected with the 

 first Persepolitan writing are those of Major Eawlinson. Hitherto 

 little had been accomplished beyond theirs/ step of the process, — 

 the determination of the values of the letters. Rask, 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 Major Eaw- 

 linson commenced his labours, in the country of the inscriptions ; 

 rediscovered 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 Behis- 

 tun, containing above 400 lines of cuneiform writing. This in- 

 scription had been copied, in part, by Major Rawlinson in 1837; 

 and a large portion of the translation was made by him, and com- 

 municated to the Royal Asiatic Society, in 1839. His philological 

 labours were suddenly interrupted in the following year, by active 

 duty at AflTghanistan ; 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 Median and Baby- 

 lonian), 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 contro- 



* This striking similarity of the Persian to the languages of the Shemitic 

 type, in its vocalic structure, has been recently drawn still closer by Dr. 

 Wall, in his able Paper on the different kinds of cuneiform writing, published 

 in the last volume of the Transactions of the Academy. 



