The Cuneatic Characters of Babylon, Assyria, and Persia. 99 



sian system. It was not till 1818, after the arrival of the 

 1 ' Rosetta stone " in England, on which Egyptian inscriptions 

 were accompanied by a Greek translation, that Dr. Young laid 

 the foundation of the method now adopted for the interpreta- 

 tion of Egyptian hieroglyphics ; and it was not till a few years 

 later that Ohampolhon developed his great system of interpreta- 

 tion, which has since been reduced to order and comparative 

 certainty by the labours of Lepsius, Bunsen, Birch, and others. 



Unaided, therefore, by the labours which have led to the 

 interpretation of the Egyptian method of writing, and long 

 before any successful attempt had been made to interpret any of 

 the Persian or Assyrian inscriptions of Central Asia, M. Grote- 

 fend, in 1808, first read off the names of Darius and Xerxes in the 

 cuneatic inscription of Behistun. When M. Grotefend deter- 

 mined to make an attempt to decipher those singular wedge- 

 shaped characters, all was utter darkness on the subject ; for 

 the assertion of Tyschen, of Rostock (1798), and afterwards 

 of Munten, of Copenhagen, that the proper mode of reading the 

 cuneatic character was from right to left, was only calculated to 

 mislead ; while the supposition of those authors that they were 

 real phonetic signs, though nearer the truth, was scarcely likely 

 to be more advantageous to the student, as, if the characters 

 were read backwards, no useful result was likely to be attained. 



The efforts of Grotefend were therefore perfectly unaided 

 by the labours of his predecessors in the field of research, which 

 he entered in the year 1800. The inscription which stimulated 

 his curiosity and led to those first steps which have proved the 

 basis of all subsequent discovery, was the one copied from the 

 rock of Behistun by the traveller Niebuhr -, who succeeded, by 

 the aid of a telescope, in making an extremely accurate copy of 

 it, although at a height of 300 feet — about as high (to make an 

 approximate comparison) as the cross of St. PauPs. This in- 

 scription, in which the writing, formed into three distinct 

 groups, bore conspicuous evidence of being written not only in 

 three distinct sets of characters, but in three distinct languages. 

 The three groups were, in fact, three copies of the same pro- 

 clamation, addressed to three different races all owning the 

 sovereignty of the Achcemenian dynasty of Persia. That the in- 

 scription belonged to the period of that dynasty, M. Grotefend 

 was led to conclude from a long course of historical study. 



In selecting one of the groups of writing as the subject of his 

 experiment, he fortunately pitched upon the one written in the 

 latest kind of character — the Persian — from which system nearly 

 all the pictorial and symbolic signs had disappeared, only the 

 phonetic or sound- expressing characters having been preserved, 

 and these reduced in number to about thirty or forty characters. 

 With these facts, however, M. Grotefend was unacquainted, as 



