JOURNAL 



ASIATIC SOCIETY 



Points in the History of the Greek, and Indo-Scythian Kings 

 in Bactria, Cabul, and India, as illustrated by decyphering 

 the ancient legends on their coins. By Christian Lassen, 

 Bonn, 1838. 1 



We now proceed to apply the fourteen letters, thus denned, 

 to the attributive epithets, met with on the legends. From 

 this examination we shall derive some new letters, with which 

 the names of the kings could not furnish us, and we may perhaps 

 succeed by this in obtaining a more exact insight into the cha- 

 racter of the language. But let us first sum up the results 

 of the previous inquiry. 



The fourteen characters, above discussed, appear to me to 

 be sufficiently confirmed (to aid us) in further decyphering. 

 Twelve among them are consonants, which, however, do not 

 enable us yet to define the system of consonants in the lan- 

 guage. We therefore resort to the vowels. We have discovered 

 the two simple vowels a and ee: the first, when initial in a 

 syllable, is expressed by an independent symbol, placed in 

 the line itself; when following a consonant, it is not expres- 

 sed by an independent sign, but included in the consonant. 

 There is no peculiar sign for the long a. The independent 

 figure of e is not yet known to us ; preceded by a consonant, 

 it is denoted by a mark on the consonant, and it has like- 

 wise no peculiar sign, when long. It serves to express the 

 1 Continued from p. 276. vol. ix. 



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