0 
to their decipherment and interpretation with some reasonable 
hope of success. Two northern professors, Tychsen, of Ros¬ 
tock, and Miinter, of Copenhagen, led the way; they did not 
advance far, but they had struck the right path. They had 
ascertained that the inscriptions were alphabetical, that the 
words are divided by an oblique character, and the letters by a 
point, and that they are to be read from left to right, like the 
Indian and European alphabets, not from right to left like the 
Semitic. This was important, as an indication that it was not 
in Syriac, Phoenician, or Hebrew that the key to the meaning 
was to he sought. They had also pointed out the probability 
that a certain group of characters stood for King. It is found 
above, or beside, the large figures seen on the walls of Perse- 
polis, everything about which, the colossal size, the umbrella 
held over their heads, the fiyhap in the hand of the attendant, 
the sitting posture, while all around are standing or bowing, 
points them out as royal personages. Further, this group was 
followed sometimes by another, exactly corresponding with it, 
except by the addition of some characters at the end. It was 
natural to conclude that the second was a modified form of the 
first—a tense, if the first was a verb, a case, if it was a noun. 
That together they should represent King of Kings was ren¬ 
dered probable by the inscriptions of the monarchs of what is 
called the Second Persian Kingdom, the Sassanidee, which are 
accompanied by a Greek translation, and in which the name of 
the sovereign with that of his fiither is followed by King of 
Kings. 
At this point the inquiry was taken up by Grotefend, to whom 
we owe the analysis of the alphabet, and the first successful 
attempt to read the inscriptions into the words of a known 
language. His mode of proceeding was necessarily tentative, 
beginning with an assumption, the truth of which had to be 
proved, like any other hypothesis, by its solving the phseno- 
mena. Consulting the succession of the Persian Kings, he 
concluded that the father and son could not be Cyrus and 
Cambvses, because the names did not begin with the same let- 
ters. Darius and Xerxes seemed the most probable names, 
and it was in favour of this supposition, that in the group 
