Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/227

and he professes to believe that interpretations based upon these emendations can inspire no confidence, and can only be regarded as an exercise of the imagination. He was surprised to find that his own interpretations, which he reached by 'proceeding in an entirely different way,' should have conducted, so far as they went, to precisely the same result: and he will not dispute that Grotefend is entitled to the priority of merit in detectiing the royal names.^[1] It does not appear that St. Martin got any farther himself, and we may be permitted to doubt whether he would have accomplished even this but for the labours of the predecessor he is so careful to disparage. When we come to inquire into 'the entirely different way' followed by St. Martin we find that in fact it is precisely the same as that with which we are already familiar. He worked on the same two inscriptions, the B and G of Niebuhr; he treats us over again to the analogy of the Sassanian inscriptions: the well-known phrase 'king of kings'; the genitive suffix; the position of the royal names; the evident relationship of father and son, and so on. Our original investigator contiinies to carry us over all the old around. He is struck by the similarity of the wedges in the word for *king' and in one of the royal names; he is guided by the Zend khsheio to the cuneiform words for 'king' and 'Xerxes,' and he tells us how dexterously he proceeded from this to the decipherment of the names of Darius and Hystaspes. In one name only he differed from his predecessor. It will be remembered that Grotefend deciphered 'Cyrus' in the Murgab inscription. St. Martin preferred to transliterate 'Houschousch' and to read 'Ochus'; ^[2] but in this single attempt at originality he turned out to be wrong and Grotefend right. He has spared us all the

1. Journal Asiatique 1823), pp. 08-70.
2. Ib, p. 85, note.