Dárayavush . Khsháyathiya . vazraka . Khsháyathiya . Khsháyathi-yánám . Khsháyathiya . dahyunám . Vishtáspahya . putra . Hakháma-nishiya . hya . imam . tacharam . akunaush.

That is to say:—

“Darius, the great king, the king of kings, the king of the pro­vinces, the son of Vishtáspa, the Achæmenian, who made this temple.”

Grotefend's transcription and translation were as follows:—

Dârheûsch . Khshêhiôh . eghré . Khshêhiôh . Khshêhiohêtchâo . Khshehioh . Dâhûtchâo . Gòschtâspâhê . bûn . âkhêotchôschôh . Âh . ôoo . Môro . êzûtchûsch.

“Darius, rex fortis, rex regum, rex Daharum (filius) Hystaspis, stirps mundi rectoris. In constellatione mascula. Môro <text in Greek script omitted> Ized.”

Yet, though Grotefend failed to accomplish all he attempted, few would have ventured even to attempt what he accom- Estimation of Grotefend's achievement. plished; and his method, and the discoveries to which it led, formed the starting-point of the further researches which ultimately resulted in the complete solution of this difficult enigma. De Sacy, whose discoveries had prepared the way for those of Grotefend, was the first to recognise the immense value of his results, and to make them more widely known, while the rival system of interpretation proposed by Saint-Martin met with but little acceptance.

*

The next great advances in decipherment were made almost simultaneously in the years 1836-1837 by Lassen, Burnouf, Work of Rawlinson, Burnouf, and Lassen. and Rawlinson, the last of whom, working inde­pendently in Persia, without knowledge of what had been effected by Grotefend, succeeded in reading the names of Arsháma, Ariyárámna, Chaishpish, and Hakhámanish in the first paragraph of the great Behistun inscription of Darius. Burnouf had already made use of his knowledge of Sanskrit to elucidate the Avesta, both by the comparative method and by the use of Neriosengh's Sanskrit translation; and he now turned from the completion of his great work on the Yasna* to an examination of the Persian cuneiform inscriptions, for the study of which the labours of the unfortu­nate traveller Schultz had furnished him with fresh materials from Alvand and Ván.* His work was to some extent thrown into the shade by the more brilliant results of Lassen; but, besides reading the name of the Supreme Being, Ahuramazda, and some other words, and pointing out that the language of the inscriptions, though akin to that of the Avesta, was not identical with it, and that the writing did not, as a rule, express the short vowels except when they were initial, he first called attention to the list of names of countries contained in the great inscription of Darius. This last indication, communicated to Lassen in the summer of 1835, was fruitfully utilised by the latter for the fuller and more accurate determination of the values of the letters, and the demonstration of the existence of an inherent short a (as in Sanskrit) in many of the con­sonants, so that, for example, S.P.R.D. was shown by him to stand for Sparda. Within the next four years (up to 1840) Lassen's results had been further extended, elucidated, and corrected by Beer and Jacquet, while new materials collected by the late Claude James Rich, British Resident at Baghdad, had been rendered available by publication, and Westergaard had brought back fresh and more accurate copies of the Persepolitan inscriptions.

It is unnecessary in this place to trace further the progress of this branch of Persian studies, or to do more than mention the Further progress of the study of Old Persian. later discoveries of Loftus (1852) and Dieulafoy (1884) at Susa; the photographs taken at Persepolis in 1876 and the following years by Stolze, and published at Berlin in 1882 in two volumes entitled Persepolis; and the additional light thrown on the Old Persian language and script by such scholars as Bang, Bartholomae, Bollensen, Foy, Halévy, Hitzig, Hübschmann, Kern, Müller, Ménant, Sayce, Thumb, and others. Nor need the wild theories as to the talismanic character of the inscrip­tions propounded by M. le Comte de Gobineau in his Traité des écritures cunéiformes (Paris, 1864) detain us even for a moment. A few words must, however, be said as to Oppert's ingenious theory as to the origin and nature of the script.

From the Old Persian character the Assyrian differs in one most essential respect, in spite of the superficial resemblance of Oppert's theory as to the origin of the Persian cuneiform alphabet. these two cuneiform scripts. The former, as we have seen, is truly alphabetical (the alphabet con­sisting of forty-one symbols, whereof four are logograms, or abbreviations for the constantly-occurring words “Ahuramazda,” “King,” “Land,” and “Earth,” while one is a mark of punctuation to separate the words from one another); the latter is a syllabary, or rather an immense collection of ideograms or logograms, comparable to the Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphics. An Assyrian graphic symbol usually connotes, in other words, an idea, not the sound representing that idea, and has, therefore, only a casual relation to its phonetic equivalent, so that, for instance, an ideogram from the older Akkadian could continue to be used in Assyrian with the same meaning but with a different phonetic value. Oppert's theory is that the Old Persian letters, invented about the time of the fall of the Medic and rise of the Persian (Achæmenian) power, were derived from the Assyrian ideograms as follows. An Assyrian ideogram was given its Persian phonetic equivalent, or, in other words, read as a Persian ideogram; this ideogram was then simplified and used as a letter having the value of the initial sound of the Persian word; and this process was continued until enough graphic symbols, or letters, had been formed to represent all the Persian phonetic elements. Thus the Persians, in the sixth century before Christ, made this great advance from a system of ideograms (probably hieroglyphic or pictorial in their first origin) to a real alphabet; but their analysis stopped short at the separation of a short vowel following a consonant, and therefore they employed separate characters, for example, for the syllables ka, ku; ga, gu; ja, ji; da, di, du; ma, mi, mu, &c.

We see here another illustration of the extent to which Persia, from very early times, has been under Semitic influence, first Assyrian, then Aramaic, and lastly Arabian. The Assyrian influence is as unmistakable in the sculptures of Persepolis Assyrian in­fluence on Persian. and Behistun as in the inscriptions; and, as Spiegel has well shown (Eranische Alterthumskunde, vol. i, pp. 446-485), it can be traced with equal clearness in the domain of religion, probably also of politics, social organisation, jurisprudence, and war. “The great King, the King of kings, the King in Persia, the King of the Provinces,” was heir in far more than mere style and title to “the great King, the King of Assyria,” with whose might Rabshakeh threatened Hezekiah. And this relation perhaps explains the enigma presented by the Huzvárish element in Pahlawí which so long misled students as to the true character of the latter.

Why did the Pahlawí scribe, fully acquainted with the alpha­betical use of the Pahlawí character, write the old title “King Discussion of a peculiarity of the Pahlawí script. of kings” as Malkán-malká when (as we know from the contemporary historian Ammianus Mar-cellinus) his soldiers and people hailed him (as they still hail their monarch) as Sháhán-sháh—the later equivalent of the old Khsháyathiya Khsháyathiyánám? Why did he write bisrá for meat and lahmá for bread when (as we learn from the author of the Fihrist, and other well-informed writers of the early Muhammadan period) he read these Aramaic words into Persian as gúsht and nán? To us it seems unnatural enough, though even we do pretty much the same thing when we read “i.e.” as “that is,” “e.g.” as “for example,” and “&” or “&” as “and.” Yet how much easier and more natural was such a procedure to a people accustomed to scripts wholly composed of ideograms and symbols appealing directly to the intelligence without invoking aid from the auditory sense? If the Assyrian adopted the Akkadian logogram connoting the idea of “father,” and read for it his own and not the original foreign equivalent, why should the Persian hesitate to treat the Aramaic words malká, bisrá, lahmá and the like, in the same way, as though they too were mere ideograms rather than groups of letters? The general use of Pahlawí, it is true, belongs, as we have already seen, to a time when Assyria had long passed away, viz., the Sásánian period (A.D. 226-640), and the early Muhammadan times imme­diately succeeding it, but it has been traced back to the third and fourth centuries before Christ, and may in all likelihood have existed at a yet earlier date. In the essentially conserva­tive East there is nothing very wonderful in this; and the siyáq, universally used for keeping accounts even at the present day in Persia, presents a somewhat analogous phenomenon, for the symbols used therein instead of the ordinary Arabic numerals are in reality mutilated and abbreviated forms of the Arabic names of the different numbers, a fact which the Persian accountant who uses them often forgets and occasionally does not know.