The Progress and Prospects of Oriental Discovery [pp. 476-493]

1875.] ORIENTAL DISCOVERY. 483
scriptions under his eye he was attracted to their study. He
was aware that Grotefend had rather guessed than deciphered
the names of several of the Ach~menian sovereigns, and commencing, therefore, as Burnouf had done in Europe, with the investigation of the Hamadan inscriptions, he succeeded in reading the names of Darius, Xerxes, and Hystaspes. At Behistun,
from which he was not far distant, he carefully copied the magnificent page of history which the Ach~menides had before
sculptured on the rocks. Here he succeeded in identifying
several new names, and determining the value of eighteen
characters, before he learned of the progress in the same direction that had been made by Lassen and Burnouf.
In 1837, he completed his copy of the Behistun inscription,
and in the winter of that year he sent to the Asiatic Society
of London, a translation of the first two paragraphs of it.
These included the titles and the genealogy of Darius. In
1839, the entire inscription had been transcribed and translated,
but no copy of it reached Europe till 1843, and it was not till
1846 that a copy of it appeared in the Journal of the Asiatic
Society of London, while the analysis and commentary were
not published till 1849. Sir Henry Rawlinson frankly admitted
that his earliest essays contained numerous errors, and that his
after progress was largely due to his study of Burnouf's commentary on the Ja~na, which had been transmitted to him
in Persia.
But attention was drawn also to the other forms of the trilingual inscriptions. Egyptian discovery had familiarized scholars with the idea of the presentation of the same facts or statements in the different languages of an empire, and it would
readily be surmised that the Persian or Aryan text that has
been partially translated, was only another version of the two
other inscriptions grouped with it. As the Persian empire embraced Medes, who held the second position in national rank,
and the Assyrians who were subject, it was inferred that the
second inscription of each group was Median, and the third Assyrian.
In i8~, M. Westergaard, returning from a journey to the
East, presented his views in accordance with this inference, as
bearing upon the Median texts. In part accepted, and in part
criticized, by Dr. Hincks, of Dublin (1846), they more gener