Burnouf of Paris, corrected many of the remaining mistakes of Grotefend, and nearly completed the decipherment of the old Persian alphabet. These two writers were profound students of Zend, especially the latter, who had been enabled to make great advances on the road opened by Anquetil-Duperron, and whose Commentary on the Yasna marked a new stage in the progress of Zend studies. Lassen, accepting much of Grotefend's work, took as the starting-point of his new decipherments an inscription on the terrace of Persepolis, published by Niebuhr, which, as he inferred from the letters which he already knew, contained a number of geographical names, the appellations of the peoples who, as represented on the sculptured staircase, came to pay tribute to the King of Persia: such a list, in fact, as Darius had inscribed on the pillars by the Bosphorus; and by comparing with these names the lists of nations subject to the Persians given us by Herodotus and Strabo, he found out almost all the letters not yet correctly discovered by Grotefend. The inscription which Lassen selected is now finally translated as follows:

"I am Darius the great king, king of kings, king of these many regions, son of Hystaspes, the Achæmenid.

"Thus says Darius the king: By the grace of Ahuramazda these are the lands that I rule with my Persian host, that feared me and brought me tribute the inhabitants of Susiana, the Medes, the Babylonians, the Arabs, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Cappadocians, the Sparda, the Greeks of the mainland and of the islands; and these lands in the East, the Sagartians, the Parthians, the Zaraka, Aria, Bactria, Sogdiana, Chorasmia, the Sattagydes, Arachosia, India, Gandara, the Saka, and the Maka.'"

It will easily be understood how by taking the twelve letters discovered by Grotefend, and trying to make out with their help the names of the nations mentioned by Herodotus and Strabo, Lassen, with his knowledge of the forms of Sanscrit and Zend, was able to discover many new letters of the old Persian alphabet.

Burnouf worked upon two inscriptions of a different sort, lately copied on Mount Elvend, near Hamadan, the ancient Ecbatana, in Media, by the unfortunate Dr. Schulz, who was murdered on his way home. It had been supposed by the natives that if any man could find the key to the interpretation of these mysterious. characters on the rock, the mountain would be shaken from the top to the bottom, and an immense treasure would be disclosed; but it does not appear that all this took place when Burnouf published his version, which simply contains the name and titles of Darius and Xerxes, with the ascription of praise to Ahuramazda, such as we have seen on the walls of Persepolis. In a work like the present it would be of no use to examine every step which these decipherers made, and the methods, often intelligible only to philologists, by which they formed their inferences. Burnouf's own description of the general character of his method is as follows:

"There is only one scientific method for the determination of an unknown character: all the words in which it occurs must be collected and compared, and the values of the alphabet not yet represented by known characters [i.e., through Grotefend's work] must be applied to it one after the other, until meanings which suit all the cases are obtained."

One great result of the labours of Lassen and Burnouf was the discovery that the old Persian language of the time of Darius and Xerxes was by no means identical with the Zend, as earlier decipherers had supposed, but stood in the relation of a sister dialect to the sacred language of the Parsees. The work of the two great scholars was soon subjected to fruitful criticism by various Orientalists; Beer corrected three false values given to letters of the old Persian alphabet; Jacquet discovered two mistakes of the same sort; much was done towards the interpretation of the language and the explanation of the grammatical forms by Holtzmann and Benfey. Since Niebuhr new material has been given to decipherers in the fresh inscriptions copied by Ker Porter, Rich, Schulz, Westergaard, and Loftus.

But the most important work was done by our own countryman. Sir Henry Rawlinson had begun the study of the cuneiform inscriptions in 1835, while living in the East, and he appears to have worked at first quite independently upon them; he had heard rumours of Grotefend's discoveries, but no details; and in his examination of the tablets of Elvend, near Hamadan, found the names of Hystaspes, Darius, and Xerxes, without any assistance from the labours of the Hanoverian professor.* In 1837 he copied for the first time the great inscription on the rock of Behistun, described by Otter and Ker Porter. Meanwhile, he had an opportunity of comparing the work of other

*Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. X., p. 4.

European scholars with his own, by studying the memoirs of Burnouf and Lassen. In 1838 he received Burnouf's Commentary on the Yasna, of which he says:

"To this work I owe in a great measure the success of my translations; for, although I conjecture the Zend to be a later language than that of the inscriptions, upon the débris of which it was indeed probably refined and systematized, yet I believe it to approach nearer to the Persian of the ante-Alexandrian ages than to any other dialect of the family, except the Vedic Sanskrit, that is available to modern research. At the same time, also, that I acquired through the luminous critique of M. Burnouf an insight into the peculiarities of Zend expression, and by this means obtained a general knowledge of the grammatical structure of the language of the inscriptions, I had the good fortune to procure copies of the Persepolitan tablets which had been published by Niebuhr, Le Brun, and Porter, and which had hitherto formed the chief basis of continental study.".

In 1847 Sir H. Rawlinson published the great inscription of Behistun, nearly two hundred lines, which had for so many years been the object of his studies, and thus supplied large additional material for students of the old Persian language; the edition was accompanied by a translation. Since that time little more has been done. M. Oppert explained a few characters that were still unknown, and he and Herr Spiegel have added to the accuracy of the interpretations, and to the explanation of the grammatical forms. The inscriptions of the Achæmenian kings of Persia in the palaces of Persepolis, on the tomb of Naksh-i-Rustam, on the rock of Elvend, on the palace of Susa, and on the monument of Suez, have all been deciphered and translated.

* Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. X., p. 8, 1847.