Münter did not profess to be able to transliterate and still less to translate the inscriptions. His pretensions were limited to a very tentative endeavour to assign values to thirteen characters; and of these, four were not derived from Niebuhr’s list, and they turned out to be merely errors of the copyist. Having fixed the date of Persepolis and presumably therefore of the inscriptions, he inferred that the language must be closely allied to the Zend or the Pehlevi. He made a minute investigation of all the cuneiform inscriptions that were known in his day in Europe, and studied Kaempfer and Le Bruyn with the same attention as he studied Niebuhr. He accepted Niebuhr’s division of the Persepolitan inscriptions into three different kinds of writing; and he conjectured that the first was alphabetical, the second syllabic, and the third ideographic. The latter he thought bore some resemblance to Chinese. He saw that the language of the first column admitted of too many vowels to be closely related to the Pehlevi. He was, on the whole, disposed to think that the three columns contained translations of the same text into different languages, which might probably be Zend, Pehlevi and Parsi.[257] On this point, however, he did not consider the evidence sufficient to exclude all doubt. Indeed, he said the three columns might turn out to be in the same language, expressed in different characters.[258] He studied carefully the inscriptions that occur on vases, cylinders and bricks from Babylon, a few of which were then beginning to find their way to the European museums and the private collections of Sir W. Ouseley and Mr. Townley. The most important of these was upon the vase described by Caylus, which, in addition to the cuneiform inscription, was also inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics.[259] Tychsen pronounced the latter to be Phoenician, and he believed that the urn itself had formerly contained the ashes of his friend Aksak.[260] Münter made the more important remark that the characters on the Babylonian relics were nearly identical with that of the third Persepolitan column.
Meanwhile, he devoted his attention exclusively to the simplest form of writing, which is found in the first column; and he speedily recognised that the diagonal wedge which occurs so frequently was evidently intended to separate one word from the other. He compared it to the cypress tree that divides the groups in the procession on the sculptured staircase seen at Persepolis; and adds that in one of the old Hindu alphabets the words are similarly separated by a small oval.[261] This discovery, now announced for the first time, had till then escaped the observation of Tychsen, who, it will be remembered, fancied he found three different words enclosed within the same diagonals. In order to find values for the cuneiform letters, he had recourse to a twofold method. He sought out the signs that recurred the most frequently and that were the most uniformly repeated in the same word, for he concluded that these would naturally turn out to be vowels. He soon identified three in particular (𐎠, 𐎹, 𐏂) that were constantly recurring: the first in almost every word, and occasionally several times in the same word.[262] In the inscriptions analysed, he found that the first was repeated 183 times, the second 146, and the third 107 times.[263] He then proceeded to compare the forms of these letters with those of the vowels in other kindred languages; and he thought he discerned a strong resemblance between the first and third in the Zend character for a and in the Armenian for o.[264] He could not find a letter anywhere that resembled the second. However, he observed another cuneiform sign that also recurred with great frequency (𐎶), and which might easily bear comparison with the Zend letter for a long.[265] A likeness between a defective cuneiform sign (
) and the Zend letter for i gave him a fourth vowel. Similar considerations led him to assign the values of ou w ii y to another sign (𐏁), a conjecture that turned out to be less happy than that of Tychsen, who accidentally hit upon its correct value, s. Münter had now pointed out six signs he thought expressed vowels (viz. 𐎠 e or a, 𐎹?, 𐎡 o, 𐎶 a,
i, 𐏁 ou, &c.). The second he dropped out of his alphabet, for after careful search he could find no letter in any other alphabet to give him a clue to its value. The fifth was not a genuine letter; and of the four that remained two were, as he surmised, vowels (Nos. 1 and 3). The other two were both consonants. Only one of the former—the first, a—was found to be correct; but it had already been recognised by Tychsen. The other—the o—was afterwards found to be i. He also identified seven other signs with the consonants p, kh (two), r, r strong, s and b, which he obtained by the simple process of comparing them with other letters found in Zend, Armenian and Georgian, to which they had ‘no small similarity.’[266] Three of the signs he selected were not genuine; and of the four others the only one that was correct was b (𐎲). His efforts in this direction were thus limited to finding correct values for two signs (a and b).[267]
Like Tychsen, he was attracted by the frequent repetition of the word of seven letters. In one short inscription it may be found five times, and it is repeated at least twenty-eight times in the inscriptions copied by Niebuhr. He also observed that the same seven letters occur frequently with a terminal addition of three or four other letters, and this word is immediately preceded by the simpler form in seven letters. He concluded that the additional letters must be an inflexion: not, as Tychsen thought, an independent word, such as ‘pius’ or ‘perfectus.’ Münter confessed his inability to read the word, but he regarded it as the key of the whole alphabet.[268] His first impression corresponded with that of Tychsen, in so far as he supposed it to be a proper name.[269] But its recurrence so frequently seemed to discredit this supposition, particularly as no name of any king of the Achaemenian dynasty appeared to fit into seven letters.[270] Then he assumed it must be a title, possibly ‘king of kings,’ and in that case he clearly saw that the preceding word must be the name of the king. Here he had got on the right track, for the word does in fact signify ‘king,’ and the one that precedes it, at the beginning of the inscriptions, was afterwards found to be the royal name; but he ultimately rejected this explanation, because in Niebuhr’s Table A it followed a word of two letters, which could not possibly express the name of any of the Achaemenian kings. The passage he refers to happens to be erroneously copied, for a diagonal wedge has been introduced where there should be a letter, and Münter was misled by this unfortunate mistake. He thus abandoned an hypothesis that, if persevered in, might have led to some result. He may also have thought that the word of seven letters was too long to be simply ‘king,’ and consequently he made the unfortunate guess that it signified ‘king of kings.’ This assumption stood greatly in the way of his arriving at the correct meaning. The truth is that the two words already referred to as occurring together are required to make up the signification of ‘king of kings,’ the second being merely a repetition of the first with the addition of the genitive termination, corresponding to ‘rex’ and ‘regum.’ Münter could derive no assistance from a Zend grammar, for at that time none had been written.[271] What information he collected by his own study afforded him no help in the present matter. According to his transliteration, he knew three out of the four letters with which the longer word terminates: these were e; an unknown sign, possibly a j, followed by ea; but Zend could not guide him to the signification of the inflexion ‘ejea.’ The transliteration was at fault, for the four letters are really ‘anam,’ which corresponds exactly to the Zend genitive plural. To be thus baffled when so near the truth is a curious illustration of how completely even an exceptionally keen inquirer may fail to recognise what might seem self-evident. With the very phrase ‘king of kings’ constantly present to his mind, it never struck him that two words occurring one after the other, and differing in only what he recognised to be an inflexion, were precisely the ‘king of kings’ he was in search of.[272]
In this dilemma De Sacy suggested that the word or words were probably a religious formula, such as an invocation of God or the Ferhouer, and this opinion gained confirmation by its occurrence on cylinders and bricks which Münter had no doubt were inscribed with magical incantations. He was thus led far away from the true solution.[273]
Münter made a careful study of the words that showed a change of termination, and he drew up a list of seven of the most common inflexions.[274] The two last in this list are the ones added so often to the enigmatical word he vainly sought to read, and which are, as we now know, the signs of the genitive singular and plural.