| 𐎧 | · | 𐏁 | · | 𐎠 | · | 𐎹 | · | 𐎰 | · | 𐎡 | · | 𐎹. |
| kh | sh | e | — | — | o | —. |
The Zend word for ‘king,’ ‘khsheio,’ corresponds almost exactly to the form thus reached,[306] and it enabled him to add i conjecturally to his alphabet (𐎰). No explanation of the third letter in ‘Xerxes’ had yet presented itself; but it nearly resembled the fourth and seventh in the word for ‘king,’ and the fourth in the signs for ‘Darius’; and Grotefend presumed—erroneously, as it turned out—that they were the same. He observed that in Zend the aspirate is sometimes left out, and he thought the Zend kh sh e i o might very well be supposed occasionally to take an h. He accordingly conjectured that this was the value of the unknown letter, and he read kh sh e h i o h for ‘king,’ kh sh h e r sh e for ‘Xerxes,’ and D a r h e u sh for ‘Darius.’ It was not, therefore, till this point had been reached that he completed ‘Darius’ by the addition of h. He was led to decide for e as the value of the fifth letter, 𐎺, by the pronunciation of the name of Darius in Hebrew.[307] The form for Xerxes must have seemed at first sight rather disconcerting; but by the time the Appendix was republished, in 1824, Grotefend was able to announce that his conjecture was fully confirmed by Champollion, who spelt out the hieroglyphics for Xerxes on the Vase of Caylus to read Kh sh h a r sh a.
The result of his labours on the three proper names was that he arrived at the values of thirteen cuneiform signs: G o sh t a s p from Goshtasp or Hystaspes; D r e u from Darius, and kh and h from Xerxes. Of these thirteen letters, nine turned out ultimately to be correct; but the a had been previously recognised by Tychsen and by Münter: so that Grotefend now added eight correct values to the cuneiform alphabet, viz. sh t s p—d r u—kh.
He did not, however, rest satisfied with this achievement. He sought to transliterate and translate the remainder of the two inscriptions, but in this his fortune failed him. He does not explain in his own Memoir the method he pursued, but de Sacy has given us an insight into the process which no doubt rests on good authority.[308] We may suppose that he kept the Pehlevi inscription before him and continued to be guided by its analogy. He accordingly expected to find that the word after ‘king’ would express some honorary epithet corresponding to ‘magnus’ in the example before him. It was in fact composed of four letters of which he already knew the first and third, e — r —. The nearest word in Zend to suit his purpose was e gh r e, ‘strong.’ He therefore considered himself entitled to add a gh and another e to his list—both wrong.
So also in the position in the cuneiform where he should expect to find a word corresponding to the one translated ‘stirps,’ in the Pehlevi he observed a word of three letters of which he knew the first two, p, u —. He hit upon a word in Pehlevi—bun—that had precisely the signification of ‘stirps.’[309] So he gave his p the alternate value of b, and added n to his list. These also were both wrong. His attention was next turned to the two different inflexions which had been remarked at the end of ‘king.’ In the one consisting of three signs, he already knew the two last, — h a, and, for some reason we have not found explained, he assumed the first (𐏃) was a second sign for a. In this addition to his alphabet he was nearly right, for the letter has the value of h before a, i, u. In the second inflexion of four letters the first and third signs are the same, his e or a; and he learned from Anquetil that the Zend has a genitive ending e tsch a o. This was sufficient to add tsch and another o to his alphabet—both wrong. Here, then, are six more letters, gh, e, n, a, tsch and o, to be added to the thirteen already found, making nineteen in all. There are twenty-five letters in the two inscriptions given by De Sacy in 1803; and there is no doubt that before that time Grotefend had, with two exceptions, completed his alphabet, as it is found in the Appendix to Heeren in 1815.[310] According to it we see that he had already attempted to assign values to thirty-seven cuneiform signs, three of which are not to be found in Niebuhr’s list and are due to defective copying. Two others occur in Niebuhr’s list, but are also defective (e,
, and r, letter No. 8), so that there remain thirty-two genuine signs for which he has now found values. Several signs are, however, allotted to express the same sound. Thus he gives three signs for e (Nos. 3 [defective], 4 and 10) besides the sign for e or a which he generally transliterates e. He also gives three signs for o (Nos. 12, 16 and 23). It was afterwards found that these signs, which he took to be synonymous, are very far from being so: for example, not one of his three signs for o has that value, being respectively i, ch(a), and m(a). Indeed, among all the additions we are now considering he only succeeded in arriving at two correct values, 𐎳, f (No. 39) and 𐏃, a (No. 41), if indeed the second may be allowed to pass. Its true value is the aspirate h. But, as we shall afterwards see, it takes an inherent a, and it is very commonly used to express the sound ‘Ha,’ the vowel a being altogether omitted. In an inquiry of this kind it is necessary to admit approximate values as correct; and in the present case the value allotted to this sign by Grotefend ultimately led to the important identification of the word ‘Achaemenian.’ Here the first syllable, ‘Ach,’ is represented by the two signs for h and kh; and before it was known that the first letter had the sound of ‘Ha’ it was a comparatively slight error to drop the aspirate and set it down as a. We have therefore added this letter to the number of Grotefend’s correct discoveries. He also observed that the word for ‘king’ is often represented by an ideogram (𐏋) which, like the word, is subject to inflexions. This discovery he, however, generously attributes to Tychsen;[311] but we have not found it in the ‘Lucubratio.’ De Sacy was not aware of the origin attributed to it, and he has given the credit entirely to Grotefend himself.[312]
Soon after the completion of the alphabet, but still before the appearance of the Appendix in 1815, he was induced to change the value of two of the signs.[313] One of these he now fixed correctly, k (25), and the other approximately sr (40).
It will be recollected that Sir William Ouseley visited Murgab in 1811 and made a copy of the inscription that is found repeated there several times. His book did not appear till 1821; but Grotefend had the advantage of seeing a copy of the inscription in time to include it in his Memoir. According to the alphabet as it then stood, the transliteration would render z u sch u d sh;[314] but if we follow his own account, he saw reasons, which he does not explain, to change the first letter from z to k and the third from sch to sr; with the result that he produced k u sr u e sch, which he read ‘Kurus.’ He does not mention the change of the d into e, but a more correct copy of the same inscription showed that that sign did not exist in the original, which consists of five signs only. After he had arrived at this result, he tells us, he came across the French translation of Morier’s first Memoir, published in 1813, where, it will be recollected, that acute traveller suggested that Murgab was Pasargadae, the city of Cyrus.[315] This confirmation of his own studies was certainly satisfactory, though the sequence of events as he describes them is remarkable. Grotefend had now contributed eight correct values from the inscriptions B and G, two from the Murgab inscriptions, and two from other sources—that is, twelve in all (if we admit the sr, really r before u, and the a which is h before a, i, u). In addition to these the a and b of Münter were known, though Grotefend erroneously changed the b into v; and hence in 1815 fourteen correct values had been reached.
Grotefend was now able to transliterate after his own fashion all the inscriptions in the first style of writing. It was quite a different matter to translate the mass of strange words that began to pour in upon him. He had to seek for analogous words in Zend or Pehlevi, or in other languages he considered akin; and he was assured by many candid friends that this was an undertaking for which he was incompetent. In the excitement of the first discovery he was much more reckless in this matter than he afterwards became, when he had more experience of the difficulties of the task. We find that he contributed the following translation of the B and G inscriptions to the ‘Göttingen Literary Gazette,’ August 1802. B: ‘Darius, the valiant King, the King of Kings, the Son of Hystaspes, the Successor of the Ruler of the World, in the constellation of Moro.’ This figures in De Sacy in 1803 as follows: ‘Darius, rex fortis, rex regum, rex populorum, Hystaspis stirps, mundi rectoris in constellatione mascula Moro τοῦ Ized.’ For G we have: ‘Xerxes, the valiant King, the King of Kings, the Son of Darius the King, the successor of the ruler of the world.’[316]