The year 1838 was memorable not only for the essays of Beer and Jacquet, but also for the appearance of Major Rawlinson among the number of cuneiform scholars. We have already related how his attention was directed to the subject while he was stationed at Kermanshah during the years 1835-7, and that he succeeded in making a transcript of two hundred lines, or about one half of the great inscription at Behistun. When he first began the study, in 1835, he was aware that Grotefend had previously ‘deciphered some names of the early sovereigns of the house of Achaemenes,’ but he could not obtain a copy of the alphabet, nor ascertain from which inscription it had been formed. Rawlinson began upon the two inscriptions he had copied at Elvend, and ‘when he proceeded to compare them, he found that the characters coincided throughout, except in certain particular groups, and it was only reasonable to suppose that the groups which were thus brought out and individualised must represent proper names. There were but three of these distinct groups in the two inscriptions,’ and they were arranged so as ‘to indicate a genealogical succession,’ no doubt ‘belonging to three consecutive generations of the Persian monarchy; and it so happened that the first three names, of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes, which I applied at hazard to the three groups proved to answer and were in fact the true identifications.’[494] This ingenious process was precisely the same as that already followed by Grotefend, which we have described in detail. Rawlinson appears, however, to have divined the method independently, though the application of the three names to the three groups was no doubt suggested to him by what he had heard reported by Grotefend’s discovery. He next turned his attention to the first two paragraphs of the Behistun inscription, and by the same means he detected five other proper names, which he identified with Arsames, Ariaramnes, Teispes, Achaemenes and Persia. The recognition of these eight proper names yielded him the values of eighteen cuneiform characters, which later study showed he had correctly identified.[495]

Such was the progress he had made down to the autumn of 1836 by his own independent research. Shortly afterwards he received copies of Heeren and Klaproth’s writings, where at length he found the alphabets of Grotefend and St. Martin explained; but he writes: ‘Far from deriving any assistance from either of these sources, I could not doubt that my knowledge of the character ... was much in advance of their respective and in some measure conflicting systems of interpretation.’[496] He had indeed some cause for congratulation, for he had discovered eighteen correct values, while Grotefend was only successful in twelve, though, with the two from Münter, he had at his disposal fourteen in all. St. Martin only made out two letters by his own ingenuity, and disposed altogether of not more than ten.[497]

Having thus greater means at his disposal, Rawlinson succeeded, in the course of 1837, in arriving at an approximate translation of the first two paragraphs of the Behistun inscription, ‘which,’ he says, ‘would have been wholly inexplicable according to the systems of interpretation adopted either by Grotefend or Saint Martin,’ the only ones with which he was at that time acquainted. By the end of the year his paper was complete, and on January 1, 1838, he forwarded the translation of the two paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic Society, where it was received on March 14. In April a copy was submitted to the Asiatic Society in Paris, where it excited great interest, and Rawlinson was at once elected an Honorary Member. Steps were at the same time taken to put him in possession of the latest results of European investigation. M. Burnouf sent him his ‘Mémoire’ of 1836. M. Mohl shortly afterwards forwarded him a copy of the Yaçna. Sir Gore Ouseley, the Vice-President of the Asiatic Society, introduced him to the notice of Lassen, who wrote to him from Bonn in August (1838) to acquaint him with his alphabet and with the corrections made since its appearance in 1836 ‘as well by others as by myself.’[498] With the valuable assistance thus placed at his disposal, Rawlinson continued to work at his translations during the remainder of 1838 and till the autumn of 1839. So early as January 1839, we learn from Mrs. Rich that he had already succeeded in deciphering a large part of the two hundred lines.[499] He derived the greatest assistance from Burnouf’s ‘Commentaire sur le Yaçna.’ ‘To this work,’ he says, ‘I owe in great measure the success of my translations.’ During his stay at Bagdad in 1839 he was in correspondence with Lassen and Burnouf, who informed him of the progress recently made by Beer and Jacquet. Rawlinson, on his part, was rapidly completing his alphabet, and he lost no time in making his friends acquainted with the result. He was surprised to find that the European scholars just about kept pace with his own progress, and that he had little to learn from them, though perhaps he might be in a position to add something to their knowledge. He observed that Lassen’s newest version of the alphabet ‘coincided in all essential points with my own,’ but that his labours ‘have been of no farther assistance to me than in adding one new letter to my alphabet and in confirming opinions which were sometimes conjectural.’[500] Rawlinson had indeed succeeded in working out the whole of the alphabet by his own unaided ingenuity, so that he was accustomed to say that there were only two letters he owed to others: k, 𐎣 No. 4, which he learned from Burnouf, and y, 𐎹 No. 27, from Lassen, who got it from Jacquet.[501]

On the other hand, his contributions to the general advance of the study were necessarily limited. By the time he became known to European scholars they had on their part advanced so far that only four letters of Niebuhr’s list remained for which a correct or approximate value had not been found. These were:

19𐎮k of Lassen,
28𐎩z of Jacquet,
32𐎪g’ of Lassen,
33𐎸g of Lassen.

The appearance of Rawlinson did not, therefore, take place till after the difficulty of the decipherment had been almost completely surmounted without his assistance. When his correspondence with Burnouf and Lassen began, in the autumn of 1838, he was, however, still in time to rectify two out of the four incorrect values.

He found 32 (𐎪) in the name of Cambyses, where it occurs as the fourth sign, which he transliterated correctly as j; Kₐbujᵢy. Hincks afterwards read the sign zh(i) and Oppert z(j)i; but both these sounds have since yielded to the one proposed by Rawlinson, and it now appears as j before i. But Rawlinson’s most striking success was with the last letter, 33 (𐎸), another g of Lassen. In his letter to Burnouf, he proposed to substitute m.[502] It is the initial letter in the name Lassen read ‘Gudrâha’ and thought indicated the Gordyaei. Rawlinson suggested the name was M’udraya, and should be compared with the Phoenician ‘Mŭdra’ and the Hebrew ‘Mitsraim,’ and signified, in fact, Egypt. Both of these emendations were, however, rejected by Lassen.[503]

There is another sign which came under discussion at this time. It will be recollected that we have assigned 13 (𐎡) to Lassen, who gave it the approximate value of t. Rawlinson, however, suggested to Burnouf that its true value is not t but tr. In this, however, he had been anticipated, as we have seen, by Grotefend in 1837, who suggested thr.[504] It is admitted that it is impossible to distinguish between the comparative merits of tr and thr;[505] and as Rawlinson probably knew nothing of Grotefend’s ‘Beiträge’ at the time, he may be credited with having discerned the correct sound of the sign.[506]

Then, as on subsequent occasions, his great merit lay in the superiority of his translations. He was already in a position to criticise Lassen’s efforts in this department with some severity. He thought that Lassen had ‘in many cases misunderstood both the etymology of the words and the grammatical structure of the language.’[507] When Rawlinson found that he was obliged to renounce the claim to a ‘priority of alphabetical discovery,’ and that he was continually being anticipated in the values he gave to the signs which he had himself just ‘obtained through continued labour,’ he was consoled by the reflection that he was ‘the first to present to the world a literal and, as I believe, a correct grammatical translation of nearly two hundred lines of cuneiform writing.’ Unfortunately, however, he withheld his translation, in the hope of making the accessories more perfect. A host of historical and geographical questions started up in rapid succession, and he was unwilling to limit his task to the series of critical notes which was all he at first contemplated. He accordingly began to recast his Memoir in the autumn of 1839, with the confident hope that it would be ready for publication early in the spring of 1840; but the outbreak of the Afghan War interrupted his literary projects and summoned him to a very different sphere of activity. Before he left, however, he had time to make a second communication to the Asiatic Society, in which he related some of the results of his study. His paper, which was read before a meeting of the Society, contained a ‘précis of the contents of a large part of the Behistun inscription, which differed in no material respect’ from the translation he elaborated at a much later date.[508] Indeed, we are told that, so far as the original materials extended, it was ‘absolutely identical’ with his subsequent work, which, as we shall presently see, was so perfect that later scholarship has found little to correct.[509] This was certainly a great achievement on the part of a young officer of twenty-nine years of age, and it was far in advance of anything that had yet been accomplished.

Meanwhile the number of inscriptions available for study continued to increase. In 1837, Grotefend published four lines of an inscription from the collection of Lord Aberdeen and Sir Gore Ouseley, which had recently been presented to the British Museum by Mountstuart Elphinstone. With the assistance of Lassen’s alphabet he deciphered the name of the king to whom it belonged. It read ‘Artks’t’â,’ which he easily identified with Artaxerxes.[510] The last line contained what appeared to be a new letter (𐏍), which he thought had the value of v.