It is the natural affectation of the minute scholar to exaggerate the importance of an accurate knowledge of grammatical construction, and to disparage or ridicule even great results that may have been attained in defiance of strict rule. It became the fashion to underrate the very considerable achievements of Lassen as a translator, because it was afterwards found that he fell into several errors which later knowledge has cleared away. Major Rawlinson was unfortunately peculiarly liable to depreciate the work of his competitors, and it is therefore with no surprise that we find him dwell with more emphasis upon their failures than upon their success. But it is certainly remarkable that Hincks, the Irish cuneiform scholar, should have been betrayed into a judgment that must now be regarded as singularly unfair and censorious. Writing in 1847, he gave expression to the opinion that ‘Lassen seems to have been completely destitute of the peculiar talent of a decipherer, and his attempts at translation were consequently as bad as could be made ... the number and grossness of many of his mistakes are such as to create astonishment.’[527] It is quite true that Lassen sometimes mistook verbs for adjectives, and that in some places he had to warn the reader that his translation was purely conjectural. But his services should be estimated by the state of knowledge at the time he wrote. It must be remembered that when he began these studies, in 1836, all that was known were a few proper names, and every attempt to pass beyond had hitherto led to ridiculous misrepresentations of the true meaning of the texts. When, in 1844, he completed his translation of the whole series of inscriptions of the Persian column—with the exception of the Behistun, which was not accessible to him—he had succeeded in making their contents as well known as they are at present in all the essential points of their subject-matter. It must be recollected also that he had to contend with difficulties that have since been in great measure removed. The texts upon which he worked were in many places in need of emendation; and the parallel columns in Susian and Babylonian, which have afforded so much assistance to later translators, were then completely unknown. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that, notwithstanding all the advantages that are now at command, many of the passages over which Lassen stumbled are still the subject of dispute.
His collection included the ten independent inscriptions at Persepolis; the Tomb inscription at Naksh-i-Rustam, so lately recovered by Westergaard; the Cyrus inscription from Murgab; the inscriptions of Elvend and Van that only a few years before had acquired an entire volume to expound. He added a translation of the short inscription on the crystal cylinder brought from Egypt and now in the British Museum. He reads: ‘Ego Darius hominum tutor.’ He also translated the Denon inscription, found in 1800 near Suez, which, according to him, signifies ‘Darius hominum tutor magnus.’ Both these inscriptions write ‘King’ with the abbreviation to which Lassen assigned the value of ‘narpa’ and translates ‘hominum tutor.’ The true meaning of the first is ‘I [am] Darius the King,’ and of the second ‘Darius the great King.’[528] The same abbreviation occurs in the inscription on the Caylus vase, but in this case Lassen translates it simply as ‘rex’—‘Xerxes rex magnus.’[529]
Although Lassen may justly claim great praise for the skill he has displayed in his translations, it must not be supposed that he succeeded in overcoming all the difficulties that stood in his way. His task was greatly simplified by the constant recurrence of a set form of words with which the inscriptions usually begin.[530] At Persepolis this form is first met with on the Porch, and it occurs altogether five times in the ten Persepolitan inscriptions. The two Hamadan inscriptions consist of nothing else. A shorter form, which begins at the second paragraph of the one just mentioned, is repeated three times at Persepolis. The longer form sometimes reaches over twenty lines, and as the whole series of these inscriptions only amount to three hundred lines, it is evident how considerably the task of the translator was reduced. Most of the inscriptions are, as we have seen, repeated in several places: the window inscription in the Palace of Darius no less than eighteen times. But the very limitation thus imposed upon him was one of the chief obstacles to his progress. Indeed, until the Behistun inscription became available it was impossible to acquire any extensive knowledge of the language. To this circumstance must be partly ascribed the inferiority of Lassen’s rendering of difficult passages, when compared with the facility we observe in Rawlinson from the first.
Between the publication of the First Memoir and the one we are now considering, Lassen made considerable progress. In the I inscription the names of the twenty-five provinces are now given correctly with the exception of two: ‘Gordyaei,’ which Rawlinson had shown should read ‘M’udraya,’ Egypt; and ‘Parutia,’ which is not a proper name at all, but means ‘east.’ Neither Lassen nor Rawlinson had much success in their treatment of the new names of provinces found at Naksh-i-Rustam, and no general agreement has even yet been reached with regard to some of them. A careful collation of the difficult passages in the subject-matter of the inscriptions is, however, sufficient to prove the great superiority of Rawlinson over Lassen, both in the actual work of translation and in the necessary emendation of a disputed text. An instance of the comparative ingenuity of the two scholars is afforded by a passage in the Naksh-i-Rustam inscription, where the last letter of the thirteenth line is obliterated and the passage runs thus (Lassen’s transliteration):
| line | 13 | ? |
| ” | 14 | Arçahjâ puthra ârija ârija d— |
| ” | 15 | thra |
The omission of the letter led Lassen into one of the greatest blunders in his revised translation. His ‘progenies Arçis’ commits him to a definite historical error, while the rendering of the following words ‘ârija ârija’ is merely an instance of aberration to which the greatest scholars are occasionally subject. Rawlinson, who greatly excelled him in ‘intuition,’ had no difficulty in supplying the missing letter as p, and he translated the passage correctly: ‘son of a Persian, an Arian, of Arian descent,’ in the place of ‘Progenies Arçis, a venerabilibus stirpis auctoribus oriundi’! Lassen’s knowledge now enabled him to point out several instances in the Inscription of Artaxerxes Ochus that served to illustrate the decay of the language, though the interval from the classical age of Darius was not more than a hundred and ninety years. It is here that the two new signs—or rather contractions—for the syllables ‘dah’ and ‘bumi’ first occur. Of more interest is the evidence this inscription affords of the degeneration of the Persian religion by the admittance of Mithra into its worship. Artaxerxes the Third traces his genealogy through Artaxerxes the Second (Mnemon), Darius the Second (Nothus), Artaxerxes the First (Longimanus), Xerxes, Darius the First, and Hystaspes, to Arsames the Achaemenian; and neither of the two last are distinguished by the royal title.
The most important publication after Lassen’s essay in 1844 was a criticism that appeared upon it by Adolf Holtzmann in the following year.[531] It was written with much personal animosity to Lassen, and this enlivens in an amusing fashion the extreme aridity of the subject-matter.
Only two letters now remained to be correctly determined: 19 (𐎮), the k’h of Lassen, and this Holtzmann successfully accomplished. The letter occurs in the words Lassen transliterated ‘jak’hija’ and ‘hak’hi(s).’[532] Holtzmann substituted d and read the first word ‘jadij,’ which he compared with the Sanscrit ‘jadi,’ Zend ‘jedhi’—‘when’—instead of Lassen’s ‘venerandus,’ a meaning that turned out to be correct.[533] Finally, he reviewed all the words in which the letter occurs, and he found that the substitution of d for k enabled him to assign satisfactory meanings to the whole of them.[534]
Holtzmann is also credited[535] with having slightly improved the value of 28 (𐎩), the z of Jacquet, by giving it the sound of g—presumably g soft, but as it always precedes a the reader would naturally assume it to be hard, as in ‘gadija,’ ‘aga’mija,’ etc. It is in fact j before a.