‘Que me protège Ormazd avec tous les Dieux, et cette forteresse, et aussi ce qui est dans cette forteresse. Que jamais je ne voie ce que l’homme méchant souhaite [que je voie]!’
The latest attempt was made by Weisbach, in 1890, and runs thus:
‘Mich möge Ahuramazda mit allen Göttern schützen, und diese Festung, und wiederum zu diesem Platze...! Das möge er nicht sehen (?), das, was der feindliche Mann ersinnt!’[663]
The work of Norris excited some controversy, and Holtzmann was especially concerned to refute the Finnic-Tartar hypothesis. M. Haug revived the theory of its closer relationship to Turkish, proposed by De Saulcy, and he suggested that the Persians themselves were originally Tartars.[664]
M. Oppert had now become the chief representative of cuneiform studies upon the Continent. His essays on the Persian column of the inscriptions (1851-2), evinced a complete mastery of the subject and considerable independence in the treatment of doubtful passages. The reputation he had earned led to his being attached to the French scientific expedition to Babylonia. On his return he undertook to write an account of the expedition, and his second volume, which made its appearance in 1859, contains an elaborate account of the work of decipherment.[665] Although the book is chiefly concerned with Assyrian, he has given a Syllabarium of the Median, with the object chiefly of comparing it with the Babylonian and Assyrian systems of writing.[666] The great importance resulting from such a comparison now becomes apparent. The values of the Assyrian signs were already ascertained in a large number of cases, and it was recognised that, with some exceptions, the similar sign in Median generally expressed the same value. The principle was also definitely admitted that each sign has only one value,[667] and that an independent sign may be looked for to express the combination of the vowels a, i and u before and after each of the principal consonants, k, p, t, m, r, l and s, and therefore we may expect a sign for each of such forms as ka, ki, ku, ak, ik, uk, and so on. The application of this system enabled Oppert to make a very decisive improvement in the Syllabarium. It will be recollected that Norris had twenty-four wrong values, and twenty-one only approximately correct. Oppert now corrects twelve of the former and eighteen of the latter. The result was that he could dispose of eighty-three values absolutely and six nearly correct. He was doubtful as to the sound of one, wrong as to seven, and he omitted seven. Thus, when the determinatives are added, all of the 106 signs in Menant’s list were deciphered except fifteen. He also added a fourth to the list of determinative signs. He showed that the one mistaken by Norris for s was in fact used simply to indicate that the following letter was an ideogram (No. 66 of Hincks). It had long ago been observed that a single sign was employed for ‘king,’ and Norris added another for ‘month.’ Oppert points out that the determinative before ‘god’ was also an ideogram for ‘god,’ and that ‘man,’ ‘water,’ ‘animal,’ or ‘horse’ and ‘road’ were likewise indicated by ideographic signs. He considered that the grammatical forms show analogy first to Magyar, then to Turkish, Mongol and Finnish. He gave it the name of Medo-Scythic, and he now considered that it was spoken by the tribes at Persepolis and Behistun—more particularly by those in the north of Media. The student of the second column had at his command some ninety-nine proper names, besides a large number of Persian official terms and titles transliterated into the Median script; and with their assistance the pronunciation of about a hundred and forty words was already known.
The remarkable success of Oppert was due almost entirely to the successful comparison of the Median and Babylonian signs; and it had something of an accidental character, for it appeared in a work chiefly devoted to Assyrian and without special reference to this particular branch of the subject. Indeed the attention of scholars was now so thoroughly absorbed by the study of Assyrian and the many new discoveries it opened to their view, that the second column fell into comparative neglect. Mordtmann wrote papers upon it in 1862, and again in 1870, in the ‘German Oriental Gazette,’ in which he appears to have ignored the results already attained, and to have given different values to some of the signs. He called the language Susian, in consequence of the order in which the provinces of ‘Persia, Susiana and Babylon’ occur in the Behistun inscription, and also because Susa bears an entirely different name in the Median from that given to it in the Persian, while the other names are alike in both. In support of his opinion he was the first to show that the inscriptions on some bricks found at Susa, which were then beginning to attract attention, though written in a different dialect, were evidently similar in speech and writing to the second column.
It will be recollected that Rawlinson visited Susa in 1836, and observed a few bricks and a broken obelisk bearing the peculiar inscriptions to which we have just referred. He considered the style of writing to be ‘the farthest removed of any from the original Assyrian type,’ and he surmised that the language is ‘not even, I think, of the Semitic family.’[668] In 1852, Loftus collected a few other inscriptions in the same character and language, which were sent to Rawlinson. Mr. Norris, who announced this acquisition in his Median Memoir, stated that Rawlinson still thought that the characters were those of ‘the Assyrian alphabet,’ but in a different language, and that he had made out sufficient to show that they belonged to Susian kings who were anterior to Darius.[669]
When Mr. Layard visited the same neighbourhood, in 1841, he was fortunate enough to be able to copy two inscriptions at Malamir, one of thirty-six lines and the other of twenty-four.[670] Rawlinson, in his classification of the cuneiform inscriptions, called them the Elymaean, and from the differences they presented, he considered that they ‘are entitled to an independent place,’ apart from Babylonian or Assyrian. In 1850, he again points out their dissimilarity from either of the two last mentioned, but he adds that they are not so difficult to read as those he had found on the bricks at Susa.[671] The surprising discovery of De Saulcy that the Median and Babylonian characters are ‘identical,’ notwithstanding their apparent diversity, naturally stimulated the ingenuity of other writers to widen the sphere of the ‘identical’; and Mordtmann was among the first who laboured in this direction. The work was continued by Lenormant, who made his appearance within the circle of cuneiform scholars in 1871, by the publication of his first series of ‘Lettres Assyriennes,’ followed, in 1873, by the ‘Choix de Textes.’ The result of the minute comparison he instituted was to show that the Old Susian script closely resembled Old Babylonian, while the Elymaean of Malamir is simply an earlier form of the Median or New Susian character. The development towards ‘identity’ had now gone so far that Bertin describes the difference between Old Susian and Old Babylonian as very slight, while Elymaean and Median are simple ‘variants of the same.’[672]