A literary history of Persia

60 HISTORY Of PERSIAN PHILOLOGYthird on November I3th of the same year, and the fourthon May 20, 1803. Till this time, though Tychsen andMiinter had made vain attempts at decipherment, it was, as wehave seen when examining Hyde's work, very generally held,even by men of learning, that these characters were notwriting at all,but were either architectural ornaments, thework of worms or insects, or mason's marks and numericalsigns. Grotefend, primarily impelled to this inquiry by adispute with his friend Fiorillo as to the possibility of arrivingat the meaning of inscriptions whereof the script and languagewere alike unknown or buried in oblivion, arrived in his firstcommunication at the following important general conclusions :(i) That the figures constituting these inscriptionsgeneral con- were graphic symbols ; (2) that the inscriptionswere trilingual,that is,that they consisted, asa rule, of three versions, each in a different language andscript ; (3) that the inscriptions which he proposed to explain,that is,those of the first class (the Old Persian) in particular,and also those of the second, consisted of actual letters^ not ofideograms or logograms comparable to those employed inAssyrian and Chinese ; (4)that all known cuneiforminscriptions were constant in direction, being in every casewritten horizontally from left to right.From these general conclusions (allof which have sinceproved to be perfectly correct) Grotefend proceeded toexamine more minutely two inscriptions of themethod of first class,which he believed to be written in theprocedure.so-called Zend (i.e., Avestic) language a conjecturewhich, though not the truth, was near the truth andwhich he correctlyreferred to " some ancient king of thePersians between Cyrus and Alexander," in other words, to theAchaemenians. An 1 examination of the Pahlawi inscriptions1 The fact that the inscriptions of the first class were in the language ofthe Achsemenian kings in other words, in an Old Persian language wassuggested to Grotefend by the position of honour always occupied by themin the trilingual tablets.