DISTORT OF DECIPHERMENT. The history of the decipherment of these alphabets is an inter esting one. Although allusion is plainly made to cuneiform texts by Herodotus, Diodo•us, Stra bo, Plutarch, Arden, and the epistles ascribed to Themistocles, all remembrance of them seems later to have been lost. Early European travel ers to the East, however, were attracted by the mysterious signs, as early as Josafat Barbaro at the each of the fifteenth century, and especially Pietro della Valla in 1621, who seems to have been the first one to suspect that the inscriptions were something more than simple decorations of the rocks. His views, however, made no lasting impression, and the wildest theories were offered in explanation of the meaning of the signs. They were supposed to be talismans, or hieratic and astrological formulas, or it was thought that they might contain the original language of Eden. They were regarded as Greek by one in vestigator, while another found them pure Arabic. Gradually, however, the theories became more sober and accurate. The investigation cen tred from the very first about the most striking of all cuneiform inscriptions, the great trilingual text on the side of Behistun. On this steep
mountain, which rises abruptly some seventeen hundred feet above the plain, there is carved at a height of three hundred feet an account of the reign of Darius I. in three languages which we now know to be Old Persian, Babylonian, and New Susian. Beginning with the discovery that the Persian sign \ denoted the end of a word, and basing investigations on historical data furnished by Herodotus and other classical authors, and on hints as to wo•d-order and style which were gained from Pahlavi (q.v.) in scriptions, successive investigations gradually de ciphered the Old Persian cuneiform writing. It was then a comparatively easy task to solve the Babylonian and New Susian versions, which re produce almost word for word the Old Persian text. From such a beginning the key has been found, not only to Assyro-Babylonian and New Susian, but to the Mitanni inscriptions and the tablets of Van and Cappadocia.