From the time when Niebuhr pointed out that there were three essentially different styles of writing, and that each style was uniformly reproduced in the same relative position in all the inscriptions, the subject had given rise to much speculation. It was at first thought that the three columns repeated the same text in the same language written in different characters.^ Grote- fend, however, recognised that the languages also were different, but he thought they were dialects closely related to each other. The first, as we have seen, he considered to be Zend, which he called the Median language ; the second he thought was Parsi, or the language of the Persians ; and the third another dialect of Persian, possibly Pehlevi.^' Subsequently he changed the order of the last two, and described them respec- tively as resembling Pehlevi and Parsi.^ As regards the signs, Miinter thought that in the second column they were syllabic and in the third ' hieroglyphic ' ; Tychsen and Grotefend thought that both had signs for vowels and consonants, which were at times replaced by an ideogram. Grotefend further saw that the second included siuns for the combination of a consonant and vowel ; the third he considered had no vowel signs, but used signs for the triple combination of consonant, vowel and consonant.'* He entirely rejected the idea that either system was purely ideographic. In 1824, he prepared a Table for the third edition of Heeren, showing some words that corresponded to each other in the three languages. The inscriptions he selected
- This opinion is attributed to iS'iebuhr by M. Oppert {Expidition en
M^sopotamie, 1809, ii. 2) ; in the passage referred to Niebuhr merely says there are three alphabets, but says nothing about their being in the same language (Niebuhr, ii. 113).
' Heeren, Historical licsearches (Eng. ed.), ii. 324. Durow, Die As- sy rische Ki'ilschrifteyi erliiutert ("Wiesbaden, 1>^20), p. 38.
^ Beitriige, 1837, p. 24. * Heeren, ib. pp. 329-30.
