Such was the state of the inquiry when Grotefend entered upon it. The Memoirs on the Antiquities of Persia. published by M. de Sacy in 1793, afforded a sort of text-book to the decipherer. De Sacy had succeeded in reading some inscriptions at Naksh-i-Rustam, written in Pehlevi. Like those at Persepolis, they were engraved above the sculptured representations of kings, and they were found to contain the royal name and title. Grotefend inferred that the cuneiform inscrip-tions had very probably served as models for these later legends. The simplest of these and, from its brevity, the one that afforded the most striking resemblance to the B and G of Niebuhr ran: ' N N rex magnus rex regum [rex-um] Filins . . . [regis] stirps Achaemenis [?]'[1] The first step Grotefend made in advance of his predecessor was to perceive that it required two words to make up the phrase 'king of kings,' and that these two words no doubt corresponded to the two in the cuneiform: the one with seven letters and the longer form of the same word that followed it. This apparently obvious necessity had, as we have seen, wholly escaped Münter. When it was once recognised that the word of seven letters was clearly 'king,' it became obvious that, according to the analogy of the Pehlevi model, the first word of the inscription was the name of the sovereign, the third a qualifying title corres- ponding to 'magnus' and the two following, where he found the word of seven letters again repeated, and on this occasion followed by the longer form, evidently corresponded to 'rex' and 'rex-um' ('regum').
Comparing the two insriptions (B and G), he found they began with different words, which he now inferred were the names of two different kings; but he observed
- ↑ De Sacy, Mémoires sur diverses Antiquités, Paris, 1793. It is given by Heeren (Eng. ed.), vol. ii. App. 2, p. 332.
