Grotefend’s next task was to ascertain the old Persian pronunciation of the name of Darius. This had been given by Strabo, while the Persian pronunciation of Xerxes was indicated in the Old Testament. With this assistance Grotefend was able to assign alphabetic values to the cuneiform characters which composed the two names, and a corner of the veil which had so long covered the cuneiform records was lifted at last. A comparison of the names which he had thus read gave the needful verification of the correctness of his method. In the names of Darius and Xerxes the same letters occur, but in different places; _a_ and _r_ in _Darius_ occupy the second and third places, in _Xerxes_ the fourth and fifth, while _sh_, which is the last letter in _Darius_, would be the second and sixth in _Xerxes_. And such was actually the case. Grotefend was therefore justified in concluding that his guesses were correct, and that the right values had been assigned to the cuneiform characters. A beginning had been made in cuneiform decipherment, and in this instance the beginning was half the whole. Grotefend’s Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy on September 4, 1802. By a curious accident it was at the same meeting that Heyne described the first attempts that had been made towards deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs. But the learned world looked askance at the discoveries of the young Latinist. The science of archæology was still unborn, and Oriental philologists were unable even to understand the inductive method of the decipherer. The Academy of Göttingen refused to print his communications, and it was not until 1815 that they appeared in the first volume of the History of his friend Heeren, who, being untrammelled by the prejudices of Oriental learning, had been one of the earliest to accept his conclusions.[4] For a whole generation the work of decipherment was allowed to sleep. It is unfortunately true that after his initial success Grotefend’s ignorance of Oriental languages really did stand in his way. He assumed that the language of the inscriptions and that of the _Zend-Avesta_ were one and the same, and accordingly went to the newly-found Zend dictionary for the readings of the cuneiform names and words. Vishtaspa, the name of the father of Darius, was thus read Goshtasp, the word for “king” became _khsheh_ instead of _khshayathiya_, and that which Grotefend had correctly divined to signify “great,” _eghre_ instead of _vazraka_. It is not wonderful, therefore, that he was never able to follow up the beginning he had made.