unilingual inscriptions, one of Arsaces and the other of Pharnuches, were also afterwards found on seal cylinders which, with the trilingual of Darius in the British Museum (Nᵃ) raise the number to three in all.[242] CHAPTER III DECIPHERMENT OF THE FIRST OR PERSIAN COLUMN—TYCHSEN TO LASSEN, A.D. 1798-1836. We have already called attention to the important services rendered by Niebuhr to the study of the cuneiform inscriptions. The copies he made at Persepolis were by far the most accurate that had hitherto appeared, and the scholars who first applied themselves to the difficult task of decipherment worked chiefly upon them. He pointed out that the inscriptions generally occur in groups of three columns, and that in each the cuneiform signs are different. He pointed out also that the three different systems always recur in the same definite order: the signs characteristic of the first, second and third columns in one inscription always correspond to those of the first, second and third columns in the others. He observed also that the signs characteristic of the first column are evidently much simpler than those in the other two. After a careful comparison of the various places where they are found, he remarked that they were limited to forty-two in number; and these he collected and published together in his Plate 23, where they occupy a position that might at first sight lead the reader to suppose that they formed a part of the ornamentation of the sculptured staircase.[243] This is the first cuneiform alphabet ever published, and it was not the least important service rendered by Niebuhr to the study. Its formation was not so simple as might be supposed, and it would have been difficult to accomplish it except by a minute study of the monuments themselves. The inscriptions had hitherto been so imperfectly copied that no mere collation of them, however carefully made, could have succeeded in eliminating the whole of the faulty signs arising from the errors of the transcriber. The accidental addition or omission of a wedge, or an alteration in its direction, had the effect of magnifying the apparent number of the letters. It is a singular proof of the accuracy of Niebuhr’s judgment that he should have been so successful in this first attempt to distinguish between the genuine and the defective letters. In his list of forty-two signs, he has only introduced nine that are not true letters, including the sign that was afterwards found to be the mark of separation between the words.[244] On the other hand, amid all the conflicting signs found in the copyists, he passed over only two that are genuine: one (𐎦) is included by Grotefend in his list of defective signs; the other (𐎵) was first added to the alphabet by Rawlinson.[245] It proved of great advantage to concentrate the attention of scholars upon signs that were for the most part genuine, and to save them the dissipation of energy that would have resulted if they had been left to