Immediately after the appearance of his tract, it was assailed by Witte, a professor of his own university, who seized that occasion to revive the old view of Dr. Hyde that the cuneiform characters were simply designed as a fantastic ornamentation and had no other signification.[253] On the appearance of Grotefend’s system, Tychsen had the singular magnanimity to abandon his own and he became one of the principal exponents of the theories of the younger scholar. In the same year (1798) that Tychsen published his ‘Lucubratio,’ a paper on the same subject was read before the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, by Dr. Münter. Münter’s father, who was a clergyman and a poet, was born at Lübeck and died at Copenhagen, where he was pastor of the German church. His son Frederick was born at Gotha, in 1761, but his youth was passed at Copenhagen, and many of his works were written in Danish and subsequently translated into German. Like his father, he entered the Church, and became a Professor of Theology at Copenhagen, and eventually rose to be the Bishop of Seeland (1808). He was a very prolific writer, especially upon theological subjects. His works include a ‘History of Dogma’ (1801), a ‘History of the Danish Reformation’ (1802), and the last, which is considered to be the most important, was on the ‘Symbols and Works of Art of the Early Christians,’ published in Altona, 1824. He also acquired considerable reputation as a philologist and Orientalist. His paper on the Cuneiform Inscriptions was published in Danish in 1800, and translated into German in 1802. It was not till then that it became accessible to the general reading public, and very soon afterwards M. de Sacy noticed it in the ‘Magasin Encyclopédique.’[254] Münter had long been in correspondence with Tychsen on the subject of their common studies; but the two scholars arrived at widely different results. While the latter invented a system of interpretation that enabled him to transliterate the inscriptions with comparative facility, the former could not admit that the solution of the difficulty rested upon any satisfactory basis. His own contribution, if much more modest, is not on that account less valuable.