Münter, in the first place, rendered important service to his successor, Grotefend, by sweeping away the foolish conjecture that the inscriptions belonged to the Parthian age, and with it the misleading inference that the name of Arsaces was to be sought for among them. In a few masterly pages, remarkable alike for wide knowledge and accurate judgment, he showed that Persepolis could only be referred to the Achaemenian kings, an opinion that had already gained the support of Heeren, in opposition to the authority of Herder, who ascribed it to the mythological age of Jamshid.[255] It might be thought that the claims of Darius or Jamshid to be the founder of Persepolis would not give rise to heated discussion; yet in the beginning of last century the tranquillity of Göttingen was convulsed by the fierce controversy that raged between the two learned advocates of the rival theories.[256] Münter did not profess to be able to transliterate and still less to translate the inscriptions. His pretensions were limited to a very tentative endeavour to assign values to thirteen characters; and of these, four were not derived from Niebuhr’s list, and they turned out to be merely errors of the copyist. Having fixed the date of Persepolis and presumably therefore of the inscriptions, he inferred that the language must be closely allied to the Zend or the Pehlevi. He made a minute investigation of all the cuneiform inscriptions that were known in his day in Europe, and studied Kaempfer and Le Bruyn with the same attention as he studied Niebuhr. He accepted Niebuhr’s division of the Persepolitan inscriptions into three different kinds of writing; and he conjectured that the first was alphabetical, the second syllabic, and the third ideographic. The latter he thought bore some resemblance to Chinese. He saw that the language of the first column admitted of too many vowels to be closely related to the Pehlevi. He was, on the whole, disposed to think that the three columns contained translations of the same text into different languages, which might probably be Zend, Pehlevi and Parsi.[257] On this point, however, he did not consider the evidence sufficient to exclude all doubt. Indeed, he said the three columns might turn out to be in the same language, expressed in different characters.[258] He studied carefully the inscriptions that occur on vases, cylinders and bricks from Babylon, a few of which were then beginning to find their way to the European museums and the private collections of Sir W. Ouseley and Mr. Townley. The most important of these was upon the vase described by Caylus, which, in addition to the cuneiform inscription, was also inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics.[259] Tychsen pronounced the latter to be Phoenician, and he believed that the urn itself had formerly contained the ashes of his friend Aksak.[260] Münter made the more important remark that the characters on the Babylonian relics were nearly identical with that of