It was written, he says, in Armenian, and contains an exhortation addressed by a priest of the ‘Temple of the God of the Dead’ to certain women mourning their departed friends.[296] De Sacy, from whom our information is taken, gives more than a page of this pious effusion, which he says is not more than a sixth part of the translation. It is needless to say that the whole is a pure invention. Indeed it does not clearly appear whether the Memoir was intended by Lichtenstein as a _jeu d’esprit_, or whether it was simply an impudent imposture. It is certainly curious that he succeeded in getting himself treated seriously. Besides the solemn review and confutation by De Sacy from which we quote, we find so late as 1820 that Grotefend still thought it necessary to combat his theories, and De Sacy even at that period classified together ‘the conjectures of Lichtenstein and the labours of Grotefend’ as equally open to suspicion.[297] We now come to the scholar to whose ingenuity we owe the first real success that was achieved in deciphering the cuneiform letters. George Frederick Grotefend was born at Münden, Hanover, in 1775. He was sent to the University of Göttingen in 1795, where two years later he obtained a tutorship. He applied himself to the study of philology under Heyne, and in 1803 he became Pro-Rector. Soon afterwards he was transferred to the Gymnasium of Frankfort on the Maine; and in 1821 he became Rector of the Lyceum at Hanover, where he died in 1853. He was always an industrious student, but he failed in after life to follow up his first great success; and if it had not been for it, his name would probably never have been known. In 1817 he published a Latin Grammar, which was translated into English under the supervision of Dr. Arnold; and subsequently he did some useful service by his inquiries into the early Italian languages. In 1835 he published a book on the Rudiments of the Umbrian, and, in 1837, another on the Oscan, and these were followed in 1840 by a Geography and History of Ancient Italy. The paper on the Cuneiform Inscriptions that first brought him into notice was read before the Göttingen Academy on September 4, 1802; and, curiously enough, at the same sitting Heyne first called attention to the Greek inscription on the Rosetta Stone, from which the reading of Egyptian hieroglyphics takes its departure.[298]