It is a very singular circumstance that Grotefend seems to have spent the whole of his ingenuity upon his first efforts; from that time he was unable to make any farther contribution of importance, and the work of decipherment was carried on entirely by other scholars. Yet he never withdrew his attention from the subject, and when he died, in 1853, all the difficulties of the Persian column had been overcome with but little farther assistance from him, and sufficient was already known of the Babylonian to disclose a wonderland of new and unexpected knowledge. Grotefend made a careful study of all the available inscriptions as they came to light, and from first to last his interest in them never flagged. We have already seen how carefully he analysed the three Persepolitan columns, seeking out in each the signs that might be supposed to correspond to each other. The classification of the Babylonian inscriptions as they now began rapidly to accumulate afforded him fresh material for the exercise of his ingenuity. It seems to have been some time before he would admit the practical identity of the writing of the third Persepolitan column with that of the simplest of the Babylonian styles. According to his earliest classification the three Persepolitan systems were kept entirely apart from the two that had been remarked at Babylon. But it was not long before the similarity of the most complicated of the Persepolitan with the simplest of the Babylonian became apparent. This was fully recognised by Rich, in 1811, and we cannot suppose that Grotefend was far behind.[330] Rich was the first to announce that Grotefend had come to the important conclusion that the two or three different forms which had been observed at Babylon were mere varieties of one and the same method of writing, analogous to our Roman and Gothic character. Grotefend’s attention was now chiefly directed to the Babylonian inscriptions, mainly in consequence of the articles contributed by Rich to the ‘Fundgruben des Orients,’ and afterwards by the constant correspondence he maintained with Bellino, the German secretary Rich had brought out with him to Bagdad.[331] Grotefend now abandoned the idea that the third column was written in Pehlevi. He described the language as Median Persian, and he called it the ‘Babylonian column.’ He showed also that the many differences in the writing of the simple Babylonian were due no doubt to the idiosyncrasies of the engravers; but they added greatly to the difficulty of the decipherment.[332] He noted also the frequent occurrence of different ideograms for the same word, such, for example, as for ‘son.’ He sharply contrasted it with such writing as is found in the India House Inscription which he called ‘the complex’ (_zusammengesetzt_). Mr. Rich had lately obtained several specimens of cylinders; two of these were found on the site of Nineveh and a few others at Borsippa. The account