Although Lassen may justly claim great praise for the skill he has displayed in his translations, it must not be supposed that he succeeded in overcoming all the difficulties that stood in his way. His task was greatly simplified by the constant recurrence of a set form of words with which the inscriptions usually begin.[530] At Persepolis this form is first met with on the Porch, and it occurs altogether five times in the ten Persepolitan inscriptions. The two Hamadan inscriptions consist of nothing else. A shorter form, which begins at the second paragraph of the one just mentioned, is repeated three times at Persepolis. The longer form sometimes reaches over twenty lines, and as the whole series of these inscriptions only amount to three hundred lines, it is evident how considerably the task of the translator was reduced. Most of the inscriptions are, as we have seen, repeated in several places: the window inscription in the Palace of Darius no less than eighteen times. But the very limitation thus imposed upon him was one of the chief obstacles to his progress. Indeed, until the Behistun inscription became available it was impossible to acquire any extensive knowledge of the language. To this circumstance must be partly ascribed the inferiority of Lassen’s rendering of difficult passages, when compared with the facility we observe in Rawlinson from the first. Between the publication of the First Memoir and the one we are now considering, Lassen made considerable progress. In the I inscription the names of the twenty-five provinces are now given correctly with the exception of two: ‘Gordyaei,’ which Rawlinson had shown should read ‘M’udraya,’ Egypt; and ‘Parutia,’ which is not a proper name at all, but means ‘east.’ Neither Lassen nor Rawlinson had much success in their treatment of the new names of provinces found at Naksh-i-Rustam, and no general agreement has even yet been reached with regard to some of them. A careful collation of the difficult passages in the subject-matter of the inscriptions is, however, sufficient to prove the great superiority of Rawlinson over Lassen, both in the actual work of translation and in the necessary emendation of a disputed text. An instance of the comparative ingenuity of the two scholars is afforded by a passage in the Naksh-i-Rustam inscription, where the last letter of the thirteenth line is obliterated and the passage runs thus (Lassen’s transliteration): line 13 ? ” 14 Arçahjâ puthra ârija ârija d— ” 15 thra