In 1851, M. Oppert undertook a complete revision of the whole series of Achaemenian inscriptions. The work appeared in the ‘Journal Asiatique,’ between February 1851 and February 1852, and was afterwards published in a separate form.[603] He introduced a considerable number of alterations, in both the transliteration and translation, and, so far as we have noticed, a large proportion of them have been accepted. He criticised some of Rawlinson’s opinions, but rarely with asperity, and he generously acknowledges that the English scholar ‘a grandement mérité de l’histoire du genre humain.’[604] He subsequently revised his own translations for his book on the ‘Expédition en Mésopotamie,’ published in 1858. In the same year Rawlinson made an amended version of the Behistun Inscription for the edition of Herodotus published by his brother; and again in 1873 for the ‘Records of the Past.’[605] The other inscriptions were once more revised by Oppert in 1877 for the same useful publication.[606] But meanwhile a complete edition of the whole Persian inscriptions had been published by Spiegel in Germany in 1862,[607] and in France in 1872, by M. Menant.[608] The latest publications on the subject that have come under our notice are the valuable treatises on the languages of the first and second columns by Weissbach,[609] and of the third column by Dr. Bezold,[610] accompanied in each case by a revised text, transliteration and translation. CHAPTER V DECIPHERMENT OF THE SECOND OR SUSIAN COLUMN—WESTERGAARD TO OPPERT—A.D. 1844-52 The signal success that had been achieved in the decipherment of the Persian column of the Achaemenian inscriptions greatly facilitated the accomplishment of the difficult task that still remained. In the other two columns it was comparatively easy, especially in the short inscriptions, to identify the combinations of signs that corresponded to the proper names in the Persian, and to check them by their recurrence in the positions where they were again to be expected. The satisfactory application of this process left no doubt that the writing in both columns was from left to right; and that they were translations of the same text. When the groups of characters composing the proper names were ascertained, the next process was to separate them into letters or syllables, and to identify each with the corresponding letter in Persian. The result of this inquiry was to show clearly that the writing was partly syllabic and to raise the suspicion that it was also partly ideographic. It was seen that the signs were too numerous to be limited to an alphabet, and that long words could be expressed with comparatively few signs. In some cases its ideographic character was illustrated by the occurrence of only one sign to represent an entire word—such as ‘King.’ It was also observed that in the second column a vertical wedge usually preceded proper names as a determinative.