of the second column and that of the ancient inscriptions found in the district has been more completely recognised. There appears good ground to believe that the Aryan race had been established throughout Media long before they rose into historical importance. The inconvenience of calling a Scythian language after the Aryan Medians has therefore manifestly increased, while the name of ‘Susian,’ though not free from objection, has become more appropriate, and is the one now generally adopted. How far the language was spoken beyond the limits of Susiana, among the subject tribes of Media, may still be open to conjecture. There is, as we shall see, some evidence in favour of its extension. It will be recollected that early in 1846 Rawlinson had been able to translate the whole of the last paragraph of the second column of the Behistun inscription from the Median or Susian text, the Persian version of that passage having been found illegible.[631] Several years later Mr. Norris, with all his special knowledge, was obliged to confess that he was ‘unable to give a better translation than Colonel Rawlinson has prepared’ of that very paragraph.[632] In the same year Rawlinson announced the opinion his studies had led him to adopt upon this subject. It does not appear that he was as yet acquainted with Westergaard’s essay; but he had arrived at the same conclusion with reference to the Scythic affinities of the language. He likewise estimated the number of the signs at about a hundred, ‘the vowels, unless they commence a syllable, being for the most part inherent.’ He does not appear to have noticed the absence of sonants, but he saw that there must be considerable interchangeability in letters of the same class, and perhaps even between _n_ and _l_. He added that the language evinced a repugnance to _r_. He held that ‘it resembles the Scythic in the employment of post-positions and pronominal possessive suffixes.’ In the declension of nouns it uses post-fixed particles that are frequently the same as in modern Turkish, and he notified the existence of a Tartarian gerund. The pronouns are, he says, Semitic; the adverbs Aryan; the vocabulary a strange agglomeration of Turkish and Semitic. Although its construction is more akin to Aryan than Scythic, yet upon the whole he decides that its affinity is with the Scythic, and suggests that that would be a more appropriate name for it than Median.[633] He thought some of its peculiarities might be explained by comparison with the Georgian, which, when time permitted, he proposed to undertake.[634] He suggested that it was the language of the aboriginal race whom the Aryan Medes had conquered, and whose settlements reached at least to Behistun, where an inscription had been found without the Persian translation, apparently indicating that it was locally comprehensible.[635]