Hincks did good service in adding a third determinative to the two acknowledged by Westergaard, De Saulcy actually refused to admit the determinative character of the horizontal wedge, and thereby reduced the number to one. On the other hand, he thought he had detected a sign to indicate the plural, which is in fact nothing but the syllable _sin_. Perhaps the most useful contribution he made was the remark that, while a few of the Median signs bore a certain resemblance to those of the same value in Persian, the larger number of them were actually ‘identical’ with the Assyrian.[647] It must be confessed that it was long before this identity was detected, and even such a practised copyist as Westergaard declared that the five different species of cuneiform writing then known ‘differed from one another in the shape of nearly every letter or group,’[648] and considerable practice is still required before their identity can be brought home to the eye. The similarity—to employ a less emphatic expression—proved, however, of great assistance in enabling future inquirers to fix the value of the signs. Some time had yet to elapse before they could take advantage of this discovery, for when De Saulcy wrote, the Assyrian characters were themselves still undeciphered. De Saulcy’s work was criticised by Löwenstern in the ‘Revue Archéologique’ (1850), where he sought to trace the affinity of Median to the Aramaic branch of the Semitic family, while he admitted that some of the endings might be traced in Pehlevi and New Persian. He did not consider it to be the Median language, which, he maintained, is properly represented by Zend; and he suggested, as Mr. Rich had done before, that it might have been the dialect of Susa.[649] Holtzmann fully recognised that it contained Semitic elements, but still he considered that it should be regarded as the mother of Pehlevi; and he subsequently added that it was probably the language of the court at Susa.[650] Still the opinion of its Scythic origin, first suggested by Westergaard and Rawlinson, continued to gain ground, supported, no doubt, by the numerous similarities to this linguistic stock that were pointed out in the learned Memoirs of De Saulcy. In 1852, M. Oppert, writing on the Persian column, went so far as to propose to drop the designation Median altogether, and, following the suggestion of Rawlinson, to substitute ‘Scythic.’ At that time he considered it to be the language of the hordes who overran Western Asia, and who, after twenty-eight years of domination in Media, were finally expelled by Cyaxares. It must be admitted that they were fortunate to leave such a permanent memorial of their passage.[651] A more important contribution than any of these was made by Luzzato, who showed with sufficient clearness that twenty-four of the Median signs corresponded to the Babylonian (1850).