Mordtmann and Lenormant were successful also in showing that both these two newly-discovered languages, or dialects, are closely related to Median, and belonged therefore to the Scythic family. The remarkable discovery that had recently been made that a Scythic language—the Akkadian—was the primitive speech of Chaldæa, gave a very unexpected extension to the range of the Turanian races; and it was now beginning to be recognised that the civilisation of Western Asia is to be referred to them, and not, as heretofore supposed, to a Semitic people. The effect of these discoveries was to stimulate once more the flagging interest in the writing of the second column, and efforts were now directed to determine the nature of its relationship to the newly-found dialects, and more particularly to ascertain the people to whom each might be attributed. The first to enter upon this new field of inquiry after Lenormant was Oppert, who submitted a tentative translation of an Old Susian inscription to the Congress of Orientalists in 1873. In the following year, Mr. Sayce attempted two short inscriptions published by Lenormant. If we may judge by comparison with a later version given by Oppert, no great measure of success was yet attained.[673] Indeed three years afterwards, Oppert himself admitted that the Susian could not yet be read. The inscriptions of Malamir caused less difficulty, and Sayce declared that it was ‘the same as the Median with a few unimportant variations.’ It must be confessed, however, that his subsequent analysis tended to show that these ‘variations’ had a considerable range both in grammar and vocabulary.[674] Meanwhile the language of the second column continued to receive a great variety of names which has produced immense confusion. Lenormant, however, heroically adheres to ‘Median,’ because one of the Median tribes is specially distinguished as Aryan, and it was therefore reasonable to suppose that the mass of the people were of different, and presumably of Turanian, race. Professor Sayce admits that it must have been ‘the vernacular of the lower classes of Persia: in other words, of the Medes’; but he preferred to call it Elamite, ‘as less likely to lead to ambiguity and misconception.’ He suggests that Amardian would be still better, for Susiana is always called ‘Khapirti’ in the Median text; and this is evidently the same as the country of the Amardians of Strabo. He showed that its relation to the dialect of Malamir was closer than to that of Old Susian; and he thought there was no doubt that the latter was related to the Akkadian.