One of the most interesting parts of Professor Sayce’s essay was the publication of ‘a revised list of the powers of the Elamite’ (_i.e._ Susian) ‘character, which can now be determined by means of the Assyrian syllabary.’[675] Written in 1874, this document illustrates the process of development that occurred between the two works of Oppert, that of 1859 and the one of 1879, to be mentioned shortly. It will be recollected that we left him with seven wrong values, six nearly correct and seven omitted altogether. We find that when Sayce wrote, four of the first and one of the second had been corrected, and three signs omitted by Oppert were now provided with correct, or nearly correct, values. At the same time a plentiful crop of fresh errors was introduced. Six or seven values, correctly ascertained in 1859, were now rejected and erroneous ones substituted. At least three of the values proposed for the signs omitted by Oppert were very far indeed from the mark. The ideogram for ‘horse’ was rejected in favour of the syllable _az_, which may have suggested to Weisbach the substitution of ‘donkey’ in place of the nobler quadruped preferred by Oppert. The two writers who have brought the knowledge of the Median syllabary to its present standard are Oppert and Weisbach: the former in a special treatise written in 1879 (‘Le Peuple des Mèdes’) long remained the leading authority on the subject, and his conclusions have in the main derived confirmation from the more recent investigations of Weisbach on the language of the second column, which appeared in 1890. With very few exceptions, to be noticed later, both scholars are in substantial agreement as to the values of the signs; and it is this agreement that forms for the present the standard of right and wrong, by which the efforts of their predecessors have been judged. Both writers were guided to a large extent by the values of the corresponding Babylonian characters.[676] Oppert, as was said, thought he could trace a resemblance between ninety-six of the Median signs and their Babylonian equivalents. In each case, the sound as well as the form of the character was appropriated. Weisbach is much less struck by the general application of this law. He fully admits the strong similarity of many of the signs, but some have, he says, so far diverged from their original types as to be hardly recognisable. Others, he thinks, were borrowed from New Assyrian, and a few from older forms. Indeed he is, on the whole, indisposed to derive the syllabary direct from the New Babylonian. He thinks it is more properly to be traced through the writing of Malamir to the Old Susian, and the development from the Old Babylonian of the latter was a parallel and independent process similar to that which produced the New Babylonian. But as the Old Susian character has not yet been sufficiently investigated, he restricts his comparison to the New Babylonian, and he points out some of the principles that were followed