The suggestion that the newly-discovered language would turn out to be Semitic was made at an early period of the inquiry. It had not, however, occurred to Grotefend, who described it, in 1837, as Parsi, and in 1840 he had apparently returned to his original opinion that it was Pehlevi, and he expressly rejected a suggestion of Lepsius that the writing might be compared to Phoenician.[748] Before the decipherment of the cuneiform every conceivable hypothesis had been started as to the probable affinities of the Ancient Assyrian language.[749] At length, in 1845, Löwenstern recollected that the Jewish Scriptures place Assur in the same ethnological division as Heber, and he concluded that Assyrian must therefore have been a Semitic speech.[750] In June 1846, Hincks also announced that ‘both Assyrian and Babylonian appear to have much in common with the Semitic languages’;[751] and in the following January he stated emphatically that they ‘exhibit a much greater similarity to the other Semitic languages than I had at first supposed.’ In consequence of this similarity, he now for the first time sets the fashion, afterwards generally adopted, of classifying the signs according to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and he endeavoured for a brief time to assimilate the vowel system to the Semitic method.[752] In a tract written in 1847 Löwenstern dwelt with increasing force upon the Semitic affinities of the language; and he considered that Rawlinson is fundamentally wrong in applying the laws of an Aryan speech ‘to a writing and a language that are Semitic.’[753] It cannot be said that he contributed much towards the proof of his assertion. He was entirely mistaken in the fundamental principle of his comparison, the supposed similarity of the vowel systems of the two languages; but he pointed out the analogy of a few words, such as ‘rabu,’ ‘great,’ to its Hebrew equivalent, and this was the only word which, according to Menant, was then correctly read.[754] In the December previous, Hincks pointed out that the personal pronoun in Assyrian reads ‘a-na-ku,’ but he left it to the learning of his readers to recognise the identity of this word with the Hebrew. This was afterwards done by Botta,[755] who, however, continued on the whole to be doubtful of the Semitic affinities of Assyrian.[756]