370 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



justice, in the very limited time he had at his disposal. The excavations 

 which had been carried on in Assyria and Babylonia, had been continued 

 through six or seven years they had ranged over tracts of country 1,000 

 miles in extent the marbles excavated would be sufficient to load three or 

 four ships, and the historical information contained in them would exceed ten 

 thousand volumes in clay. Of course, in dealing with such a subject he 

 could only select a portion of it and even of that he could only communicate 

 the heads. The part to which he wished to direct their attention was the 

 Cuneiform Inscriptions. This phrase merely signified the wedge-shaped form 

 of writing, and was not employed in any particular language or by one par- 

 ticular nation. The cuneiform system of letters was a species of picture-writ- 

 ing, invented, not by the Semitic inhabitants of Babylon, but by those who 

 preceded them. This writing was, however, reduced by the Semitic race to 

 letters, and adapted to the articulation of their language. Their mode of 

 writing consisted of several elements. There was the ideographic, or picture- 

 writing, and the phonetic, which was equivalent to the alphabet of their 

 language. He had been fortunately able to obtain among the ruins of Nineveh 

 a tablet which actually exhibited the several developments of this system of 

 writing into a regular alphabet. The Cuneiform Inscriptions were divided 

 into three branches Persian, Scythic, and Assyrian; and it was on the 

 third of these that he wished to say a few words. He then proceeded to ex- 

 plain how the decipherment of these inscriptions had been obtained. About 

 twenty years ago his attention had been directed to a series of inscriptions in 

 cuneiform characters on a rock at Behistun, near Kermaixhah. The tablet 

 was divided into three compartments, giving three different versions of the 

 same inscription, and on the simplest of these, the Persian, he set to work, 

 and found by comparing it with the two others that they corresponded, with 

 the exception of two or three groups, from which, on further investigation, he 

 made out Hystaspes, Darius, and Xerxes. By means of these proper names 

 he obtained an insight into the Persian alphabet, and by analyzing the names 

 of the ancestors of Darius and Hystaspes, and obtaining a list of the tributary 

 provinces of Persia he managed to form the alphabet. This was, however, 

 but the first step ; the great object being to decipher the Assyrian inscription, 

 and this could only be done by comparing it with the Persian. The tablet 

 was situated on the face of the rock, 500 feet from the ground, with a preci- 

 pice above it of 1,200 feet, and, in order to reach it, it was necessary to stand 

 on the top rung of a ladder placed almost perpendicular. Nor was this all, 

 ' for there was still the Babylonian to be copied, and it was engraved on the 

 overhanging ledge of rock, which there was no means of reaching but by 

 fastening tent-pegs into the rock, hanging a rope from one to the other, and 

 while thus swinging in mid-air, copying the inscription. An insight into the 

 system of writing being thus obtained, the fortunate discovery of the ruins of 

 Nineveh furnished a great mass of documents to which it might be applied. 

 "Wherever they had found- Uimuli, or any appearance of a ruin, trenches were 

 sunk, galleries opened, and in almost every case they came upon the remains 

 \of inscribed tablets. Whether it was the king who wished to issue a bulletin, 

 a shopkeeper to make up his accounts, the same process had to be gone 



