A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



Schrader, in Germany, though a host of other scholars 

 soon entered the field. 



This great linguistic feat was accomplished about 

 the middle of the nineteenth century. But so great 

 a feat was it that many scholars of the highest stand- 

 ing, including Joseph Erneste Renan, in France, and 

 Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, in England, declined at first 

 to accept the results, contending that the Assyriolo- 

 gists had merely deceived themselves by creating an 

 arbitrary language. The matter was put to a test in 

 1855 at the suggestion of Mr. Fox-Talbot, when four 

 scholars, one being Mr. Talbot himself and the others 

 General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks, and Professor 

 Oppert, laid before the Royal Asiatic Society their in- 

 dependent interpretations of a hitherto untranslated 

 Assyrian text. A committee of the society, including 

 England's greatest historian of the century, George 

 Grote, broke the seals of the four translations, and re- 

 ported that they found them unequivocally in accord 

 as regards their main purport, and even surprisingly 

 uniform as regards the phraseology of certain passages 

 in short, as closely similar as translations from the 

 obscure texts of any difficult language ever are. This 

 decision gave the work of the Assyriologists official 

 status, and the reliability of their method has never 

 since been in question. Henceforth Assyriology was 

 an established science. 



