A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



like Greek and Latin, merely passed from practical 

 every-day use to the closet of the scholar, but utterly 

 and absolutely forgotten by all the world. Such being 

 the case, it is nothing less than marvellous that it 

 should have been restored. 



It is but fair to add that this restoration probably 

 never would have been effected, with Assyrian or with 

 Egyptian, had the language in dying left no cognate 

 successor ; for the powers of modern linguistry , though 

 great, are not actually miraculous. But, fortunately, 

 a language once developed is not blotted out in toto; 

 it merely outlives its usefulness and is gradually sup- 

 planted, its successor retaining many traces of its 

 origin. So, just as Latin, for example, has its living 

 representatives in Italian and the other Romance 

 tongues, the language of Assyria is represented by 

 cognate Semitic languages. As it chances, however, 

 these have been of aid rather in the later stages of 

 Assyrian study than at the very outset; and the first 

 clew to the message of the cuneiform writing came 

 through a slightly different channel. 



Curiously enough, it was a trilingual inscription that 

 gave the clew, as in the case of the Rosetta Stone, 

 though with very striking difference withal. The tri- 

 lingual inscription now in question, instead of being a 

 small, portable monument, covers the surface of a 

 massive bluff at Behistun in western Persia. More- 

 over, all three of its inscriptions are in cuneiform char- 

 acters, and all three are in languages that at the be- 

 ginning of our century were absolutely unknown. 

 This inscription itself, as a striking monument of un- 

 known import, had been seen by successive genera- 



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