THE LATEST STORY OF THE CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTIONS. 71 
THE LATEST STORY OF THE CUNEIFORM 
INSCRIPTIONS. 
ABSTRACT OF PAPER BY REV. G. EVANS, M.A. 
(Read October 30th, 1884.) 
The lecturer spoke — 1. Of a fourth creation tablet. 
2. Mr. Rassam's discoveries at Sippara : (a) Inscription to the 
sun-god. (b) Inscriptions throwing fresh light on Babylonian 
chronology, (c) Special reference to the king Phul mentioned in 
2nd Kings. 
3. Pinches' discovery of the originals of Babylonian history, and 
4. The cylinder of Nabonidus and its importance. 
Mr. Evans then proceeded to refer to two Babylonian bricks in 
the Museum, observing : The two Babylonian tablets now in the 
Museum of the Athenaeum were brought, as a label testifies, from 
the Blue Mosque at Mooltan by Major-General Henry Jacob (then 
Captain Jacob) in January, 1849, and presented to the Institution 
in 1851. The tablets are of brick, and the writing upon them is 
in the old Babylonian cuneiform character. Inscriptions in the 
same kind of cuneiform writing may be seen in the earlier pages of 
the first volume of the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, 
published by the Trustees of the British Museum, and also in 
most of the inscriptions dating from the time of Nebuchad- 
nezzar III. The one tablet contains seven short lines, and the 
other three long ones. In the former the characters are mostly 
legible, with the exception of two or three, which are somewhat 
indistinct. In the latter nearly a half of the tablet is very indis- 
tinct, but on very close inspection I have discovered what the 
characters must necessarily be. I first set about deciphering the 
former as being the more legible of the two ; and on comparing 
the other with it, I found that both tablets told the same story. 
There were differences in the characters found in the two, and this 
was because on the one tablet a word would be written ideographi- 
