When Champollion tackled the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics he was able to make his studies from little pictures. The writing of Persepolis did not show any pictures at all. They consisted of v-shaped figures that were repeated endlessly and suggested nothing at all to the European eye. Nowadays, when the puzzle has been solved we know that the original script of the Sumerians had been a picture-language, quite as much as that of the Egyptians. But whereas the Egyptians at a very early date had discovered the papyrus plant and had been able to paint their images upon a smooth surface, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia had been forced to carve their words into the hard rock of a mountain side or into a soft brick of clay. [Illustration: THE ROCKS OF BEHISTUN.] Driven by necessity they had gradually simplified the original pictures until they devised a system of more than five hundred different letter-combinations which were necessary for their needs. Let me give you a few examples. In the beginning, a star, when drawn with a nail into a brick looked as follows. [Illustration: Star] But after a time the star shape was discarded as being too cumbersome and the figure was given this shape. [Illustration: Asterisk] After a while the meaning of "heaven" was added to that of "star," and the picture was simplified in this way [Illustration: Odd Cross] which made it still more of a puzzle. In the same way an ox changed from [Illustration: Ox Head] into [Illustration: Pattern] A fish changed from [Illustration: Fish] into [Illustration: Fish Scales] The sun, which was originally a plain circle, became [Illustration: Diamond] and if we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an [Illustration: Bike] look like this [Illustration: Pattern]. You will understand how difficult it was to guess at the meaning of these figures but the patient labors of a German schoolmaster by the name of Grotefend was at last rewarded and thirty years after the first publication of Niebuhr's texts and three centuries after the first discovery of the wedge-formed pictures, four letters had been deciphered. These four letters were the D, the A, the R and the Sh. They formed the name of Darheush the King, whom we call Darius. Then occurred one of those events which were only possible in those happy days before the telegraph-wire and the mail-steamer had turned the entire world into one large city. While patient European professors were burning the midnight candles in their attempt to solve the new Asiatic mystery, young Henry Rawlinson was serving his time as a cadet of the British East Indian Company. He used his spare hours to learn Persian and when the Shah of Persia asked the English government for the loan of a few officers to train his native army, Rawlinson was ordered to go to Teheran. He travelled all over Persia and one day he happened to visit the village of Behistun. The Persians called it Bagistana which means the "dwellingplace of the Gods."