Notwithstanding, however, the attitude of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, scholars like De Sacy, Heeren, and others were not slow to recognize the importance of Grotefend’s far-reaching discoveries. The number of investigators in the studies of Europe and in the ruin-dotted plains of Persia and Mesopotamia gradually increased. The careful researches of Niebuhr were followed in the first half of the nineteenth century by the painstaking observations of Rich, Ker Porter, and Colonel Chesney. But while those noted explorers were winning laurels in the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, Sir Henry Rawlinson “forced the inaccessible rock of Behistun to surrender the great trilingual inscription of Darius, which, in the quietude of his study on the Tigris, became the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of Assyriology and in his master hand the key to the understanding of the Assyrian documents.”[372] While Rawlinson was conducting his celebrated investigations relating to the trilingual inscription of Behistun, and Layard and Rassam were unearthing the priceless documents of Asurbanipal’s library, Edward Hincks in Ireland, Edwin Norris in England, Eugène Burnouf and M. de Saulcy in France, Westergaard, a Dane, and Lassen, a Norwegian, both living in Germany, were astonishing the learned world by their wonderful contributions towards the decipherment of the inscriptions of Persepolis and Behistun and of tablets and seals and cylinders taken from the temples and palaces of Assyria and Babylonia. Thanks to the investigators named and to a rapidly increasing number of others, the decipherment of Assyrian inscription was gradually assuming the dignity of an exact science. But there were still scholars of acknowledged eminence who questioned the validity of the system employed and who openly expressed grave doubts about the translations of the cuneiform inscriptions which had been published by divers scholars of Great Britain and the Continent. Finally, in 1857, it was suggested to make a test which should silence all objectors and demonstrate that the method of the decipherers reposed on a scientific basis. An Assyrian text was translated independently by Hincks, Talbot, Oppert, and Rawlinson, and sent sealed to the Royal Asiatic Society. When these versions were compared by a committee of distinguished scholars they were found to show such a remarkable correspondence that there could no longer be any reasonable doubt as to the system of decipherment or the substantial accuracy of the four translations which had been offered to the distinguished committee of the Royal Asiatic Society.