It was used first in Mesopotamia, and then in Persia, and the districts north of Nineveh. When it became extinct, for nearly sixteen hundred years, its very existence was absolutely forgotten. It was not until the year 1618 that Garcia de Sylva Figuëroa, ambassador of Philip III of Spain, on seeing them, felt convinced that these inscriptions, in a writing to which no one in the wide world possessed a key, must mean something. Therefore he had a line of them copied. In 1693 they were supposed to be "the ancient writings of the Gaures." Hyde, in 1700, trifled with them, and gave them credit for being nothing more than the architect's fancies. Witte saw in them nothing but the disfigurations of many generations of worms. Others had their own speculations as to their meaning. But Karsten Niebuhr took a big step higher and nearer to their real meaning. He made out that there were three cuneiform alphabets, because of the threefold inscriptions at Persepolis. In 1802 Grotefend, of Hanover, put before the Academy of Göttingen the first cuneiform alphabet. Then, among other great investigators, followed Rawlinson. The first of these alphabets is Persian; the second the Median; the third the Babylonian. Deutsch tells us that, originally, the cuneiform signs were pictures of objects drawn in outline on a vegetable substance, known by the native name of _likhusi_. He thinks it probable that the supply of this was not equal to the demand, for early in the Babylonish history clay was used instead of _likhusi_. (This letter is undated.) "My dear Nicholson, "I cannot remember the longitude or latitude of my hearing from you or writing to you, and do not know whether I have to apologize for neglecting you, so absorbed (it seems) have I been. I cannot even tell whether I told you of my two months' devotion to Cuneiformism, and my study of the Medo- Persian and Scythian inscriptions as _promeletemata_ of an article in the November _Fraser's Magazine_. "I found the Assyrian useless to dabble in: it is so vast, so fragmentary, so embarrassed by dogmatic hypotheses and assertions, and deterring complications, that one must give oneself _wholly_ to it for any chance of getting to its foundations. But I feel on perfectly solid ground in Medo- Persian or Scythian. Difficulties in them are like difficulties in Greek or Sanscrit: that is all. In the Assyrian, I do not yet know whether to believe at least half of the characters, and many fundamental alleged principles; and I get no satisfaction in what I read....