finished, and further the characters on the monuments from Persepolis differed very considerably from those found on the Babylonian monuments, which also varied among themselves very greatly. On the seal-cylinders they were especially complicated, and it was almost impossible to see any resemblance whatever between the characters on the latter and those of the Persepolitan inscriptions. But light was to come from another quarter: in 1842 Botta, French Consul at Mosul, began excavating on the site of Nineveh, but not meeting with success he transferred his operations to Khorsabad further north, and there excavated a large palace which subsequently turned out to be that of Sargon. In 1845 Layard entered the field, and carried on most successful excavations at Nimrûd (the ancient Calah) and then at Kouyunjik, one of the mounds which represents the site of Nineveh. Botta published the inscriptions he had found in 1846-50, and also classified the signs, which numbered 642, while he further demonstrated the identity of the cuneiform system of the Nineveh inscriptions with that of the third column on the Persepolitan monuments, but it was reserved for the incomparable Hincks to discover the fact that the Assyrian cuneiform system was syllabic and not alphabetic like the Persian. The proper names in the Persian columns gave the first clue to the decipherment of the Assyrian columns. The values thus obtained for some of the Assyrian signs made it possible to read many of the words, their meanings being determined by a comparison with the Persian columns. It was then seen that Assyrian was a Semitic language and resembled Hebrew in particular; this was proved conclusively by De Saulcy in 1849. In 1850 Rawlinson submitted a translation of the inscription on the Black obelisk of Shalmaneser II to the Royal Asiatic Society, a translation which was in the main correct, and in the following year he published the text and translation of the Assyrian transcript on the Behistun inscription, and announced two facts, one already known, namely that the Assyrian signs can be used ideographically, i.e. to denote an object or idea, as well as to represent merely a syllable, the other fact was that the characters were polyphonous, i.e. could represent more than one syllable each: this was again proved to demonstration by the redoubtable Hincks. Both facts alike argued that the cursive Assyrian cuneiform had its origin in picture writing, for in the latest times when cuneiform was as it were fully stereotyped, the signs were still used alone singly to represent an object or an idea, and also the polyphonous character of the individual signs testified to the same origin, for example the picture of an arm would signify not merely an “arm” but also “strength,” “might,” “grasp,” etc., and thus though the sign would—at least originally—only have one general idea attached to it, it would have quite a number of phonetic values: these phonetic values would in