But this third species of writing, which we must henceforth term Babylonian or Assyrian, presented extraordinary difficulties. Instead of an alphabet of forty-two letters, the decipherer was confronted by an enormous number of different characters, while no indication was given of the separation of one word from another. Moreover the forms of the characters as found on the Persepolitan monuments differed considerably from those found on the Babylonian monuments, which again differed greatly from each other. On the seal-cylinders, more especially, they assumed the most complicated shapes, between which and the Persepolitan forms it was often impossible to trace any likeness whatever. Suddenly a discovery was made which furnished an abundance of new material and incited the decipherer to fresh efforts. In 1842 Botta was sent to Mossul as French Consul, and at Mohl’s instigation began to excavate on the site of Nineveh. His first essays there not proving very successful, he transferred his workmen further north, to the mound of Khorsabad, and there laid bare the ruins of a large and splendid palace which subsequently turned out to be that of Sargon. In the autumn of 1845 the excavations of Botta were succeeded by those of Layard, first at Nimrûd (the ancient Calah), and then at Kûyunjik or Nineveh, the result being to fill the British Museum with bas-reliefs covered with cuneiform writing and with other relics of Assyrian civilization. The inscriptions brought to light by Botta were copied and published by him in 1846–50.[9] The sumptuous work which was dedicated to them was followed by a smaller and cheaper edition, and the author gave further help to the student by classifying the characters, which amounted to as many as 642.[10] His work proved conclusively the identity of the script used at Nineveh with that of the third transcripts on the Persian monuments, as well as the substantial agreement of the groups of characters occurring in each. The Irish scholar Dr. Hincks--one of the most remarkable and acute decipherers that have ever lived--was already at work on the newly-found texts. In 1847 he published a long article on “The Three Kinds of Persepolitan Writing,”[11] and, two years later, another “On the Khorsabad Inscriptions.”[12] In 1850 he read a Paper before the British Association,[13] summing up his conclusions and announcing the important discovery that the Assyrian characters were syllabic and not alphabetic, as had hitherto been supposed. With this discovery the scientific decipherment of the Assyrian inscriptions actually begins.