He was, moreover, mistaken as to the age of the monument itself, which he assigned to too early an epoch. It was Dr. Hincks who again settled the question, by reading upon it the names of Hazael of Damascus and Jehu of Israel.[17] This was one of the first-fruits of his discovery of the syllabic character of the Assyrian signs. Another was the discovery of the name of Sennacherib,[18] as well as those of Hezekiah and Jerusalem.[19] Shortly before this Hincks had made another discovery of importance. He had deciphered the names of Nebuchadrezzar and his father on the bricks of Babylon,[20] and had further shown that a cylinder of Nebuchadrezzar brought from Babylon by Sir Robert Ker-Porter, and written in the cuneiform characters met with on the Persian monuments, contained the same text as another cylinder obtained by Sir Harford Jones, and inscribed with characters of the most complex kind. A comparison of the two texts gave him the values of the latter characters, which we now know to represent the archaic Babylonian forms of the cuneiform signs. But the decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian script was not yet complete. In 1851 Rawlinson’s long-promised Memoir on the Babylonian version of the inscription of Behistun was given to the world,[21] and consisted of the cuneiform text, with translation, grammar and commentary, besides a list of 242 characters. It announced, moreover, two facts about these characters, one of which had already been recognized, while the second was received by the Orientalists with shouts of incredulity. The first fact was that the characters, besides having phonetic values, could also be used ideographically to denote objects and ideas. The second fact was that they were polyphonous, each character possessing more than one phonetic value. For once the sceptics seemed to have common-sense upon their side. How, it was asked, could a system of writing be read the symbols of which might be pronounced sometimes in one way, sometimes in another? Anything could be made out of anything upon such principles, and a method of interpretation which ended in such a result was pronounced to be self-condemned. Hincks, however, once more entered the field and demonstrated that Rawlinson was right.[22] Hincks was an Egyptologist, and consequently the polyphony of the cuneiform characters was not to him a new and startling phenomenon. It merely showed that they must once have been pictorial--as, indeed, their ideographic use also indicated--and in a picture-writing each picture could necessarily be represented by more than one word, and therefore by more than one phonetic value, when the pronunciation of the word came to be employed phonetically. The picture of a foot, for instance, would denote not only a “foot,” but also such ideas as “go,” “run,” “walk,” each of which would become one of its phonetic values with the development of the picture into a conventional syllabic sign.