Thanks to the brilliant penetration of the French Assyriologist, Dr. Scheil, the outlines of the language of the ancient kingdom of Elam can now be sketched with a fair amount of completeness and accuracy.[31] The name of Neo-Susian has by common consent been conferred upon the language of the second Achæmenian transcripts; perhaps Neo-Elamite would be better. At all events it represents the language of the second capital of the Persian Empire as it was spoken in the age of Darius and his successors, and is a lineal descendant of the old agglutinative language of Elam. The three systems of cuneiform script, which a hundred years ago seemed so impenetrable in their mystery, have thus, one by one, been forced to yield their secrets. But as each in turn has been deciphered, fresh forms of cuneiform writing and new languages expressed in cuneiform characters have come to light. The first to emerge was that agglutinative language of primitive Chaldæa which so scandalized the philological world and excited such strong distrust of the Assyriologists. The question of the name by which it should be called has been set at rest by the discovery of tablets in which its native designation is made known to us. Some years ago Bezold published a bilingual text in which it is termed “the language of Sumer,”[32] and more recently Messerschmidt has edited a bilingual inscription of the Babylonian king Samsu-ditana in which the Semitic “translation” is described as “Akkadian.”[33] Oppert is thus shown to have been right in the name which he proposed to give to the language of the inventors of the cuneiform script.