The gradual changes that took place in the cuneiform system of writing, and the adaptation of it to the requirements of Semitic speech, contributed to the creation of an artificial and quite unclassical Sumerian, and the lexical tablets became filled with uses and combinations of characters which were professedly Sumerian but really Semitic in origin. All this renders the decipherment of a Sumerian text even now a difficult affair, and many years must elapse before we can say that the stage of decipherment is definitely passed and that the scholar may content himself with a purely philological treatment of the language. But Sumerian was not the only new language outside the circle recognized by the Persian monarchs which the decipherment of the cuneiform characters has revealed to us. Even before the discovery of Sumerian, cuneiform inscriptions had been copied on the rocks and quarried stones of Armenia, which, when the characters composing them came to be read, proved to belong to a language as novel and as apparently unrelated to any other as Sumerian itself. As far back as 1826 a young scholar of the name of Schulz had been sent by the French Government to Van in Armenia, where, according to Armenian writers, Semiramis, the fabled queen of Assyria, had once left her monuments. Here Schulz actually found that the cliff on which the ancient fortress of the city stood was covered with lines of cuneiform characters, and similar inscriptions soon came to light in other parts of the country. Before Schulz, however, could return to Europe he was murdered (in 1829) by a Kurdish chief, whose guest he had been. But his papers were recovered, and the copies of the inscriptions he had made were published in 1840 in the _Journal Asiatique_. The first to attempt to read them was Dr. Hincks, whom no problem in decipherment ever seemed to baffle.[37] The characters, he showed, were practically identical with those found in the Assyrian texts, the values of many of which had now been ascertained; but Hincks, with his usual acuteness, went on to use the Armenian or Vannic inscriptions for settling the values of other Assyrian characters which had not as yet been determined. In 1848 he was already able to read the names of the Vannic kings and fix their succession, to make out the sense of several passages in the texts, and to indicate the nominative and accusative suffixes of the noun. Here Vannic decipherment rested for many years. There was no difficulty in reading the inscriptions phonetically, for they were written in a very simplified form of the Assyrian syllabary; but the language which was thus revealed stood isolated and alone, without linguistic kindred either ancient or modern. The various attempts made to decipher it were all failures.