So things remained until 1882–3, when I published my Memoir on “The Decipherment of the Vannic Inscriptions” in the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_. Here for the first time translations were given of the inscriptions, together with a commentary, grammar and vocabulary. At the same time I settled the chronological place of the Vannic kings, which had hitherto been uncertain, as well as the geography of the country over which they ruled, and analyzed the ancient religion of the people as made known to us by the decipherment of the texts. In revising and supplementing Schulz’s copies of the inscriptions I had obtained the help of squeezes taken by Layard and Rassam. The task of decipherment was, after all, not so hard a matter as the absence of a bilingual text might make it appear. The want of a bilingual was compensated by the numerous ideographs and “determinatives” scattered through the inscriptions, which indicated their general meaning, pointed out to the decipherer the names of countries, cities, individuals and the like, and gave him the signification of the phonetically-written words which in parallel passages often replaced them. Moreover, the French Assyriologist, Stanislas Guyard, and myself had independently made the discovery that a clause which frequently comes at the end of a Vannic inscription corresponds with the imprecatory formula of the Assyrians, while the decipherment of the inscriptions led to the further discovery that not only had the characters employed in them been borrowed from the Assyrians in the time of the Assyrian conqueror, Assur-natsir-pal, but that many of the phrases used in Assur-natsir-pal’s texts had been borrowed at the same time. Other scholars soon appeared to pursue and extend my work, more especially Drs. Belck and Lehmann, whose expedition to Armenia in 1898 has placed at our disposal a large store of fresh material. Amongst this fresh material are two long bilingual inscriptions, in Vannic and Assyrian, one of which had been discovered by de Morgan in 1890. These have verified my system of decipherment, have increased our knowledge of the Vannic vocabulary, have corrected a few errors, and, I am bound to add, have in one or two cases justified renderings of mine to which exception had been taken. A historical Vannic text can now be read with almost as much certainty as an Assyrian one.