The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions was the archæological romance of the nineteenth century. There was no Rosetta stone to offer a clue to their meaning; the very names of the Assyrian kings and of the gods they worshipped had been lost and forgotten; and the characters themselves were but conventional groups of wedges, not pictures of objects and ideas like the hieroglyphs of Egypt. The decipherment started with the guess of a classical scholar who knew no Oriental languages and had never travelled in the East. And yet it is upon this guess that the vast superstructure of cuneiform decipherment has been slowly reared, with its ever-increasing mass of literature in numerous languages, the very existence of some of which had been previously unknown, and with its revelation of a civilized world that had faded out of sight before Greek history began. The ancient East has risen, as it were, from the dead, with its politics and its wars, its law and its trade, its art, its industries and its science. And this revelation of a new world, this resurrection of a dead past, has started from a successful guess. But the guess had been made in accordance with scientific method and had scientific reasons behind it, and it has proved to be the fruitful seed of an overspreading tree. Seventy years ago a single small case was sufficient to hold all the Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities possessed by the British Museum. They had been collected by Rich, to whom we owe the first accurate plans of the sites of Babylon and Nineveh. But the cuneiform characters found on the seals and clay cylinders of Babylonia were not the only characters of the kind that were known. Similar characters had been noticed by travellers on the walls of the ruined palaces of Persepolis in Persia. As far back as 1621 the Italian traveller Pietro della Valle had copied two or three of these, which he reproduced in the account of his travels some thirty years later. One of the first acts of the newly-founded Royal Society of Great Britain was to ask in their _Philosophical Transactions_ (p. 420) whether some draughtsman could not be found to copy the bas-reliefs and inscriptions which had thus been observed at Persepolis, though the only result of the inquiry was that a few years afterwards (in June 1693) two lines of cuneiform were published in the _Transactions_ from the papers of a Mr. Samuel Flower, who had been the agent of the East India Company in Persia. The editor of the _Transactions_ correctly concluded that the inscriptions were to be read from left to right. The cuneiform characters which were printed in the _Transactions_ were, however, not the first specimens of cuneiform script that had been published in England. Thomas Herbert, in the fourth edition of his Travels, which appeared in 1677, had already given three lines of characters taken indifferently from the three classes of inscriptions engraved on the