Then came the discovery of Nineveh and the first essays at the interpretation of the Assyro-Babylonian texts. Layard himself made an expedition to Armenia, and besides recopying Schulz’s texts and correcting certain inaccuracies in them, added considerably to the collection. Dr. Hincks, with his usual genius for decipherment, perceived that the syllabary in which they were written was the same as that used at Nineveh, and utilized them for determining the values of some of the Assyrian characters. He succeeded in reading most of the proper names, in assigning the inscriptions to a group of kings whose order he was able to fix, and in pointing out that many of them contain an account of military campaigns and of the amount of booty which had been carried off. But it was also clear that the inscriptions were not in a Semitic language, and as the nominative and accusative of the noun seemed to terminate in _-s_ and _-n_, while the patronymic was expressed by the suffix _-khinis_, the decipherer assumed that the language was Indo-European. The most important texts had been found in or near Van, which had apparently been the capital of the kings by whose orders they had been engraved, and the name of Vannic, accordingly, was given to both texts and language. It was soon recognized that Dr. Hincks had been in error in suggesting that the Vannic language was Indo-European. It was, it is true, inflectional, but with this any resemblance to the languages of the Indo-European family ceased. Nor was there any other language or group of languages to which it appeared to be related, and all attempts failed to advance the decipherment much beyond the point at which it had been left by Hincks. Thanks to the “determinatives,” which indicate proper names and the like, and the ideographs, which are fairly plentiful, the general sense of many of the inscriptions could be made out; but beyond that it seemed impossible to go. Lenormant, indeed, following Hincks, showed that the suffix _-bi_ denoted the first person singular of the verb, and indicated Georgian as possibly a related language; but in the hands of other would-be decipherers, like Robert and Mordtmann, there was retrogression instead of advance. [Illustration: THE GARDENS AND HILL OF DHUSPAS OR VAN.]