Down to the time we have now reached the progress made was disappointing. We have seen that much speculation was indulged as to the affinity of the language and the people to whom it should properly be attributed; but very little knowledge of the language itself had been acquired. Dr. Hincks had read forty-eight signs with sufficient correctness, and De Saulcy thirty-one, out of the one hundred and eleven with which the language is written; but both scholars were encumbered by the multitude of unknown or erroneous values. In 1852, however, a considerable step was made in advance. On July 3 of that year, Mr. Norris read a paper to the Asiatic Society on the result of his study of the Median column of the Behistun inscription with which Colonel Rawlinson had entrusted him; but the essay did not appear in the Journal in its completed form till 1855. The much greater diversity of material at his command enabled him to dispose of many difficulties that had obstructed earlier scholars. In the first place, he was able to increase the number of signs from the eighty-two that had puzzled his predecessors to one hundred and three, and to all of these he endeavoured to assign values. He was successful with fifty-seven, and twenty-one others were sufficiently correct for purposes of transliteration, making a total of seventy-eight in addition to two determinatives. One other sign has not even yet been satisfactorily settled,[652] and he still had twenty-four incorrect values. Unlike many decipherers, however, he was able to distinguish the gradations of certainty attaching to the values he assigned. Those that appear in his list allied to any vowel other than _a_, _i_ or _u_ are to be regarded as questionable. He estimated their number with tolerable accuracy at about twenty. He fully recognised the true syllabic character of the language. ‘Each character,’ he says, ‘represents a syllable which may be either a single vowel or a consonant and vowel, or two consonants with a vowel between them.’[653] He has, however, given six signs in his list a purely consonantal value, _m_, _r_, _s_ and _t_, the two latter being each represented by two signs.[654] Four of these are correct, but the second signs for s and t are both wrong. He limited the vowels to _a_, _i_ and _u_, but he has also allowed _e_ to appear in his list, because he found a sign in Median that corresponds exactly to the Babylonian for that letter, and it is now admitted as correct. He reckoned eleven initial consonantal sounds: they include the consonants already named with the exception of _m_, together with _th_, _ch_, _p_, _k_, _v_, _l_, _n_ and _y_. With these united to one of the three vowels all the syllables in the language are formed. The double syllables are composed of the same consonantal sounds (excluding _th_ and _y_), separated by _a_. He did not consider that any of the signs represented the union of two consonants separated by _i_ or _u_, an opinion that has