pronunciation of about a hundred and forty words was already known. The remarkable success of Oppert was due almost entirely to the successful comparison of the Median and Babylonian signs; and it had something of an accidental character, for it appeared in a work chiefly devoted to Assyrian and without special reference to this particular branch of the subject. Indeed the attention of scholars was now so thoroughly absorbed by the study of Assyrian and the many new discoveries it opened to their view, that the second column fell into comparative neglect. Mordtmann wrote papers upon it in 1862, and again in 1870, in the ‘German Oriental Gazette,’ in which he appears to have ignored the results already attained, and to have given different values to some of the signs. He called the language Susian, in consequence of the order in which the provinces of ‘Persia, Susiana and Babylon’ occur in the Behistun inscription, and also because Susa bears an entirely different name in the Median from that given to it in the Persian, while the other names are alike in both. In support of his opinion he was the first to show that the inscriptions on some bricks found at Susa, which were then beginning to attract attention, though written in a different dialect, were evidently similar in speech and writing to the second column. It will be recollected that Rawlinson visited Susa in 1836, and observed a few bricks and a broken obelisk bearing the peculiar inscriptions to which we have just referred. He considered the style of writing to be ‘the farthest removed of any from the original Assyrian type,’ and he surmised that the language is ‘not even, I think, of the Semitic family.’[668] In 1852, Loftus collected a few other inscriptions in the same character and language, which were sent to Rawlinson. Mr. Norris, who announced this acquisition in his Median Memoir, stated that Rawlinson still thought that the characters were those of ‘the Assyrian alphabet,’ but in a different language, and that he had made out sufficient to show that they belonged to Susian kings who were anterior to Darius.[669]