characters, and he found that ninety-eight or a hundred were reproduced identically at Khorsabad.[730] When he began to write upon this subject he had only just received a copy of the East India House inscription, and it was some time before he could hazard an opinion as to the relationship of the New Assyrian to the Old Babylonian.[731] The result of a first study of the two hundred and eighty-seven signs in the East India House inscription was the identification of a hundred and seven of the signs with the Assyrian, and a more careful investigation ultimately raised the number to one hundred and seventy-nine.[732] The remaining one hundred and eight have not, he says, any proper equivalent at Khorsabad. He was inclined to attribute a good deal of the diversity to the material and the instrument used. Where, for example, the stone was brittle, as at Van, the engraver showed a disinclination to make the wedges cross, and the chisel would naturally produce a different effect from the impress of a wedge upon soft clay. Much also was, no doubt, due to the individuality of the scribes, who seemed to think they might increase or diminish the number of the wedges according to fancy. Others were simple errors on the part of the original scribe or his copyist, and some may have been intended for abbreviations. He did not believe it possible to establish any fundamental distinctions between any of these styles. Thus he thought the Taylor prism combined the differences peculiar to Nineveh and Babylon so equally that it would be impossible to decide to which class it really belongs. He concluded, therefore, that, notwithstanding considerable apparent variety, there was substantial identity; and that one and the same mode of writing prevailed in Assyria and Babylon, at Van and Persepolis. Indeed he went so far as to suppose that whoever could read a Khorsabad inscription would be able also to read all the others. It is true he could not himself read or pronounce a single word with any degree of certainty;[733] and Rawlinson declared that his special studies afforded him no facility. He could, he says, read the Babylonian of the third column, but he has not ‘yet succeeded in identifying a single name in the tablets of Van or Khorsabad.’[734]