At first indeed Rawlinson was much more impressed by the diversity than by the similarity of the signs, and he described them as ‘constituting varieties of alphabetical formation.’ He divided Babylonian into the writing of the third Persepolitan and that of the bricks and cylinders; the latter he considered was the primitive form ‘which must have embodied the vernacular dialect of Shinar, when the earth was of one language and one speech.’ Assyrian he also divided into two classes, Assyrian proper and Medo-Assyrian or Vannic; but he also distinguished Assyrian proper into two subdivisions, representing the lapidary and the running hand—a specimen of the latter being the Taylor prism. The Elymaean inscriptions he placed in a class apart, ‘as entitled to an independent rank.’ He pointed out that even the third Persepolitan writing is not identical with the cursive Babylonian, and that the variation is sufficient to constitute a serious impediment to study. The writing on the Assyrian cylinders is ‘quite distinct from any variety of character which occurs on similar relics at Babylon’; and he found ‘characters at Van that never occur at Khorsabad and _vice versa_.’ He cannot, therefore, agree with Botta that they all ‘belong to one single alphabetical system,’ and that the differences are merely ‘varieties of hand.’[735] Farther study, however, led him to alter his opinion, and in 1850 he admits that ‘there is no doubt but that the alphabets of Assyria, of Armenia, of Babylonia, of Susiana and of Elymais are, so far as essentials are concerned, one and the same. There are peculiarities of form, a limitation of usage—but unquestionably the alphabets are “au fond” identical.’ Mr. Layard had also arrived at the same conclusion. In his opinion, the varieties appear to be mere ‘caligraphical distinctions.’[736] The same important discovery was soon afterwards extended, as we have already related, to include the writing in the second or Susian column of the Persepolitan inscriptions. In 1846, Hincks called attention to the similarity that existed between them. Both the Babylonian and Assyrian modes of writing, he says, ‘agree in principle with the second Persepolitan,’ and he farther observed that where the characters are the same, they have generally the same, or nearly the same, value in all three.[737] It is curious that Botta was quite unable to trace the existence of this resemblance. Writing of the three columns, he says: ‘The elements of the groups are in each quite different, and even when the form agrees the sound is quite different’; and this opinion was shared by Westergaard, who, as we have said, maintained that the various species of cuneiform writing ‘differed from one another in the shape of nearly every letter or group.’[738]