In June 1846 Hincks began the series of contributions to the subject which he continued down to the time of his death, twenty years later. In his first paper he tells us he had just begun to apply himself to the third Persepolitan, which, he says, he found to agree in ‘character and, to a great extent at least, in language with the Babylonian inscriptions, and to the Assyrian writing in Schulz’s inscriptions.’ ‘In both,’ he says, ‘some of the characters represent elementary sounds and some [represent] combinations. In both, two or more characters are used to represent the same sounds. In both, no vowel is omitted; but vowels and consonants are repeated in two consecutive characters.’ He also ‘found it to be a general rule, though it admits of some exceptions, that when a character occurred in two or more alphabets, it had the same value, or nearly so, in all of them.’ Thus the _pa_ of the second Persepolitan is _pa_ in Assyrian, and _ba_ in Babylonian. He claimed to be able to read the names of ‘Babylon’ and ‘Nineveh’ on certain bricks that had been brought from those places.[780] A few months later he was able to announce that he had ‘made considerable progress in deciphering the Babylonian cursive and also the lapidary character of the East India House inscription.’ He found that the writing in the third Persepolitan column was identical with the former, or cursive, style, and that its title to be called the ‘Babylonian column’ was therefore incontestable. The only predecessor he will allow to have had in this inquiry is Grotefend, who has discovered, he says, that the Babylonian characters are partly syllabic and partly literal; and that ‘certain lapidary characters correspond to certain cursive ones.’ Grotefend, he adds, may also have discovered the values of about ten cursive characters correctly, and possibly of ten others approximately. But he was not aware that ‘several equivalent characters might be in use to represent the same letter or syllable.’[781] Hincks was, however, more adequately supplied with materials to work with. Besides the Persepolitan inscriptions which he had the advantage to study in the more perfect copies of Westergaard, he had also access to the list of provinces at Naksh-i-Rustam lately copied by the same traveller. The discovery that a clay cylinder published by Porter reproduced in cursive characters a portion of the East India House inscription written in the lapidary style had, as we have already seen, enabled him to compare together seventy-six signs in the two different modes of writing. These he now attempted to classify according to what he considered to be their values. The Table is the first of the kind that appeared, and is consequently of very exceptional interest. His decipherment was based in the usual manner upon a comparison between the proper names in the Babylonian and those in the Persian column. ‘But,’ he says, ‘even more [values] were determined