It is, in fact, in these essays that the first real progress in the decipherment of Babylonian was made. In them Hincks laid the foundation upon which all subsequent work was raised, a work to which he himself contributed no small share. The year 1847 was especially rich in contributions to the study. It opened with the remarkable paper we have just reviewed; and during its course Rawlinson expounded his views in the ‘Journal of the Asiatic Society,’ Botta in the ‘Journal Asiatique,’ Longpérier in the ‘Revue Archéologique.’ Löwenstern added another Memoir of greater value than the first, and De Saulcy made his appearance in this field of inquiry by a paper communicated to the Académie des Inscriptions, and by two essays that have exposed him to much criticism. Hincks, as we have seen, had worked exclusively upon the Persepolitan and Babylonian texts; but the great discoveries of Botta and Layard soon diverted attention to the more ample materials that were beginning to pour in from Khorsabad and Nimrud. We have already alluded to the enormous number of different signs that were found to be employed in the Assyrian inscriptions—no less than six hundred and forty-two, according to Botta’s computation. It seemed incredible that they could all convey different shades of sound. Grotefend noticed that even in the third Persepolitan some signs appeared to be interchangeable, and therefore presumably of similar value; and this peculiarity became even more noticeable in Babylonian.[785] Hincks, as we have seen, noticed ‘the equivalence to each other of different lapidary characters, which are constantly transcribed by one and the same cursive character.’ In a paper read before the Académie des Inscriptions in 1845, Botta explained that many Assyrian characters of very different form were frequently substituted for one another, and the inference was that there are several signs to express the same, or nearly the same, sound. Rawlinson’s attention, up to the present, had been almost entirely fixed upon the Persian column of the Behistun inscription, and his version of it appeared early in 1847. He saw that it afforded the ‘only key to the decipherment of the Babylonian alphabet.’[786] We have observed that Grotefend found himself practically limited to four proper names; Löwenstern had only twenty to work upon;[787] while Hincks and De Saulcy, with the addition of the Naksh-i-Rustam inscription, had forty. From the Behistun and other sources now available to Rawlinson, the number gradually rose to ninety-four;[788] and with these before him, he began to apply himself to ‘the determination of the phonetic powers of the characters.’ Among the new names was that of Nebuchadnezzar, which he at once recognised was the same as occurred so frequently on the bricks at Hillah. This discovery was made quite independently of Dr. Hincks; and Layard is inclined to think that, in actual date, the precedence is