Botta succeeded in dividing nearly the whole of the Bull inscription correctly into its words, but the difficulty of this task was still so great that even he occasionally fell into error. He also first pointed out that the sign Löwenstern mistook for two signs was one and indivisible. He detected the determinative sign for ‘country’ that is used in the Khorsabad inscription, and he made the important suggestion that the phonetic value of the sign for ‘king’ is ‘sar.’[801] Longpérier at once connected this word with its Hebrew equivalent, and showed that it is used to express the first syllable in the name of the Khorsabad king ‘Sar-gin.’ He made an attempt to decipher an inscription on the leg of the Khorsabad bull, and he was the first to recognise ‘Assur.’ His translation runs thus: ‘Glorious [is] Sargon, King, great King, King of Kings, King of the country of Assur.’[802] He also showed that ‘great’ might be expressed by one sign only,[803] which added another step to the discovery of the phonetic complement begun by Löwenstern. This short contribution to the ‘Revue Archéologique’ shows that Longpérier possessed to a high degree a true aptitude for these studies; and if he had been able to pursue them, he might have vindicated for France a more favourable position than it was her fortune to obtain. The difficulty in these matters of recognising truth from error was nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the case of the identification of ‘Sargon’ by Longpérier. So far was the correctness of this ingenious suggestion from gaining immediate acceptance, that we find Hincks subsequently conjectures that the name of the father of Sennacherib should be read ‘Ni-Shar.’[804] A later attempt, in 1849, which resulted in ‘Kin-nil-li-n’a’ showed little improvement. Even in 1850 Rawlinson is still so far afield that he translates it ‘Arko-tsin’; and it is not till August 1851 that he accepts ‘Sargina,’ the reading given four years previously by Longpérier.[805] Yet the question was of no little interest, for it really settled the controversy between Hincks and Rawlinson as to the date of the Lower Assyrian dynasty in favour of the former. It was not till Rawlinson read ‘Sennacherib’ in a tablet found by Layard at Kouyunjik that he would acknowledge his error, and admit that there was at last found ‘a tangible starting place for chronology.’ Hincks was satisfied, two years earlier, that he had identified the names of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon.