seventeen pages, and the achievement cannot fail to elicit unqualified admiration. The unfortunate failure to identify a large proportion of the proper names gives to it an unreal appearance that no doubt strikes the modern student unfavourably and may at first lead him to exaggerate its deficiencies. If, however, he is careful to remember that it is the first attempt of the kind ever made, his feelings will soon turn to astonishment that so much should have been correctly made out of what had hitherto been absolutely unintelligible. He may profitably compare a few passages with a modern version. For example, Temenbar begins: ‘At the commencement of my reign after that I was established on the throne I assembled the chiefs of my people and came down into the plains of Esmes, where I took the city of Haridu, the chief city belonging to Nakharmi.’ A recent translation of the same passage runs: ‘At the beginning of my reign when on the throne of the kingdom I had seated myself in state, my chariots and [my] armies I assembled. Into the depths of the land of Simesi I penetrated; Aridu the strong city of Ninni I captured.’ Again Rawlinson translates: ‘I went out from the city of Nineveh and crossing the Euphrates I attacked and defeated Ahuni, the son of Hateni, in the city of Sitrat, which was situated upon the Euphrates, and which Ahuni had made one of his capitals. Ahuni, the son of Hateni, with his gods and his chief priests, his horses, his sons and his daughters and all his men of war, I brought away to my country of Assyria.’ The modern version says: ‘I departed from Nineveh; the Euphrates I crossed at its flood; I marched against Akhuni, the son of Adini. The country of Shitamrat, a mountain peak on the banks of the Euphrates, he made his stronghold. The peak of the mountain I captured; Akhuni, with his gods, his chariots, his horses, his sons, his daughters and his army, I carried away and to my city of Assur I brought’;[824] and so on through the events of thirty-one years of the reign of the great king. On the other hand, it would be too much to say that even the sense is always preserved. There are, in fact, many and serious divergencies from the correct translation as it now stands, after more than forty years’ continuous study. It is impossible that it could have been otherwise with the means then at hand. The wonder is that so much could have been accomplished with one hundred and fifty imperfectly understood characters; and with only five hundred words arrived at conjecturally out of some six thousand. Rawlinson himself warned the reader that here and there ‘little dependence can be placed on the translation’; and he confesses that sometimes he could not ‘conjecture even the meaning of several passages.’ Notwithstanding his difficulty with the proper names, a host of new ones were now for the first time identified: Amanus; the Hittites; Chaldæans; the rivers Tigris, Euphrates, Belikh; the cities of Borsippa, Tyre, Sidon, Gabal, Caleh.