But the inscription to which he now more particularly drew attention was recently found by Mr. Layard on a colossal bull at the great entrance of the Kouyunjik Palace; and Rawlinson speedily recognised that it contained the Annals of Sennacherib, its founder, and son of Sargon. The annals extend only to the seventh year of the king, but they recount the subjugation of Babylon in the beginning of his reign, and the defeat of Hezekiah and the capture of Jerusalem in his third year. The narrative agrees with what was already known from the Hebrew writings and from Polyhistor. The discovery, in a cuneiform inscription, of the three names Hezekiah, Jerusalem and Judah, and an account of events related in the Book of Kings, naturally stimulated the interest of a wider public than is generally occupied with archæology.[842] From this period dates the great popularity these studies enjoyed for a time, a popularity that culminated more than twenty-five years later by the despatch of George Smith on a mission to the East by the ‘Daily Telegraph.’ A year after the publication of the third column of the Behistun inscription, Hincks read a paper ‘On the Assyrio-Babylonian Phonetic Characters’ (1852), which may be regarded as having closed the early stage of inquiry into the subject.[843] In this essay he contributes no less than a hundred and eighteen new values, of which sixty-eight certainly, and possibly more, are correct. When these are added to the Syllabarium of Rawlinson, upwards of two hundred correct signs, in addition to those for the vowels and diphthongs, were now at the disposal of the decipherer. It had also been proved conclusively that ‘the characters all represent syllables and were originally intended to represent a non-Semitic language.’ In opposition to the system that still found an advocate in De Saulcy, it was shown that ‘instead of the vowels being unrepresented, or only represented by points, as in all Semitic writing that was first applied to a Semitic language, we have in the cuneatic inscriptions every vowel definitely expressed.’ This new Syllabarium demonstrates for the first time how extensively polyphony prevailed. Indeed one of its chief merits consists in the enumeration of the different values expressed by the same sign. This had been done to a slight extent by Rawlinson, who puts the polyphones in an apologetic manner in a separate column, under the heading ‘Phonetic Powers arising from Ideographic Values.’ This excited the contemptuous criticism of De Saulcy, who was still so far from appreciating the true nature of the language that he declared: ‘Either this language was for the Assyrian an inextricable _gâchis_, or one or other of these values must be chosen.’[844] The present Memoir of Hincks, which must soon after have fallen into his hands, ought to have convinced him that the former alternative is the only one available. Indeed the number of polyphones is