In 1849, however, he contributed two pamphlets which it is admitted were of greater importance. In the first, which appeared on September 14, he undertook a transcription of the Babylonian column of the Elvend inscription with translation and analysis. He succeeded, we are told, in separating the Babylonian signs correctly, so that each group could be compared word for word with the Persian. In his analysis he is said to have justified the values he attributed to each sign, and the meaning he attached to each word. He regarded the signs as purely consonantal, and sought to bring them all into relation with the twenty-two Hebrew letters. He seems to have thought that some of the signs are capable of division: one portion fixed, representing the consonant, and the other a variable appendix indicating the vowel. In the second pamphlet, dated November 27, he treated the Persepolitan inscriptions in the same manner, but with a growing suspicion that the Assyrian letters might after all turn out to be syllabic.[850] By this means he arrived at the consonantal sound of a hundred and twenty signs which M. Menant says were generally correct. When Rawlinson published his Syllabarium, in 1851 (two years later) De Saulcy observed that sixty-eight of these one hundred and twenty signs received the same values. Not satisfied with this success, he seems actually to have thought that Rawlinson had borrowed them without acknowledgment from him: ‘J’avais donc lu et publié avant M. Rawlinson soixante-huit des valeurs exactes publiées par lui; il eût été de bon goût, peut-être, de prendre, ne fût-ce qu’une seule fois, la peine de citer mon nom.’[851] It is, of course, quite impossible to admit the claims made on his behalf. We have not been able to see the signs to which reference is made, but it is quite certain that, in September 1849, there were not sixty-eight signs in the Persepolitan inscription still remaining unknown either to Hincks or Rawlinson. It must be recollected that De Saulcy’s pamphlets appeared more than two years after Hincks had already accomplished a somewhat similar classification with a considerable measure of success; and therefore after the consonantal values of a large number of signs had long been correctly ascertained. On the other hand, the earlier papers of Hincks were quite accessible to De Saulcy, and we learn from Mohl that they were well known in France a year before the appearance of his two pamphlets.[852] ‘What,’ asks M. Menant, ‘did Rawlinson owe to De Saulcy’s labours on the Assyrian text? It is impossible to say,’ he answers, ‘for Rawlinson has not given an account of his preliminary studies.’[853] The answer is, however, much simpler than this. Rawlinson owes nothing to De Saulcy, for the reason that his transliteration of the Behistun inscription was accomplished before he left Bagdad in October 1849,[854] and therefore before it was possible for him to receive even the earliest of De Saulcy’s pamphlets.