Menant afterwards concedes that Rawlinson’s work on the Obelisk proves preliminary labours which he graciously admits may justly claim to be independent.[855] Nor is it true, as Menant says, that ‘it was by following De Saulcy’s steps that all later progress has been accomplished.’[856] The precise opposite approaches more nearly to the truth. It was by abandoning the alphabetical system, to which De Saulcy clung with strange pertinacity to the last, that all later progress was in reality accomplished; and two months after these pamphlets were written this was precisely what was done by Hincks with unmistakable perspicuity in the Appendix to his Khorsabad Essay. The two tracts of De Saulcy, written in 1849, gave the transliteration according to his peculiar system of the whole of the Achaemenian inscriptions accessible to him. The text of the Behistun inscription had not, of course, escaped as yet from the jealous hands of the English Major. The translation of these inscriptions was comparatively easy, for it was only necessary to follow the Persian version, which was already known. De Saulcy may therefore claim to be the first who accomplished this task, which neither Hincks nor Rawlinson thought necessary to attempt. But De Saulcy did not rest satisfied with this achievement. On February 3, 1850, he published a transliteration of ninety-six lines of the inscription engraved upon the bulls at the entrance to Khorsabad; and he accompanied it by a translation, which two years later he still considered was sufficiently accurate. On February 12, he also contributed a Memoir on the Royal Names at Nimrud.[857] These two publications appeared between Major Rawlinson’s lectures of January 19 and February 16. In the first lecture, Rawlinson gave the earliest translation of a purely Assyrian inscription that had ever appeared, with the exception of the few lines rendered by Longpérier and Hincks. It was taken from the Black Obelisk, and he promised to read at the next sitting a _précis_ of the Khorsabad inscription.[858] It was clear, therefore, that he had already prepared it. Meanwhile, after this announcement was made, and thirteen days before it was carried into execution, De Saulcy’s translation appeared. This forms the second long Assyrian inscription to be translated, and it can scarcely be denied that De Saulcy and Rawlinson had worked upon it independently of each other. The report of Rawlinson’s second lecture was given in the ‘Athenæum’ on March 2. It is, as we have said, impossible to estimate the comparative merits of the two works, because we have not seen De Saulcy’s pamphlet. It can only be judged by what we know of that writer’s later acquirements.