The transliteration from which we have quoted made its appearance in February 1854, having apparently been sent to press in June 1853, or some three years after Rawlinson’s version of the same text.[859] It cannot, therefore, claim the indulgence so willingly accorded to a first effort; on the contrary, it is distinctly put forward as a rival Essay, intended to prove ‘the essential error of Rawlinson’s method of reading.’ It was designed at the same time to show that not one of the general results reached in the two Memoirs of 1849 had now to be abandoned, and also to establish his legitimate right to a large share of priority of discovery to which De Saulcy says he attached great value. We have already disposed of his claims to priority so far as regards the consonantal values of the Babylonian signs found in the trilingual inscriptions, and we are at a loss to imagine in what other direction he fancied that he had achieved priority. So far indeed from his studies having ever been in advance of his contemporaries, they uniformly lagged far behind, and he evinces a singular inability even to follow the results obtained by their genius. A remarkable instance of this is seen in his rejection of Longpérier’s reading of ‘Sargon’ in the Khorsabad inscription. ‘The _kh_, _k_ or _g_,’ he writes in 1852, ‘is in reality a _d_’; and in the Table he published in 1854 it is actually found under that heading. He regrets that he is obliged to renounce all hope of finding the ‘Sargon of the Bible’ at Khorsabad; and he reads ‘Sardon’ instead.