that the interpretation could not be arbitrary’; but while ‘there is a remarkable concurrence as to the general meaning of each paragraph ... very many words were differently translated.’ The closest resemblance was found to exist between the versions of Rawlinson and Hincks. Talbot was ‘less positive and precise,’ and Oppert showed the greatest divergence. The examiners farther noted their opinion passage by passage, and as we look down the pages, among many verdicts of ‘very near,’ ‘much alike,’ and so on, we find other judgments much less satisfactory, such as ‘many coincidences and many variations’; ‘some coincidences and great variations’; and even ‘totally different.’ Much indeed yet remained to be done before accuracy could be achieved, and the voice of the doubter was not yet stilled. In France especially, the greatest scepticism prevailed as to the genuineness of the translations, and those of Oppert, in the ‘Journal Asiatique’ were received with general incredulity.[889] Neither De Saulcy nor Longpérier took any farther share in the work, and their silence increased the discouragement. A very eminent Frenchman, Count de Gobineau, had just written on the ‘Ecritures des Textes cunéiformes’ and attacked the whole system pursued by Rawlinson and Oppert.[890] The one he proposed to substitute is too grotesque to merit description, but the defection of a scholar so well known in Oriental studies intensified the growing unbelief.[891] It was at this conjuncture that Menant published his book on Cuneiform Writing, in which he related the successive steps that had led up to the decipherment of the inscriptions (1860): an undertaking which he describes four years later, in his second edition, as having slowly produced a beneficial effect. Some people may have been more influenced by the striking reward conferred upon M. Oppert by the Institut in 1860, which awarded him the prize of twenty thousand francs, founded by the Emperor for the ‘work or the discovery most calculated to the honour of France,’ and this, we learn with surprise, afforded ‘une sanction qui devrait dissiper toutes les susceptibilités.’ These susceptibilities were, however, by no means dispelled by any such Imperial mandate. Mohl writes with evident sympathy that ‘people decry a language in which one can never know if a syllable is ideographic or phonetic, and, when phonetic, which of two or three different values it may have in that place.’[892] Gobineau still remained recalcitrant (1864), and Sir George Cornewall Lewis contended in the ‘Astronomy of the Ancients’ that neither Egyptian nor Assyrian could ever be restored.[893] Lord Macaulay also rejected the interpretation with undisguised contempt.[894] It was only by slow degrees that these doubts were finally extinguished, and that the cuneiform languages have conquered the universal recognition of all competent inquirers.