The French traveller Otter seems to have been the first to call attention to Behistun, about the year 1734, and it is also noticed in the travels of Olivier.[156] Kinneir passed it in 1810, and he describes ‘a group of figures in the form of a procession sufficiently perfect to show that they are of the same age and character as those of Persepolis.’[157] In 1818, Porter at length succeeded in getting sufficiently near to sketch the figures.[158] He confirms Kinneir’s conjecture as to their resemblance to those at Persepolis; and he recognises the winged figure as ‘the floating intelligence in his circle and car of sunbeams, so often remarked on the sculptures of Naksh-i-Rustam and Persepolis.’ He remarked that there was a cuneiform inscription above the head of each figure and below ‘eight deep and closely written columns in the same character.’ Notwithstanding the facility Porter had already acquired in copying inscriptions at Persepolis, he was at too great a distance from these to make the attempt. He calculated it would require a month to complete the task, and adds that ‘at no time can it ever be attempted without great personal risk.’ The extremely inaccessible position of the inscriptions long baffled the zeal of explorers. M. Flandin, as we shall see, though specially commissioned by the French Government to examine Persian antiquities, retreated in dismay from the perilous task, which was left as usual to the private enterprise of an Englishman to accomplish. So long indeed as the history of cuneiform decipherment is remembered, the name of Henry Creswicke Rawlinson will continue to be associated with Behistun. He was not only the first to surmount the very considerable physical difficulties of approaching the inscriptions, but he succeeded, while in a position that was highly inconvenient, if not positively dangerous, in making so accurate a copy that few errors or omissions of importance were afterwards detected. The first copy appears to have been made entirely with the pen—the process of taking paper casts being employed on a later occasion—and it was a task that called for the display of extraordinary patience and most scrupulous care. He had to transcribe, or more properly to draw, vast numbers of signs of multitudinous and fantastic shapes, without at that time having the smallest clue to their meaning—a knowledge that would have served to check the accuracy of his work as he went along. Soon afterwards indeed he became the most skilful of decipherers. He cannot indeed claim to have been the first to solve the difficulties of the Persian alphabet; but his translation of the Behistun inscription was by far the greatest contribution ever made to a knowledge of that language; and he rendered scarcely less remarkable service in unravelling the mysteries of the third, or Babylonian, column.