Rawlinson therefore laboured under a much bigger handicap than that imposed on Young and Champollion. But Rawlinson was one of those men to whom a handicap means something to be surmounted. The bigger the handicap, the greater the satisfaction in overcoming it. The inscriptions at Behistun seemed to challenge him, to defy him to read them, as from their lofty pinnacle they had challenged men for ages past. Rawlinson was the man in a million. The lure of the past and the fascination of the East spurred him on to do the impossible. His courage was as great as his knowledge of dialects was profound. It was no hope of reward, of glory, that urged him to wrest the secret from his sheets of paper impressions. It was the desire to pit his brain against the baffling writing, to master it. Grotefend years before had pointed the way, but Rawlinson was ignorant of this fact. All the years that Rawlinson was writing and studying at Baghdad, an Irish clergyman, Dr. Hincks, was engaged on the same mighty task in a quiet rectory in Ireland, solving the puzzle which Rawlinson had already solved. Other men were wrestling with the same difficulties, but Rawlinson knew absolutely nothing of them or their endeavours. He worked away incessantly, relying upon himself alone. He studied the queer, wedge-shaped impressions for months, noted their resemblances, found the characters that were repeated, and little by little, a character at a time, he built up that dead language, succeeded in reading the writing of the peoples who inhabited Persia and the plains of Mesopotamia long before the birth of Christ. In 1846 his great book, giving his reading of the inscriptions at Behistun, was published in London by the Royal Asiatic Society. The scientific world was astounded. People thought such a thing impossible. Many imagined that Rawlinson had invented some sort of reading of his own for the cuneiform characters. They reasoned that as there was no guide whatsoever, no man could ever read them. They reasoned wrongly, as time was to prove. The unearthing in Mesopotamia of a romantic cylinder of clay, all covered with arrow-headed characters, brought the longed-for opportunity of testing whether Rawlinson was right or wrong, whether he had indeed solved the mystery. Copies of the cylinder were given to four men who had learned to read cuneiform writing, among them Rawlinson. Each was asked to make a translation, and to submit it to the authorities of the British Museum. The four translations were made, and the authorities sat down and compared them. Each translation told the same story of Tiglath-pileser, gave the same names and dates! It was a wonderful triumph for Rawlinson, for it proved beyond all doubt that he had indeed solved the mystery of the dead writing of Persia and Babylon.