translations have been accepted as reliable. At first all was conjecture; then the process of investigation was purely tentative; but conjecture was superseded by certainty, and the tentative by the demonstrative. Step by step these patient toilers advanced, till results as sured them of success. To verify what had been done, translations of the same inscription, but made by differ ent persons, were carefully compared, one with the other, and then compared with the well-ascertained facts of contemporaneous history. By this thorough and honorable method were the translations of the Annals of Sennacherib tested, and which were found substantially correct when compared with the Bible account of his wars against the Jews. And it is no mean compliment to the translators that the French Academy, justly considered the first literary and scientific body in the world, has recognized the progress made, the correctness of the principles upon which the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions are based, and the importance of the results already obtained, by recommending one of the foremost of the translators, Dr. Oppert, as entitled to receive the great prize of twenty thousand francs, conferred periodically upon the author who has rendered the greatest service to literature or science. It is to Mr. Layard that we are indebted for the following lucid account of the process and progress in the difficult task of deciphering the Assyrian inscriptions:

"Although our knowledge is far from complete, yet the sculptures and inscriptions have enabled us to put together a part of the skeleton of Assyrian history, and to illustrate to a certain extent the manners, arts, sciences, and literature of the Assyrian people. So much unreasonable incredulity still exists as to the extent to which this has been effected through the interpretation

of the cuneiform inscriptions, and the evidence upon which that interpretation rests has been so summarily rejected by English writers of great and deserved authority, that a short account of the history of cuneiform decipherment may be interesting to some of my readers, and may tend to remove those erroneous impressions which exist on the subject.

"The investigation of the arrow-headed character is by no means a new study. It was first seriously attempted in the year 1802 by Grotefend, a learned German scholar. At that time the only materials accessible for this purpose, with the exception of the well-known inscribed bricks from the ruins of Babylon, were the inscriptions carved on rocks, and on the remains of edifices at Persepolis and Hamadan (Ecbatana), and near other ancient sites in Persia. Copies of these inscriptions, more or less accurate, had been brought to Europe by various travelers from the time of Tavernier and Chardin. Fortunately, although short, they afforded the most important materials for breaking ground and taking the first step in the interpretation of the cuneiform character. They are trilingual, that is to say, that the same inscription is repeated three times in a different language and in a different character; but, unfortunately, unlike the trilingual inscription on the celebrated Rosetta stone, which furnishes a key for the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, neither the languages nor the characters were previously known to us. The trilingual inscriptions of Persia are generally divided into three parallel columns, or arranged in three distinct tablets, each containing the same inscriptions expressed in a different language, and in a different modification of the cuneiform character-the letters and signs in each column being formed by the same elementary wedges arranged in

different combinations or groups. That the inscriptions are the same is evident from the fact of the recurrence of the same groups of letters or words in each column or tablet, at the same regular intervals. I give a copy herewith of one of these trilingual tablets from Persepolis, in order that my readers may understand their nature, and the process by which they are deciphered.

"It will be perceived that the combination of wedges forming a letter or sign differs in each col

First Column.

Second Column.

Third Column.

SPECIMEN OF A CUNEIFORM INSCRIPTION.

scriptions is allied to the ancient Sanscrit. This is called. the Persian cuneiform character. The characters in the second or centre column are commonly called the Median, or, more correctly, the Touranian or Scythic, because they are believed to express a Touranian or Tartar language, one of the then families of languages spoken by the subjects of the ancient Persian kings. The inscrip tions of the third column are in a character and language nearly identical with those of the monuments of Nineveh and Babylon. They have been, consequently, termed the Assyrian and the Babylonian, or sometimes the AssyroBabylonian.

"It will be further observed that in the first, or Persian, column a single oblique arrow-head or wedge constantly recurs. It first occurred to the German scholars, Tychsen and Münter, that this sign might mark the di vision of words. This conjecture was confirmed by the recurrence of the same group of letters forming a word, sometimes with terminal variations which might indicate case-endings, marked off, as it were, by these single oblique wedges. Instances of this will be perceived in the first and second lines of the inscription which I have given. A comparison of a number of inscriptions led to the further discovery that, while the greater number of words or groups of signs in each were generally the same, certain groups had disappeared, and other groups, which had before appeared in another part of the inscription, had taken their place. These, again, were suc ceeded by a new group. This circumstance led Grote fend to conjecture that these signs so changing position represented proper names of persons in the relation of father and son, and that when a new king had ascended the throne his name appeared in the place of his prede The name of the grandfather would then disap

cessor.

pear altogether, and be replaced by that of the father. For instance, if in one inscription Darius was called the son of Hystaspes, in a second, carved after his death, Xerxes would be called son of Darius, the name of Darius taking the place of that of Hystaspes, which would no longer be found in the inscription.

"This ingenious conjecture led to the discovery of the clue to the decipherment of the inscriptions, and Grote fend assumed that these groups of letters or signs were the names of these very Persian kings. Supposing such to be the case, and admitting that the ancient Persian forms of these names varied considerably from those handed down to us by the Greeks, yet he felt convinced that the value of certain letters in them must be the same. By various tentative processes he satisfied himself that he had hit upon the right names, and that he had determined the proper value of some, if not all, the letters composing them. This enabled him to verify the conjecture, based upon historical evidence, that the language of the inscription was in Indo-Germanic dialect, spoken in Persia at the time of the Macedonian conquest, and allied to the Zend or Sanscrit, and consequently, in a certain degree, to the modern Persian.

"Proceeding always in the same tentative way, Grotefend next attempted a translation of some of the inscriptions, and the results of his investigations and an analysis of his method of interpretation were given in an appendix to Heeren's work on the principal nations of antiquity, which was published in 1815.

Lassen, Rask, Burnouf, and other eminent Sanscrit and Oriental scholars, applied themselves to the examination of Grotefend's system and his interpretations, bringing to bear upon the inquiry a profounder knowledge of the ancient Indo-Germanic tongues than he claimed to pos