Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/163

 upon it by the foreigners raised it in the estimation of the natives to such a height that the subsequent effort of Mr. Gordon to get possession of it utterly failed (1812). It was already invested with the mysterious virtue of a talisman, and its loss, it was thought, would involve the country in disaster. To secure its retention resort was had to the singular expedient of blowing it into a hundred fragments by gunpowder. The destruction, however, was not complete, and the fragments were afterwards carefully collected, and secretly built into a pillar in the Tomb of Daniel, where they now are. In 1836 Rawlinson was able to pass two days amid the ruins in the course of his march from Zohab to Shuster. His visit, he thought, had enabled him to 'unravel the mystery of the two rivers Eulaeus and Choaspes.' He heard that the 'black stone' had been blown to pieces, but he was evidently not informed that the fragments were collected and were then in the Tomb of Daniel. He was rewarded, however, by the discovery of a broken obelisk with 'a very perfect inscription of thirty-three lines,' which was afterwards found to be written in Old Susian. Five years later, Mr. Layard penetrated into the tomb disguised in Arab dress, and was told by a dervish that the precious inscription was buried there. In the outer court he was shown one or two small capitals and other vestiges of columns that had fallen from the mound; and also the fragment of a slab with a few cuneiform characters almost obliterated. The mound appeared to him little inferior in size to the Mujelibi, and he found and copied an inscription from a marble