Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/191

 well known to persons interested in such matters, by the plates of Le Bruyn and more especially by those of Niebuhr. But the inscriptions from Babylon had only just begun to attract notice. So far back indeed as the beginning of the seventeenth century Delia Valle, as we have seen, had sent a few inscribed bricks to Rome, but they had received little attention. Later travellers do not appear to have mentioned the existence of these curious relics till the end of the eighteenth century, when Pére Emanuel, a Carmelite, who resided at Bagdad, gave a description of them in a manuscript referred to by D'Anville in the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions. Soon afterwards the Abbé Beauchamp, in his account of Hillah, says he found 'large and thick bricks imprinted with unknown characters, specimens of which I have presented to the Abbe Barthélemy.' His account excited some interest, and it was translated into English in 1792, and also into German by Witte of Rostock. Several of the bricks were deposited in the National Library at Paris, and plaster casts of them were sent to Herder and Münter. Shortly afterwards the same collection was enriched by the Egyptian vase already mentioned, which Count Caylus had discovered, and which he described in his 'Recueil d'Antiquites.' About the same time also various cylinders and bricks found their way to different European museums and private collections. Drawings of a few of these were also to be found in Caylus; and in 1800 Münter published two others from Babylonian bricks that had not seen the light before.