Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/192

Rh Meanwhile the directors of the East India Company gave instructions to the Resident at Bussorah to secure ten or a dozen specimens for their museum (1797). They said they had heard that near Hillah 'there exist the remains of a very large and magnificent city, supposed to be Babylon, and that the bricks contain an indented scroll or label in letters totally different from any now made use of in the East.' The bricks reached London in 1801, and the task of copying and describing them was entrusted to Joseph Hager. Hager was a curious specimen of the wandering scholar, and he enjoyed a reputation that appears to have been quite out of proportion to his acquirements. He was of Austrian descent, but he was born at Milan in 1757, and died at Pavia in 1819. He early took to the study of Oriental languages, and especially Chinese. He roamed about Europe, visiting all the libraries from Constantinople to Madrid, and from Leyden and Oxford to the south of Italy. He wrote both in Italian and German, and apparently also in English and French. One of his first works was in German on a Literary Imposture (1799), and he became known in England as a contributor to Ouseley's Oriental Collections, and by a book on the 'Elementary Characters of the Chinese' (1801). It was in this year that his Memoir on the Babylonian Inscriptions was written, and shortly afterwards he settled in Paris, and was commissioned by Napoleon to compile a Dictionary of Chinese in Latin and French (1802). For this he was to receive 6,000 francs a year; but after some time a suspicion arose as to his qualifications and industry. The result of an inquiry was that he was removed from his post, and he left France in 1806. We afterwards find him a teacher of German at Oxford,