Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/224

Rh Babylon. Rich exercised considerable influence in Germany by his contributions to periodical literature, and his cordial assent to the opinions of Grotefend was of importance at that time. We have seen that his first Memoir was published in Vienna before it appeared in London; and he continued to write to the 'Fundgruben des Orients' to describe the inscriptions he had procured from Babylon and Nineveh. The cylinder from Nineveh is said to have been the earliest specimen brought to light, and it was the first to attract the attention of Grotefend to the Babylonian system of writing. It was published by Dorow in 1820, when inscriptions of that kind were almost unknown. Rich's secretary, Bellino, was also in constant correspondence with Grotefend down to the period of his early death. He sent him a copy of the first column of one of the inscriptions at Hamadan, which Grotefend presented to the University Library of Tubingen, where Bellino had been educated. He also sent him copies of inscriptions on forty bricks in Mr. Rich's collection, many of them of service by illustrating slight differences in the writing of words and characters.

We have said that De Sacy remained unconvinced that the names of Darius and Xerxes were to be found in the Persepolitan inscriptions. Two years after he had solemnly repeated this confession, a M. St. Martin announced that he had made the same discovery as Grotefend, which he professed to have reached by an entirely different and far more scientific method: a circumstance which, if true, would have afforded a strong confirmation of the reality of the original discovery. St. Martin was born in 1791, and died of