Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/279

 of the language.' ' When Rawlinson found that he was obliged to renounce the claim to a 'priority of alphabetical discovery,' and that he was continually being anticipated in the values he gave to the signs which he had himself just 'obtained through continued labour,' he was consoled by the reflection that he was 'the first to present to the world a literal and, as I believe, a correct grammatical translation of nearly two hundred lines of cuneiform writing.' Unfortunately. however, he withheld his translation, in the hope of making the accessories more perfect. A host of historical and geographical questions started up in rapid succession, and he was unwilling to limit his task to the series of critical notes which was all he at first contemplated. He accordingly began to recast his Memoir in the autumn of 1839 with the confident hope that it would be ready for publication early in the spring of 1840; but the outbreak of the Afghan War interrupted his literary projects and summoned him to a very different sphere of activity. Before he left, however, he had time to make a second communication to the Asiatic Society, in which he related some of the results of his study. His paper, which was read before a meeting of the Society, contained a ' précis of the contents of a large part of the Behistun inscription, which differed in no material respect' from the translation he elaborated at a much later date. Indeed, we are told that, so far as the original materials extended, it was 'absolutely identical' with his subsequent work, which, as we shall presently see, was so perfect that later scholarship has found little to correct. This was certainly a great achievement on the part of a young officer of twenty-