Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/295

266 to a Colonial Governorship, and was made a K.C.B. in 1862. His brother Edward, the cuneiform scholar, was born in 1792, and after a distinguished career at the University of Dublin, he settled down in a remote country parish as Eector of Killyleagh in the (county Down. In that inhospital)le region he spent forty-one years, till his death in ISf'A). He first attracted atten- tion by his papers on Egyptian hieroglyphics, contri- buted to the Irish Academy. His contributions to cuneiform literature bciran in June 1846, when he read a paper 'On the First and Second Khids of Persepolitan Writinii.' ^ This was followed by another in November ' On the Three Kinds of Persepohtan Writing and on the Babylonian Lapidary Character.' In January of the following year a farther essay appeared, ' On the Third Persepolitan,' and hi the Decembei* after lie pub- lished a long paper in the ' Journal of the Eoyal Asiaiic Society ' on the Inscriptions of Van.-

When he entered upon the study of the lirst column but little remained to be done to complete the decipher- ment of the Persian alphabet. His attention was therefore chiefly directed to the writing in the Susian and Babylonian columns. In a postscript to his first essay he insisted on the substantial resemblance of the language of the third column to those of the Babylonian and Assyrian inscriptions. He supported the opinion which had been even then simuested, that bf)th of thes(* ' have much in common with the Semitic languages ' and he announced that he had read the names of Babylon and Nineveh on the bricks.^ He devoted his inaenuitv in the first instance to prove the identity of the cursive mode of writing' found in the third column and in some

' Transactions of the JRoyal Itish Academy (1848), vol. xxi. pt. ii.

- J. Ii. A. S. ix. 387.

^ Trans. 7?. /. Acad. loc. cit. p. 131.