Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/390

Rh to give 'the mode of expressing numbers in cuneatic characters from 1 to 100,000 ': a system he farther ex- empUfied in his later paper on the Van inscriptions.

His manipulation of the two hundred and eighty- seven signs induced him to take a nuich too favourable opinion of his own achievement, for we find him, in the course of the following year (May 1848), announcing that 'the values of the great majority of the [Babylonian] characters are, in my judgment, already settled beyond the reach of criticism,' a statement which we now know is, in fact 'beyond the range of criticism.' By that time he had, however, made the important discovery that Sennacherib and Esarhaddon were the builders of the two palaces at Nineveh. He would not, however, admit that Sargon was the Khorsabad king, a fact that had just been demonstrated with remarkable ingenuity by Longpérier. Hincks suggested that the proper reading was Ni-Sliar.

It is worthy of remark that the writings we have just reviewed of Hincks, in 1846-7, were brought to the notice of Continental students by Mold, in his 'Rapport' to the Société Asiatique of 1848.

It is, in fact, in these essays that the first real progress in the decipherment of Babylonian was made. In them Hincks laid the foundation upon which all subsequent work was raised, a work to which he himself contributed no small share.

The year 1847 was especially rich in contributions to the study. It opened with the remarkable paper we have just reviewed; and during its course Rawlinson expounded his views in the 'Journal of the Asiatic Society,' Botta in the 'Journal Asiatique,' Longpérier in the 'Revue Archéologique.' Löwenstern added another