Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/427

398 because of the claims put forward on his behalf by some of his countrymen. It seems to be generally admitted that the honour attached to the first deecipherment of the Babylonian inscriptions cannot be justly claimed by more than three scholars—Hincks, Rawlinson and De Sauley. We have endeavoured to lay before the reader the contributions made by the first two. There can be no doubt that Hincks displayed remarkable insight into the formation of the language, and that his ingenuity in detecting the value of the sings, and in recognising their relation to one another was very great. Whether he would have been able to go farther and acquire equal distinction as a translator is another question. His genius seems to have been more adapted to elucidate matters of grammar and philosophy. Rawlinson had a rare ability of assimilating the suggestions of other scholars so quickly as to be almost oblivious that they were not original, and of carrying them rapidly to a perfection that, was all his own. Thus Hincks's elementary Syllabarium of 1850 appears in Rawlinson's Memoir of 1851 so vastly improved as to be practically an independent work. But the translation of the inscriptions was entirely his own, and in this department Hincks never entered into competition with him. Here, according to M. Menant, his rival was De Sauley. It is unfortunate that De Sauley's early contributions should have become almost inaccessible, and we have not found any detailed account of their contents. They date from 1847, but his earliest efforts, even according to M. Menant, only deserve mention because the author himself was disposed to treat them too