Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/89

 The English translator omitted them, and it is little likely that a book written in German and published in the remote town of Schleswig ever enjoyed a wide circulation. The engraving given by Herbert, even in his latest edition, is still grossly incorrect. It was executed by an artist who had never visited the spot, and Herbert was himself entirely unable to convey a true idea of the appearance and position of the different ruins. Dauher Deslandes at length made a great advance upon all his predecessors, and placed the student in a position to form a tolerable conception of the general aspect of the buildings.

Still less progress had yet been made towards the reproduction of the cuneiform letters. Delia Valle had given five of the characters in the Italian edition of his Travels, but his French translators omitted them. Herbert contrilnited three lines; Daulier gave a short inscription taken from an arch; and Flower had quite recently increased the available material by two lines. They were all very imperfectly copied, but it was known that large numbers of similar inscriptions appeared in various parts of the ruins. Dr. Hyde, the learned Orientalist, concluded that they were not letters at all, but simply designed as ornamentation. He entirely repudiated the suggestion, which was already current, that they had any resemblance to Chinese. He went so far as to upbraid the artist for having been the cause of so much torment to critics and men of learning. The whole matter was, he declared, beneath his notice, and he would not have alluded to it if he had not feared that his silence might be misconstrued.

This opinion was occasionally repeated both in