Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE ,22. The discoverers of the long-buried memorials of Assyria and Babylonia were at first and for a long time unable to read their message. But side by side with the work of the explorer and excavator went continually the investigations of the scholar. The objects sent back by European excavators and installed in museums immediately attracted the attention and enlisted the energetic activity of many students, who gave themselves to the task of decipherment. Beginning with Georg Friedrich Grotefend, of Hannover, who, in 1815, published a translation of some brief inscriptions of the Achemaenian kings of Persia, this scientific activity was immensely stimulated by the discoveries and investigations of Sir Henry Rawlinson, who, after more than fifteen years of study in the East, published, in 1851, his "Memoir on the Babylonian and Assyrian Inscriptions " containing the text, transliteration, and translation of the Babylonian part of the Behistun inscription, which records the triumph of Darius I. of Persia over his enemies. During the same period the brilliant French savant Jules Oppert, the Irish scholar Edward Hincks, and the Englishman Fox Talbot had been making their contributions to the new linguistic problem. In 1857 the accuracy andpermanence of their results were established by a striking test. Copies of the inscription of Tiglath- pileser I. of Assyria, recently unearthed, were placed in the hands of the four scholars, Rawlinson, Oppert, Hincks, and Fox Talbot, and they were requested to make, independently of one another, translations of the inscription in question. A comparison of these translations showed them to be substantially identical. A new language had been deciphered, and a new chapter of human history opened for investigation...