key to the decipherment of the cuneiform texts.

But he did little further himself towards the completion of the work, and
it was many years before any real progress was made with it. Meanwhile,
the study of Zend had made great advances, more especially in the hands of
Burnouf, who eventually turned his attention to the cuneiform
inscriptions. But it is to Burnouf's pupil, Lassen, as well as to Sir
Henry Rawlinson, that the decipherment of these inscriptions owes its
final completion. The discovery of the list of Persian satrapies in the
inscription of Darius at Naksh-i-Rustem, and above all the copy of the
long inscription of Darius on the rock of Behistun, made by Sir H.
Rawlinson, enabled these scholars independently of one another to
construct an alphabet which differed only in the value assigned to a
single character, and, with the help of the cognate Zend and Sanskrit, to
translate the language so curiously brought to light. The decipherment of
the Persian cuneiform texts thus became an accomplished fact; what was
next needed was to decipher the two versions which were inscribed at their
side.

But this was no easy task. The words in them were not divided from one
another, and the characters of which they were composed were exceedingly
numerous. With the assistance, however, of frequently recurring proper
names even these two versions gradually yielded to the patient skill of
the decipherer; and it was then discovered that while one of them
represented an agglutinative language, such as that of the Turks or Fins,
the other was in a dialect which closely resembled the Hebrew of the Old
Testament. The monuments found almost immediately afterwards in Assyria
and Babylonia by Botta and Layard soon made it clear to what people this
dialect must have belonged. The inscriptions of Nineveh turned out to be
written in the same language and form of cuneiform script; and it must
therefore have been for the Semitic population of Assyria and Babylonia
that the kings of Persia had caused one of the versions of their
inscriptions to be drawn up. This version served as a starting-point for
the decipherment of the texts which the excavations in Assyria had brought
to light.

It might have been thought that the further course of the decipherment
would have presented little difficulty, now that the values of many of the
Assyrian characters were known, and the close resemblance of the language
they concealed to Hebrew had been dis