covered. But the complicated nature
of the Assyrian system of cuneiform--the great number of characters used in
it, the different phonetic values the same character might have, and the
frequent employment of ideographs, which denoted ideas and not
sounds--caused the progress of decipherment to be for some time but slow.
Indeed, had the Assyrian inscriptions been confined to those engraved on
the alabaster bulls and other monuments of Nineveh, our knowledge of the
language would always have remained comparatively limited. But,
fortunately, the Assyrians, like the Babylonians before them, employed
clay as a writing material, and established libraries, which were filled
with a literature on baked bricks.

One of the most important results of Sir A. H. Layard's explorations at
Nineveh was the discovery of the ruined library of the ancient city, now
buried under the mounds of Kouyunjik. The broken clay tablets belonging to
this library not only furnished the student with an immense mass of
literary matter, but also with direct aids towards a knowledge of the
Assyrian syllabary and language. Among the literature represented in the
library of Kouyunjik were lists of characters, with their various phonetic
and ideographic meanings, tables of synonymes, and catalogues of the names
of plants and animals. This, however, was not all. The inventors of the
cuneiform system of writing had been a people who preceded the Semites in
the occupation of Babylonia, and who spoke an agglutinative language
utterly different from that of their Semitic successors. These Accadians,
as they are usually termed, left behind them a considerable amount of
literature, which was highly prized by the Semitic Babylonians and
Assyrians. A large portion of the Ninevite tablets, accordingly, consists
of interlinear or parallel translations from Accadian into Assyrian, as
well as of reading books, dictionaries, and grammars, in which the
Accadian original is placed by the side of its Assyrian equivalent. It
frequently happens that the signification of a previously unknown Assyrian
word can be ascertained by our finding it given as the rendering of an
Accadian word, with the meaning of which we are already acquainted. The
bilingual texts have not only enabled scholars to recover the
long-forgotten Accadian language; they have also been of the greatest
possible assistance to them in their reconstruction of the Assyrian
dictionary itself.

The three expeditions