of the most marvellous achievements of the present century.
It has often been asked how Assyrian scholars have been enabled to read an
Assyrian text with almost as much certainty as a page of the Old
Testament, although both the language and the characters in which it is
written were utterly unknown but a few years ago. A brief history of the
origin and progress of the decipherment will best answer the question.

Travellers had discovered inscriptions engraved in cuneiform, or, as they
were also termed, arrow-headed, characters on the ruined monuments of
Persepolis and other ancient sites in Persia. Some of these monuments were
known to have been erected by the Achaemenian princes--Darius, the son of
Hystaspes, and his successors--and it was therefore inferred that the
inscriptions also had been carved by order of the same kings. The
inscriptions were in three different systems of cuneiform writing; and,
since the three kinds of inscription were always placed side by side, it
was evident that they represented different versions of the same text. The
subjects of the Persian kings belonged to more than one race, and just as
in the present day a Turkish pasha in the East has to publish an edict in
Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, if it is to be understood by all the
populations under his charge, so the Persian kings were obliged to use the
language and system of writing peculiar to each of the nations they
governed, whenever they wished their proclamations to be read and
understood by them.

It was clear that the three versions of the Achaemenian inscriptions were
addressed to the three chief populations of the Persian Empire, and that
the one which invariably came first was composed in ancient Persian, the
language of the sovereign himself. Now this Persian version happened to
offer the decipherer less difficulties than the two others which
accompanied it. The number of distinct characters employed in writing it
did not exceed forty, while the words were divided from one another by a
slanting wedge. Some of the words contained so many characters that it was
plain that these latter must denote letters, and not syllables, and that
consequently the Persian cuneiform system must have consisted of an
alphabet, and not of a syllabary. It was further plain that the
inscriptions had to be read from left to right, since the ends of all the
lines were exactly underneath one another on the left side, whereas they
terminated irregularl