Explorations in Bible lands during the 19th century - H. V. Hilprecht

DURING lorn CENTURY: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 71
empires.
While Continental explorers won their laurels on
the mounds of Khorsabad and Nimrud, Rawlinson forced
the inaccessible rock of Behistun to surrender the great
trilingual inscription of Darius, which, in the quietude of
The Rock of Behistun with the Great Trilingual Inscription
his study on the Tigris, became the " Rosetta Stone " of
Assyriology, and in his master hand the key to the understanding
of the Assyrian documents. 1
So far the leading explorers of Assyrian and Babylonian
ruins in the nineteenth century had been British officers and
private travellers. In no small degree, the East India Company,
through its efficient representatives at Baghdad and
Basra, had promoted and deepened the interest in the
1
The two fundamental and epoch-making publications in which Rawlinson
submitted the first complete copy and his decipherment of the second
(Persian) and third (Babylonian) columns of the Behistun inscription to the
learned world, appeared in the "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of
Great Britain and Ireland," vols. x. (1846-47), xi. (1849), x "* O^So),
and xiv. (1851).