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

DURING 19 CENTURY: ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA 187
TEMPORARY REVIVAL OF PUBLIC INTEREST IN ASSYRIAN
EXCAVATIONS
A large amount of cuneiform material had been gradually
stored in the halls of the Louvre and of the British Museum
towards the middle of the last century.
Before other funds
were likely to be granted by governments and liberalminded
individuals for the continuation of the excavations
in Assyrian and Babylonian mounds, it
became necessary to
satisfy the learned, and to prove to the public at large that
the numerous monuments and broken clay tablets unearthed
could really be read, and that their intrinsic value or the
contents of their inscriptions were well worth the capital and
time spent in their rediscovery. The number of scholars
ready to make the study of cuneiform inscriptions their chief
occupation, or at least part of their life's work, was exceedingly
limited, and those who had manifested any deeper
interest in their interpretation were concerned more with
the Persian inscriptions than with those of Assyria.
Grotefend
had tried repeatedly to elucidate the meaning of the
most complicated of all
cuneiform writings, — the so-called
third system of the Persian monuments, but he had made
little progress. In 1845, Loewenstern of Paris had guessed
the Semitic character of the Assyrian language correctly.
Soon afterwards De Longperier had recognized a few proper
names often occurring in the titles of the Khorsabad inscriptions.
Botta had published important collections of the
different cuneiform signs found in the same texts, from
which it was proved beyond doubt that the Assyrians could
never have employed an alphabet. And following in the
footsteps of his predecessors, De Saulcv had even gone so
far as to undertake boldly the translation of an entire
Assyrian inscription. But valuable as all these attempts