Babylonian Books.

Yesterday afternoon Professor Lyon lectured on the decipherment of the Babylonian books. He said that had Babylonian writings not been found accompanied by parallel translations in some simpler language, they could perhaps never have been deciphered. Such translations were furnished by the records of the Achaemenian kings of Persia. The first problem was therefore to read the old Persian after which the reading of the Babylonian was sure to follow. Inscriptions from Persepolis furnished the material. After the unsuccessful attempts of various scholars, Georg Friederich Grotefend, of Hanover, in 1802, found the key, by applying a formula of the old Pehlevi inscriptions to the shorter cuneiform inscriptions from Persepolis. Grotfeend made out several of the letters accurately and several others proximately, but his material was too limited for him to do much more than read a few proper names in the inscriptions. Colonel (now Sir) Henry Rawlinson, a young English officer, while stationed in Persia in 1835, was attracted to the study of the inscriptions. He states that his work was altogether independent of Grotefend and other European scholars. He used a method similar to that of Grotefend and reached results much more advanced.

Although the Babylonian inscriptions from Persepolis were translations of the deciphered old Persian, yet the difficulty of the Babylonian script stood in the way of reading the Babyilouian characters. A given sign did not always represent the same sound nor the same idea. One could read the shorter Babylonian inscriptions without knowing how to pronounce a single sign. By degrees it was seen that the various signs were syllables and not letters. From this discovery the work went rapidly forward. In 1857 so much had been written on the subject that the Royal Asiatic Society of London appointed a committee of scholars to test the accuracy of the translations. The committee submitted to Rawlinson, Hinch, and Fox Talbot copies of a long passage of writting from one of the old Assyrian kings. Independent translations were to be made and returned in sealed packages to the committee. These translations showed such a large amount of agreement that there has never since been reason to doubt the general accuracy of the reading of Babylonian-Assyrian books.

The reading of these books may no longer be called decipherments, because the great facts of the script and the language are now well known. The working out of the nicer details of the grammar, the enlargement of our knowledge of the vocabulary, the discovery and publication of new books, the interpretation of the multitude of facts contained in the Babylonian books regarding early history, religion and art-these are the delightful tasks before the students of today.