ith them is the fact that
nineteenth-century scholarship should have given us, not the material
documents themselves, but a knowledge of their actual contents. The
flight of arrow-heads on wall or slab or tiny brick have surely a
meaning; but how shall we guess that meaning? These must be words; but
what words? The hieroglyphics of the Egyptians were mysterious enough
in all conscience; yet, after all, their symbols have a certain
suggestiveness, whereas there is nothing that seems to promise a mental
leverage in the unbroken succession of these cuneiform dashes. Yet the
Assyrian scholar of to-day can interpret these strange records almost
as readily and as surely as the classical scholar interprets a
Greek manuscript. And this evidences one of the greatest triumphs of
nineteenth-century scholarship, for within almost two thousand years no
man has lived, prior to our century, to whom these strange inscriptions
would not have been as meaningless as they are to the most casual
stroller who looks on them with vague wonderment here in the museum
to-day. For the Assyrian language, like the Egyptian, was veritably a
dead language; not, like Greek and Latin, merely passed from practical
every-day use to the closet of the scholar, but utterly and absolutely
forgotten by all the world. Such being the case, it is nothing less than
marvellous that it should have been restored.

It is but fair to add that this restoration probably never would have
been effected, with Assyrian or with Egyptian, had the language in dying
left no cognate successor; for the powers of modern linguistry, though
great, are not actually miraculous. But, fortunately, a language once
developed is not blotted out in toto; it merely outlives its usefulness
and is gradually supplanted, its successor retaining many traces of its
origin. So, just as Latin, for example, has its living representatives
in Italian and the other Romance tongues, the language of Assyria is
represented by cognate Semitic languages. As it chances, however, these
have been of aid rather in the later stages of Assyrian study than at
the very outset; and the first clew to the message of the cuneiform
writing came through a slightly different channel.

Curiously enough, it was a trilingual inscription that gave the clew, as
in the case of the Rosetta Stone, though with very striking difference
withal. The trilingual inscription now in question, instead of being
a small, portable monument, c