gist began his career in the
East as an officer in the Bombay army. He distinguished himself as a
political agent and diplomatist. While resident at Baghdad, he devoted
his leisure time to cuneiform studies. One of his remarkable feats was
the copying of the famous trilingual rock inscription of Darius the
Great on a mountain cliff at Behistun, in Persian Kurdistan. This work
was carried out at great personal risk, for the cliff is 1700 feet
high and the sculptures and inscriptions are situated about 300 feet
from the ground.

Darius was the first monarch of his line to make use of the Persian
cuneiform script, which in this case he utilized in conjunction with
the older and more complicated Assyro-Babylonian alphabetic and
syllabic characters to record a portion of the history of his reign.
Rawlinson's translation of the famous inscription was an important
contribution towards the decipherment of the cuneiform writings of
Assyria and Babylonia.

Twelve years of brilliant Mesopotamian discovery concluded in 1854,
and further excavations had to be suspended until the "seventies" on
account of the unsettled political conditions of the ancient land and
the difficulties experienced in dealing with Turkish officials. During
the interval, however, archaeologists and philologists were kept fully
engaged studying the large amount of material which had been
accumulated. Sir Henry Rawlinson began the issue of his monumental
work _The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia_ on behalf of the
British Museum.

Goodspeed refers to the early archaeological work as the "Heroic
Period" of research, and says that the "Modern Scientific Period"
began with Mr. George Smith's expedition to Nineveh in 1873.

George Smith, like Henry Schliemann, the pioneer investigator of
pre-Hellenic culture, was a self-educated man of humble origin. He was
born at Chelsea in 1840. At fourteen he was apprenticed to an
engraver. He was a youth of studious habits and great originality, and
interested himself intensely in the discoveries which had been made by
Layard and other explorers. At the British Museum, which he visited
regularly to pore over the Assyrian inscriptions, he attracted the
attention of Sir Henry Rawlinson. So greatly impressed was Sir Henry
by the young man's enthusiasm and remarkable intelligence that he
allowed him the use of his private room and provided casts and
squeezes of inscriptions to assist him in his studies. Smith made
rap