This inquiry into the nature and use of ideograms was the first that had been made, and it formed an important contribution to the knowledge of the language* His attempted transliterations are not of equal value. He rejected the reading of 'Sargon' given by Lihvenstern, and he does not seem to have heard of the solution of the difficulty proposed the year before by Longp^rier.^ He recognised indeed that the sign for ' king ' with which the word begins forms an integral portion of the name, ]3Ut he did not i)erceive, like Longperier, that its (counterpart is the Heljiew ' sar ' ; and he was led by other comparisons to assign the value of 'kin-nil' to the ideogi'am. He knew also that the sign Lowenstern had broken up into two and thought signified r, s foniied in fact a single sign, which he pronounced ri or //, These efforts resulted in ' kin-nil-li-n'a,' which might seem even less manageable than the r, 5, k of Lowenstern. But Hincks was quite equal to the occa- sion, and, with the custcmiary imaginative faculty of the philologist, he found no difficulty in connecting this person with the Chinzirus of Ptolemy, who, it appears, was a contemporaiy of Porus. He had already detected that the names of the son and grandson of this prince were Semiacherib and Esarhaddon, the builders of Kouyunjik and the Soutli-West Palace of Nimrud. The first w^e find he transliterated ' Sanki' or 'Sankhi,' with the possible addition of 'rav' or 'ram' — 'Sankin- rav ' : the other came out as ' Adar-ka-dan.' He also explains how he an-ived at ' Nabiccudurrayuchur ' for
therefore simply a non-phonetic determinative. (4) Elsewhere it forms part of a compound ideograph, and may entirely change its phonetic value ; and (5) it may be used idfOgraphicaUy for *god * in Semitic proper names, where its value is not an but iluy or sometimes A^sur. — Transactions j ib. pp. 27-30; Athencetwi, ib.
- lie admits in Sept. IHoO that he had not yet seen Longi)^rier's paper
Athenceunif Sept. 21, 1800).
