Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/414

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THE BABYLONIAN COLUMN
385

wise with the means then at hand. The wonder is that so much could have l)eeu a(!CompHshed with one hundred and fifty imperfectly understood cliaracters ; and with oidy live hundred words arrived at conjec- turallv out of some six thousand. Kawlinson himself warned the reader that here and there 'little depend- ence can Ije placed on the translation ' ; and he conft^sses that sometimes he could not ' conjecture even the meanin;L>' of several passages.' Notwithstanding his difficulty with the pr()i)er names, a host of new ones were now for the first time identified: Amanus ; the Tlittites; Chaldaeans ; the rivers Tigris, Euphrates, Relikh ; the cities of Borsippa, Tyre, Sidon, Gabal, Caleh. On the other hand, the Akkadians now make their first appearance hi modern history as ' Ilekdi,' ' which mav be connected with the Armenian "Haik.'" Hazael of Damascus is still concealed as ' Khazakan of Atesh ' and 'Jehu the son of Onui' ap])ears as 'Yahua the son of Ilubiri,' ' a prince,' says the translator, ' of whose native country I am imorant.' He called attention to the name of Yehuda hi a Khorsabad inscription in connection with that of Ilamath ; but he hesitated to identify it with Judah. Indeed at this period he could not bring himself to believe that the son of the Khorsabad king was Sennacherib and his grandson Esarhaddon, as Ilincks ventured to assert.^ The sisxiis for Sarwn he transliterated ' Arko-tsin,' and those for Sennacherib, ' Bel Adonim-sha ' ; but Esar- haddon came out almost (correct as ' Assar-Adan.' He concludes his paper by an analysis of the inscriptions found at Khorsabad, containing the annals of ' Arko- tsin.'

It was not till the following year, and till after Eawlin-

  • He thought the dynasty of Nimrud flourished B.C. 1300-1200, and

the later dynasty of Khorsabad from B.C. 1100-1000. J. R, A, S. xii. 471.

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