[664] Mohl, op. cit. vol. ii. Report, June 1855; Weisbach, p. 7.
[665] Expédition scientifique en Mésopotamie (1851-4), par Jules Oppert, vol. ii. Paris, 1859.
[666] M. Oppert cannot always be taken seriously where his own claims are concerned. Writing in 1859, he says of the Median: ‘Tous nos devanciers, y compris M. Norris, l’ont prise pour une écriture distincte de celle des Assyriens’ (p. 71). Leaving out of account Norris’s identification of 47 of the characters, De Saulcy had pronounced them to be ‘identical’ in 1848. Oppert now compares 97 Median signs and 8 ideograms with both Babylonian and Assyrian groups.
[667] ‘Deux caractères n’expriment jamais le même son,’ p. 35. ‘Les mêmes sons syllabiques sont toujours attachés au même signe,’ p. 77.
[668] Bonomy, Nineveh and its Palaces (1889), p. 479; J. R. A. S. xii. 482.
[669] J. R. A. S. (1855), xv. 97; Memoir by Canon Rawlinson, p. 174.
[670] Layard (Sir H.), Early Adventures (1894), pp. 168, 220. Cf. Professor Sayce in Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch. iii, 472.
[671] J. R. A. S. x. 28; ib. xii. 483.
[672] ‘Development of Cuneiform Syllabary’ (1887), J. R. A. S. vol. xix. They appeared to Mr. Vaux in 1851 ‘to contain a considerable number of new characters, for which no conjectural equivalent can be found either in the Babylonian or the Assyrian alphabet’ (Nineveh and Persepolis, p. 431).
[673] Trans. S. B. A. vol. iii. (1874), p. 479; Records of the Past, O.S. vol. vii. (1876), p. 81.