Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/276

complete, and on January 1, 1838, he forwarded the translation of the two paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic Society, where it was received on March 14. In April a copy was submitted to the Asiatic Society in Paris, where it excited great interest, and Rawlinson was at once elected an Honorary Member. Steps were at the same time taken to put him in possession of the latest results of European investigation. M. Burnouf sent him his 'Mémoire ' of 1836. M. Mohl shortly afterwards forwarded him a copy of the Yaçna. Sir Gore Ouseley, the Vice-President of the Asiatic Society, introduced him to the notice of Lassen, who wrote to him from Bonn in August (1838) to acquaint him with his alphabet and with the corrections made since its appearance in 1836 'as well by others as by myself.^[1]'With the valuable assistance thus placed at his disposal, Rawlinson continued to work at his translations during the remainder of 1838 and till the autumn of 1839. So early as January 1839, we learn from Mrs. Rich that he had already succeeded in deciphering a large part of the two hundred lines.^[2] He derived the greatest assistance from Burnouf's 'Commentaire sur le Yaçna.' 'To this work,' he says, 'I owe in great measure the success of my translations.' During his stay at Bagdad in 1839 he was in correspondence with Lassen and Burnouf, who informed him of the progress recently made by Beer and Jacquet. Rawlinson, on his part, was rapidly completing his alphabet, and he lost no time in making his friends acquainted with the result. He was surprised to find that the European scholars just about kept pace with his own progress, and that he had little to learn from them,

1. Memoir by Canon Rawlinson, pp. 311-17.
2. Babylon and Persepolis, preface, p. vii. Cf. Vaux, Nineveh and PersepoliS, p. 426.