The Progress and Prospects of Oriental Discovery [pp. 476-493]

1875.] ORIENTAL DISCOVERY. 481
with derived divinities, and the great doctrine of the immortality of the soul, has been placed beyond question. But no
one who has any conception of the vastness of the field that
yet remains to be explored, and the almost exhaustless litera.
turetthat still exists in untranslated inscriptions, can doubt that
much fuller and clearer light will yet be poured upon the difficult problems of Egyptian history.
The discovery of the buried remains of the great capital of the
Assyrian Empire, marks an era in Oriental exploration. It has
resulted in giving back to us the lost records of centuries of
Assyrian history, and it has impelled to kindred investigations
in other spheres, from which important results have already been
secured, while results still more important are moreover to be
anticipated. Almost at the same time, England and France, by
their several representatives,became interested in the exploration
of the remains of Assyrian grandeur. The cuneiform inscriptions
of the East, however, had long before been the objects of Cu.
rious though futile inquiry. Early in the seventeenth century,
Persepolis was visited, and its numerous inscriptions noted. In
1693, specimens of them, taken sixteen years before, by Flower,
the English agent of the East India Company, were published
in the Philosophical Transactions. In 1700, Dr. Thomas My~le,
eminent for his Oriental studies, and successor of the learned
Pocock at Oxford, published his "Rehgion of tke Ancient Persians," betraying his utter misapprehension of the nature of
the cuneiform inscriptions, while exhibiting his extensive acquaintance with Oriental languages. After K~mpfer and
Van Bruyn, the Danish traveler, Karsten Niebuhr, father of
the historian, visited Persepolis, in 1765, and brought back the
texts of numerous inscriptions. The labors of Anquetil Duperron, though without results of immediate importance, served
to excite curiosity, and draw increased attention to the sub
ject. In 1798, Tychsen made some valuable criticisms on the
suggestions of Niebuhr, who recognized the threefold grouping
of the inscriptions, and professed to discover forty-two distinct
characters, without determining to what alphabet, or even language, they belonged In 1800, Bishop Mu~nzer drew up a
table of twelve characters, the alphabetic value of which
he believed that he had established, but of which two only, A
and B, were subsequently found to be correct. On Sept. 4,