Edward Hincks

By 1823 the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion had succeeded in deciphering this enigmatic script, but Hincks made a number of discoveries of his own which established him as an authority of ancient philology.

[2] Hincks' greatest achievement was the decipherment of the ancient language and writing of Babylon and Assyria: Akkadian cuneiform but his attention might never have been drawn to the relatively new topic of Assyriology had it not been for a lucky find during 1842.

Among the treasures unearthed by Botta and his successors, including Austen Henry Layard, with whom Hincks exchanged many letters, was the famous Library of Assurbanipal, a royal archive containing tens of thousands of baked clay tablets.

Three men were to play a decisive role in the decipherment of this script: Hincks, Rawlinson and a young German-born scholar called Jules Oppert.

Hincks deduced correctly that cuneiform writing had been invented by one of the earliest civilisations of Mesopotamia (a people later identified by Oppert as the Sumerians), who then bequeathed it to later states such as Babylon, Assyria and Elam.

In 1857 the versatile English Orientalist William Henry Fox Talbot suggested that an undeciphered cuneiform text be given to several different Assyriologists to translate.

Edwin Norris, secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, gave each of them a copy of a recently discovered inscription from the reign of the Assyrian emperor Tiglath-Pileser I.

The inexperienced Talbot had made a number of mistakes, and Oppert's translation contained a few doubtful passages due to his unfamiliarity with the English language.

The Reverend Edward Hincks devoted the remaining years of his life to the study of cuneiform and made further significant contributions to its decipherment.