ABSTRACT
While Layard was busy writing his book on Nimrud the decipherment of the Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform system of writing was entering a decisive phase, and he must have been terribly frustrated by not being able to include in his book any readings of just a few of the many texts he had found. The solution seemed so close, and Rawlinson's letters promised much. After a new visit to the Bisutun rock in September 1847 he claimed that he could now prove that his previously established alphabet was nearly one-hundred per cent correct. Not only that, he was now in a position to add a large number of new values, ‘and I have moreover a vocabulary of between two and three hundred words in the determinate rendering’. 94
