Darius was the first monarch of his line to make use of the Persian cuneiform script, which in this case he utilized in conjunction with the older and more complicated Assyro-Babylonian alphabetic and syllabic characters to record a portion of the history of his reign.  Rawlinson’s translation of the famous inscription was an important contribution towards the decipherment of the cuneiform writings of Assyria and Babylonia.

Twelve years of brilliant Mesopotamian discovery concluded in 1854, and further excavations had to be suspended until the “seventies” on account of the unsettled political conditions of the ancient land and the difficulties experienced in dealing with Turkish officials.  During the interval, however, archaeologists and philologists were kept fully engaged studying the large amount of material which had been accumulated.  Sir Henry Rawlinson began the issue of his monumental work The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia on behalf of the British Museum.

Goodspeed refers to the early archaeological work as the “Heroic Period” of research, and says that the “Modern Scientific Period” began with Mr. George Smith’s expedition to Nineveh in 1873.

George Smith, like Henry Schliemann, the pioneer investigator of pre-Hellenic culture, was a self-educated man of humble origin.  He was born at Chelsea in 1840.  At fourteen he was apprenticed to an engraver.  He was a youth of studious habits and great originality, and interested himself intensely in the discoveries which had been made by Layard and other explorers.  At the British Museum, which he visited regularly to pore over the Assyrian inscriptions, he attracted the attention of Sir Henry Rawlinson.  So greatly impressed was Sir Henry by the young man’s enthusiasm and remarkable intelligence that he allowed him the use of his private room and provided casts and squeezes of inscriptions to assist him in his studies.  Smith made rapid progress.  His earliest discovery was the date of the payment of tribute by Jehu, King of Israel, to the Assyrian Emperor Shalmaneser.  Sir Henry availed himself of the young investigator’s assistance in producing the third volume of The Cuneiform Inscriptions.

In 1867 Smith received an appointment in the Assyriology Department of the British Museum, and a few years later became famous throughout Christendom as the translator of fragments of the Babylonian Deluge Legend from tablets sent to London by Rassam.  Sir Edwin Arnold, the poet and Orientalist, was at the time editor of the Daily Telegraph, and performed a memorable service to modern scholarship by dispatching Smith, on behalf of his paper, to Nineveh to search for other fragments of the Ancient Babylonian epic.  Rassam had obtained the tablets from the great library of the cultured Emperor Ashur-bani-pal, “the great and noble Asnapper” of the Bible,[5] who took delight, as he himself recorded, in

    The wisdom of Ea,[6] the art of song, the treasures of science.