both the French and the British ended in 1853. Their success inspired a number of exploratory soundings at Babylonian sites in the 1850s but with limited results, due largely to the excavators’ unfamiliarity with mud-brick architecture. Hormuzd Rassam returned to the field in 1878 and worked through 1882 at widely scattered sites in Assyria and Babylonia, but his careless methods rendered even the more important finds less useful than they should have been. An additional setback was the loss of nearly all of Victor Place’s finds from Khorsabad, and some of the British finds from Nineveh, in a disastrous sinking of the cargo rafts at Qurnah in 1855.

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Mesopotamian Archaeological Sites

While Botta and Layard had been digging, scholars in Europe were working to decipher the cuneiform script of the Mesopotamian monuments. The key to their understanding lay in a trilingual inscription, in Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite, of Darius at Behistun in western iran. The Indo-Iranian Old Persian text provided the basis for deciphering the Semitic Babylonian, and in 1857 a blind test of the four leading experts