EDWARD HINCKS (1792-1866): A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HIS PUBLICATIONS.
No Place: No Publisher, No Date. First Edition (& 1st printing). Large octavo, original printed wrappers. Pp 325-356. "An Offprint, "Reprint from Orientalia Vol 52 (1983). First separate edition. From the library of Mystical Philosopher, Mathematician, Egyptologist & Assyriologist Charles A. Muses, with his handwritten notes and checkmarks in pencil throughout. In one instance Muses has corrected one of the translations in the text. A very good clean copy. Item #313331
Edward Hincks, Irish Clergyman, Irish clergyman, best remembered as an Assyriologist and one of the decipherers of Mesopotamian cuneiform. He was one of the three men known as the "holy trinity of cuneiform", with Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson and Jules Oppert. After taking an M.A. at Trinity College, Dublin in 1817, he took on as the protestant pastor in Ardtrea and later, in Killyleagh. In the 1830s he turned his attention to Old Persian cuneiform, a form of writing that the Achaemenid emperors had used for monumental inscriptions in their own language. Working independently of the leading Orientalist of the day, Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, Hincks deduced the essentially syllabic nature of this script and correctly deduced the values of the Persian vowels. In 1835 he supervised the unrolling of the mummified body of Takabuti at the Belfast Natural History Society. Hincks deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which revealed that she was mistress of a great house. In 1839 and 1846 he published on Egyptian Chronology, identifying Thutmose III, who Manetho called Memphres, with Menophres, who Theon of Alexandria had said reigned at the start of the Egyptian Great Year – a reference to what is known as the "Era of Menophres". 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. During that year the archaeologist Paul Émile Botta uncovered the remains of the ancient city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire. 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. These tablets were inscribed in a strange illegible form of writing known as cuneiform. 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 1848 he was awarded the Cunningham Medal of the Royal Irish Academy for his achievements.
Price (CAD): $175.00