Edward Hincks (1792-1866), the Irish Assyriologist and decipherer
of Mesopotamian cuneiform, was born in Cork and spent forty years
of his life at Killyleagh, Co. Down, where he was the Church of
Ireland Rector. He was educated at Midleton College, Co. Cork and
Trinity College, Dublin, where he was an exceptionally gifted
student. With the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs by
Jean Francois Champollion in 1822, Hincks became one of that first
group of scholars to contribute to the elucidation of the language,
chronology and religion of ancient Egypt. But his most notable
achievement was the decipherment of Akkadian, the language of
Babylonia and Assyria, and its complicated cuneiform writing
system.Between 1846 and 1852 Hincks published a series of highly
significant papers by which he established for himself a reputation
of the first order as a decipherer. Most of the letters in these
volumes have not been previously published. Much of the
correspondence relates to nineteenth-century archaeological and
linguistic discoveries, but there are also letters concerned with
ecclesiastical affairs, the Famine and the Hincks family.Between
1850 and 1852 Edward Hincks completed the main steps in the
decipherment of Akkadian. In 1851 he announced his sensational
discovery of the name of the Biblical king Jehu 'son of Omri' on
the famous Black Obelisk of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III,
which Layard had discovered at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu). On other
clay tablets he identified the names of the king Menahem of
Samaria, the place Yadnan (Cyprus), and people referred to as
'Ionians'. His discoveries prompted Austen Henry Layard, the
excavator of Nimrud (he thought it was Nineveh) to invite him to
prepare translations of the inscriptions for his bestselling
Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon.Layard was also
instrumental in persuading the British Museum to employ Hincks for
a year to transcribe and translate cuneiform texts. In 1856 Hincks
began to correspond with Henry Fox Talbot, pioneer of photography,
who was also interested in cuneiform. The variety and richness of
the correspondence provides a unique insight into the world of
Victorian intellectual and cultural life. Amongst Hincks'
correspondents were Samuel Birch, Franz Bopp, Friedrich Georg
Grotefend, William Rowan Hamilton, Christian Lassen, Austen Henry
Layard, Edwin Norris, George Cecil Renouard, and Peter le Page
Renouf. Volume I was published in 2007 and Volume III will be
published in 2009.
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