The Correspondence of Edward Hincks: Volume I 1818-1849

Mesopotamian cuneiform, was born in Cork and spent much of his life in Ireland, where he was the Church of Ireland Rector. 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. The letters in this first volume cover the period from the 1820s when Hincks was a young clergyman and scholar, to the years 1846-9 during which he announced his epoch-making discoveries in the decipherment of Akkadian.