Rawlinson, after studying the syllabaries excavated at Kuyunjik, had come to the conclusion that they were bilingual and that the Semitic Babylonian words in them explained corresponding words in an entirely new and hitherto unknown language, which he designated "Akkadian" and which he considered to be "Scythian or Turanian." Here, then, we learn for the first time of the possibility that there had existed a non-Semitic people and a non-Semitic language in Mesopotamia. In
