“My Dear Sir,” wrote Henry Fox Talbot one Wednesday in late 1870, “I am informed by Mr. Cooper that a new Society under your auspices is going to be…formed for the promotion of Egyptian and Assyrian Archæology and Biblical Chronology…It will perhaps be difficult to devise a suitable name for the Society, that of Syro-Egyptian being preoccupied. Perhaps Egypto-Chaldæan would do – I know nothing of the Syro-Egyptian beyond its name, but I suppose from the fact of your promoting a new society, that you think the Syro-Egyptian a failure.” Talbot was a British aristocrat and a scholar of Assyrian cuneiform, writing to Dr. Samuel Birch, keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum. The two men had corresponded about Assyrian antiquity for almost twenty years, working to decipher cuneiform texts stamped into ancient clay tablets. Birch’s response was swift. His new project would combine the Syro-Egyptian Society with another organization, the Chronological Institute, to create an expanded journal for “researches connected with Biblical lands.” (read more...)