During that year the archaeologist Paul Émile Botta uncovered the remains of the ancient city of Niniveh, 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.