Alongside Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform script is among the oldest known scripts. It preceded the still unknown Phoenician, so-called “Linear B” script. Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered by Champollion, while the Phoenician script remains a mystery. Emerging from obscurity, cuneiform script became a subject of great interest worldwide in the 17th century, so it cannot be said that it was deciphered by one person. It was the achievement of many people who didn’t even know each other.
Cuneiform script is the script of the Sumerians, one of the oldest advanced civilizations in the world, presumed to have existed around the 4th millennium BC. They recorded their achievements on a multitude of clay tablets. They developed a writing system that was later used by other civilizations in the region after their civilization disappeared. The Assyrians and Babylonians adopted the Sumerian script, which is now a witness to their time. The last in a long line of civilizations that used the script were the Persians. The cuneiform script was used by the Persians. They adopted it in the 6th century BC and adapted it to their language. Texts written in cuneiform adorned the walls of the royal palaces in the monumental city of Persepolis, the center of the Persian Empire. Only ruins remain today, bearing witness to the once mighty kingdom that stretched from India to the Nile. The inscriptions on the walls of the ruins, written in an unfamiliar language, could have spoken of its past glory, but no one understood them.
The first person to study these inscriptions in recent times was the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle in the 17th century. However, his transcription was not accurate enough to initiate any further research, but it sparked the interest of many scientists and future decipherers of cuneiform script. In 1711, Jean Chardin (later Sir John Chardin), an extraordinarily educated son of a French jeweler and himself the chief jeweler at the British court, carefully and precisely transcribed them in his travelogue about Persia. One small inscription that was found in the ruins of Persepolis.
An inscription from Uruk written in cuneiform script.
A merchant document found in Tellohu relates to a loan of donkeys to a farmer, cattle farmer, blacksmith, and messenger. This square plate with rounded corners dates back to 2360 BCE and has the characteristic shape of plates from the early Sumerian dynastic period. Its dimensions are 7.8 x 7.8 cm and it is preserved in the Louvre.
In 1802, a librarian from the University of Göttingen persuaded Georg Friedrich Grotefend to accept this task. This German teacher was a gifted linguist and extremely skilled in solving linguistic puzzles. He had already published works on two ancient Italian dialects (Tuscan and Umbrian), but was not familiar with oriental languages. He assumed that there were three languages involved, with the first one being Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid era, which built the mentioned palaces and had these inscriptions engraved. For a start, he selected two of these Old Persian inscriptions. And he placed them one next to the other. The frequent repetition of the same symbol in them indicated that they contained similar content. He used a very simple but reliable method, and because he progressed step by step, the possibility of error was very small. Münter noticed a word in all Persian texts that appeared in two forms: long and short. The same word appeared in two of Grotefend’s texts in both long and short form. Münter suggested that this word means king in the short form and kings in the long form, and when these two forms of the word appear together, they mean king of kings. Furthermore, Grotefend discovered a phrase which he assumed meant great king, king of kings. Namely, in the Sasanian records, the first word was always the king’s name, followed by the words great king, king of kings. He found a list of Persian kings in Herodotus and selected three rulers who fit into the existing framework: Histasp, Darius, and Xerxes. According to his hypothesis It was difficult, at the beginning of Group I, the name was Darije. He translated some parts of the text as follows:
Darije, the great king, king of all kings… son of Histaspes…
Xerxes, the great king, king of all kings… son of King Darije…
Darheush, the form he arbitrarily chose for Darije (correct is Daryavush), allowed him to reveal the letters D, A, R, SH. It was an extraordinary discovery because the key to deciphering three ancient languages lay there. Only a few people managed to make discoveries significant to history and philology. However, he was not destined to translate the entire text or understand the meaning of the words he could only guess.
His work was continued by Rasmus Christian Rask, a Danish professor of oriental studies, a linguist who mastered 25 languages and dialects, and studied nearly the same number. Rask discovered the plural endings in Persian language.
Eugene Burnouf, a French orientalist and professor of Sanskrit, who introduced Europe to the religion and ancient Iranian language of Avesta He significantly contributed to the puzzle of putting together the mosaic. Thanks to his research on the liturgical text Yasna from the Avesta and the study of a list of Persian geographical names found in Naksh-i-Rustam, he almost simultaneously revealed all the letters of the Persian alphabet.
One of many inscriptions from the palace in Persepolis.
During the thirty-year period of deciphering the script, from the publication of Grotefend’s essay in 1802 to the release of Lassen’s book in 1836, there were more skeptics than those who believed in the decipherment results. The need for another type of researcher to conclude the case of cuneiform decipherment arose once again, and that person had already appeared when the results of Lassen’s research were published.
Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson went into the service of the East India Company in India at a very young age. There, he learned several Indian languages and was also familiar with Persian. In 1833, he went to Persia, where he worked on the reorganization of the Persian language. xke army. During a military exercise, he accidentally found himself near some old Persian inscriptions in Hamadan (Ecbatana). He was drawn to an unusual text that he transcribed and later began to decipher. He knew very little about the long-standing work on this subject in Europe. It is not known exactly when he came across information about Grotefend’s work, but it is undoubtedly clear that he worked independently for some time. His method was incredibly similar to Grotefend’s. He transcribed two trilingual inscriptions and immediately realized that he was dealing with three languages. In 1839, he said the following about his method:
“When I began comparing and transcribing these two texts (or rather, Persian fragments, because as parts written in the Persian language occupied a prominent place on all tablets and were written in the simplest of the three forms of cuneiform script, naturally they were the first to be processed), I discovered that the signs, except in some places, completely matched. The only reasonable conclusion that could explain…” The jumping and mismatching of individual parts is that they represent personal names. Furthermore, I note that only three such groups of characters appear in the first two texts because the characters that appear in the second position in one text match the characters that are in the first position in the second text. This leads to the conclusion that they bring the name of the father of the king who is being celebrated here. This serves not only to connect these two texts but, if we accept that they are indeed proper names, they indicate a genealogical sequence. The natural conclusion that follows is that I, having received these three names, have obtained the names of three consecutive generations of the Persian monarchy; it so happened that the three names Histasp, Darije, and Kserks, which I randomly tried to assign to these three groups of characters, matched perfectly, and indeed were the correct choice. (H. Rawlinson, Memoirs)
Drawing from the Behistun Rock. The Behistun inscription about Persian history served to decipher the cuneiform script, just as it did for the decipherment The hieroglyph served as the Rosetta Stone. The inscription is carved about 100 meters above the ground. The monument consists of a large relief depicting King Darius I and the conquered peoples, with a depiction of the supreme deity Ahura Mazda rising above them, and a trilingual inscription measuring 15 x 25 m. The Old Persian and Elamite inscriptions are side by side, with the Babylonian inscription above them.
Drawn to the rock inscription, he focused on uncovering its meaning, regardless of the difficulties and dangers associated with the ascent…
Although the French Antiquities Commission in Persia declared a few years ago that it was impossible to copy the Behistun inscription, I wouldn’t say that the climb to the place where the inscription appears is a big deal. When I lived in Kermanshah fifteen years ago and was more active than I am today, I often climbed the rock three or four times a day without the help of ropes or ladders, without any assistance, without anything. However, during my later visits, I did start using ropes for climbing and descending. and ropes. (H. Rawlinson, Archaeologia, 1853.)
The Behistun Rock, which bears a record of Persian history, as later discovered, was to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to hieroglyphs, as its decipherment was a crucial key to uncovering cuneiform script.
The present appearance of the Behistun Rock.
I am the great king Darius, king of kings, king of Persia, king of lands, son of Hystaspes, grandson of Arsames, an Achaemenid.
King Darius speaks: My father is Hystaspes; Hystaspes’ father is Arsames; Arsames’ father is Ariaramnes; the father of Ariaramnes is Teispes; Teispes’ father is Achaemenid.
King Darius speaks: That is why we are called Achaemenids. We have been illustrious since ancient times. Our family has been royal since ancient times…
King Darius speaks: These are the lands that have fallen under my rule; by the grace of Ahuramazda, I have become their king: Persia, Susa, Babylon, Assyria, Arabia, Egypt, the lands by the sea, Sparda, Ionia, Media, Armenia, Cappadocia, Parthia, Drangiana, Ariya, Corasmia, Bactria, So Gediana, Gandaara, Scythia, Sattagydia, Arachosia, Maka; a total of 23 countries.
An inscription from Van in Turkey mentioning King Xerxes. This is a trilingual inscription written in Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite languages.
Rawlinson, who deciphered the text on the Behistun Inscription in his thirties, achieved enduring fame in Oriental studies. The fact that Grotefend and Rawlinson, two researchers of completely different types and backgrounds, arrived at the same results confirmed the truthfulness of deciphering this script in the eyes of the public.
Work on deciphering the Old Persian text was practically completed. However, in 1846, Reverend Edward Hincks’ work appeared at the Royal Irish Academy, whose astute criticism of Lassen’s work and his original contribution to the definitive determination of syllabic values can be considered the closure of the case of deciphering the Persian cuneiform script.
The remaining two texts were translations of the first one. The text written in Elamite script. Using the language of tears, the language of the city of Suze, Niels Louis Weestergaard and Edwin Norris worked. By comparing texts, they came to the conclusion that this language is partially phonetic and partially syllabic. It consists of 96 syllabic signs, 16 alphabetical signs, and 5 determinatives, and the text written in it is quite readable, although some parts are still unclear.
The third version is written in Babylonian language. Its decipherment was contributed by Isadore Löwenstern, who discovered signs for the words “great king” and the plural ending for nouns. The Babylonian language was finally deciphered through the joint efforts of orientalists Jules Oppert and Edward Hincks, archaeologists Lois Frédérick de Saulcy and Rawlinson. The relief in this case was the resemblance of the Babylonian language to many well-known Semitic languages.
Thanks to the selfless work of many people around the world, cuneiform script has been deciphered, thus opening the doors that have been tightly closed for centuries, hiding a part of our history. It opens Through those doors, we were given the opportunity for new learning, but more importantly, this endeavor is just one of many examples that show victory is not reserved only for experts. It demonstrates that overcoming the boundaries of knowledge and solving problems can be contributed by anyone with a heart and mind set towards progress.