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A Cyprian inscription from c. fourth century BCE with
transliteration and Greek words on the lines below.

Unfortunately from the point of view of historians, these Cuneiform
materials virtually without exception are brief and unin- By far the most important decipherment—not only in
formative, mainly funerary. Edward Gibbon in The sheer quantity of materials made available, but in their
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) makes no quality as well—was of the complex of scripts known as
use of them, for example, in his account of the fall of cuneiform.Again it was a question of accurate copies, this
Palmyra and its queen Zenobia (chap. xi). Barthélemy time brought from Persepolis by the Danish explorer
himself, who spent thirty years preparing an immense pic- Carsten Niebuhr and published beginning in 1772. Each
aresque didactic novel detailing The Voyage of Young Persepolitan inscription appeared in three guises: three
Anacharsis (a fictional Phrygian traveler in mid-fourth- scripts differing in complexity. It was an easy surmise that
century Greece and environs), published in 1788, does they represented the same text in three languages; the cru-
not cite the inscriptions there. cial step in their decipherment was taken by a German
Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did gymnasium (grade school) instructor, Georg Friedrich
explorers and archeologists begin to encounter longer Grotefend, who in 1802 conjectured that the most
(mainly annalistic and dedicatory) inscriptions in these prominent in each example, which also happened to be
scripts, which began to provide alternative accounts of the simplest of the three, probably represented the prin-
episodes known only from the Bible—the first, longest, cipal language of the Persian (Achaemenid) empire.
and for a long time the earliest (c. 850 BCE) is the Mesha Guided by de Sacy’s texts, he expected to find formulas
inscription (discovered 1868, in Moabite, very like He- like “Xerxes, great king, son of Darius, great king, son of
brew), which relates puzzlingly to 1–2 Kings; the Siloam Hystaspes” (who was not a king)—the names known
Tunnel inscription (discovered 1880, in Hebrew) spec- from the Greek of Herodotus. Indeed he found suitably
tacularly illuminates 2 Kings 20:20.A handful of inscrip- repetitive patterns, and he knew enough of Iranian lan-
tions (they continue to be found) in Aramaic from small guages to point the way for specialists, some of the pio-
Aramaean kingdoms scattered around the northeast cor- neers in Indo-European studies, including two other
ner of the Mediterranean offer almost all that is directly Danes, Rasmus Rask and Christian Lassen, to bring the
known about these buffer states, located between the al- decipherment to completion over the next few decades.
ternately surging Assyrian, Egyptian, and Hittite empires. The Persepolis inscriptions proved to be singularly
Antoine Isaac Sylvestre de Sacy’s decipherment in the unenlightening as to political history, while theology
late 1780s of the scripts of the Middle Persian languages and imperial ideology emerge more clearly. The only
of the Parthian and Sasanian empires also did not yield quasi-annalistic inscription, an immense one placed by
much. From their coins and their meager inscriptions, we Darius I on a cliff near Behistun, Iran, which was copied
learn little beyond the names of the kings and the fluc- with great difficulty and aplomb by a British military
tuating extents of their domains. Emil Rödiger’s deci- diplomat stationed in Baghdad, H. C. Rawlinson, offers
pherment of the South Arabian (“Himyaritic”) script a endless opportunities for the disputations of historians.
half-century later provided little information to historians. Its 1848 publication, however, was too late to be of use
Inscriptions in the four languages involved, notably in the decipherment of cuneiform; Rawlinson’s work on
Sabaean, are numerous, and some are lengthy, but they the Old Persian version seems to have independently
are almost impossible to date, and they are concerned far replicated that of Grotefend over a generation earlier.The
more with local hydraulic projects than with affairs of second of the three official Achaemenid languages, now
state. known as Elamite, remains little understood (the initial