Decipherment historiography

For centuries, travellers to Persepolis, in modern-day Iran, had noticed carved cuneiform inscriptions and were intrigued. Attempts at deciphering these Old Persian writings date back to Arabo-Persian historians of the medieval Islamic world, though these early attempts at decipherment were largely unsuccessful. In the 15th century, the Venetian Giosafat Barbaro explored ancient ruins in the Middle East and came back with news of a very odd writing he had found carved on the stones in the temples of Shiraz and on many clay tablets. Antonio de Gouvea, a professor of theology, noted in 1602 the strange writing he had had occasion to observe during his travels a year earlier in Persia which took in visits to ruins. See: It was translated into English and reprinted in 1625 by Samuel Purchas, who included it in a collection of letters and other writings concerning travel and exploration: That English translation was reprinted in 1905:
 * Gouvea, Antonio de, Relaçam em que se tratam as guerras e grandes vitórias que alcançou o grande Rey de Persia Xá Abbas, do grão Turco Mahometo, e seu filho Amethe … [An account in which are treated the wars and great victories that were attained by the great king of Persia Shah Abbas against the great Turk Mehmed and his son, Ahmed … ] (Lisbon, Portugal: Pedro Crasbeeck, 1611), p. 32.  [in Portuguese]
 * French translation: Gouvea, Antonio de, with Alexis de Meneses, trans., Relation des grandes guerres et victoires obtenues par le roy de Perse Cha Abbas contre les empereurs de Turquie Mahomet et Achmet son fils, … (Rouen, France:  Nicolas Loyselet, 1646), pp. 81–82.  [in French] From pp. 81–82:  "Peu esloigné de là estoit la sepulture de la Royne, qui estoit fort peu differente.  L'escriture qui donnoit cognoissance par qui, pourquoy, & en quel temps cest grande masse avoit esté bastie est fort distincte en plusieurs endroits du bastiment:  mais il n'y a personne qui y entende rien, parce que les carracteres ne sont Persiens, Arabes, Armeniens ny Hebreux, qui sont les langages aujourd'hui en usage en ces quartiers là, … "  (Not far from there [i.e., Persepolis or "Chelminira"] was the sepulchre of the queen, which wasn't much different.  The writing that announced by whom, why, and at what time this great mass had been built, is very distinct in several locations in the building:  but there wasn't anyone who understood it, because the characters were neither Persian, Arabic, Armenian, nor Hebrew, which are the languages in use today in those quarters … )  In 1619, Spain's ambassador to Persia, García de Silva Figueroa (1550–1624), sent a letter to the Marquesse of Bedmar, discussing various subjects regarding Persia, including his observations on the cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis.  This letter was originally printed in 1620:
 * Figueroa, Garcia Silva, Garciae Silva Figueroa ... de Rebus Persarum epistola v. Kal. an. M.DC.XIX Spahani exarata ad Marchionem Bedmari (Antwerp, (Belgium): 1620), 16 pages. [in Latin].
 * "Letter from Don Garcia Silva Figueroa Embassador from Philip the Third King of Spaine, to the Persian, Written at Spahan, or Hispahan Anno 1619 to the Marquese Bedmar Touching Matters of Persia," in:  Purchas, Samuel, Purchas His Pilgrimes (London, England:  William Stansby, 1625), vol. 2, book IX, Chap. XI, pp. 1533–1535.
 * Figueroa, Don Garcia Silva, "Chap. XI.  Letter from Don Garcia Silva Figueroa Embassador from Philip the Third King of Spaine, to the Persian, Written at Spahan, or Hispahan Anno 1619 to the Marquese Bedmar Touching Matters of Persia," in:  Purchas, Samuel, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, … (Glasgow, Scotland:  James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), vol. 9, pp. 190–196.  On pp. 192–193, Figueroa describes the cuneiform at Persepolis:  "The Letters themselves are neither Chaldæan, nor Hebrew, nor Greeke, nor Arabike, nor of any other Nation, which was ever found of old, or at this day, to be extant.  They are all three-cornered, but somewhat long, of the forme of a Pyramide, or such a little Obeliske, as I have set in the margine:  so that in nothing doe they differ one from another, but in their placing and situation, yet so conformed that they are wondrous plaine distinct and perspicuous."

Inventoring inscriptions
In 1625, the Roman traveler Pietro Della Valle, who had sojourned in Mesopotamia between 1616 and 1621, brought to Europe copies of characters he had seen in Persepolis and inscribed bricks from Ur and the ruins of Babylon. The copies he made, the first that reached circulation within Europe, were not quite accurate but Della Valle understood that the writing had to be read from left to right, following the direction of wedges, but did not attempt to decipher the scripts.

Englishman Sir Thomas Herbert, in the 1638 edition of his travel book ''Some Yeares Travels into Africa & Asia the Great. … '', reported seeing at Persepolis carved on the wall "a dozen lines of strange characters…consisting of figures, obelisk, triangular, and pyramidal" and thought they resembled Greek. In the 1677 edition he reproduced some and thought they were 'legible and intelligible' and therefore decipherable. He also guessed, correctly, that they represented not letters or hieroglyphics but words and syllables, and were to be read from left to right. Herbert is rarely mentioned in standard histories of the decipherment of cuneiform.

Carsten Niebuhr brought the first reasonably complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to Europe in 1767. Bishop Friedrich Münter of Copenhagen discovered that the words in the Persian inscriptions were divided from one another by an oblique wedge and that the monuments must belong to the age of Cyrus and his successors. One word, which occurs without any variation towards the beginning of each inscription, he correctly inferred to signify "king". By 1802 Georg Friedrich Grotefend had determined that two kings' names mentioned were Darius and Xerxes (but in their native Old Persian forms, which were unknown at the time and therefore had to be conjectured), and had been able to assign correct alphabetic values to the cuneiform characters which composed the two names. Although Grotefend's Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities on September 4, 1802, the Academy refused to publish it; it was subsequently published in Heeren's work in 1815, but was overlooked by most researchers at the time.

Burnouf & Lassen
In 1836, the eminent French scholar Eugène Burnouf discovered that the first of the inscriptions published by Niebuhr contained a list of the satrapies of Darius. With this clue in his hand, he identified and published an alphabet of thirty letters, most of which he had correctly deciphered.

A month earlier, a friend and pupil of Burnouf's, Professor Christian Lassen of Bonn, had also published his own work on The Old Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of Persepolis. He and Burnouf had been in frequent correspondence, and his claim to have independently detected the names of the satrapies, and thereby to have fixed the values of the Persian characters, was consequently fiercely attacked. According to Sayce, whatever his obligations to Burnouf may have been, Lassen's.

"...contributions to the decipherment of the inscriptions were numerous and important. He succeeded in fixing the true values of nearly all the letters in the Persian alphabet, in translating the texts, and in proving that the language of them was not Zend, but stood to both Zend and Sanskrit in the relation of a sister."

- Sayce

Rawlinson & Hincks
In 1835 Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company army officer, visited the Behistun Inscriptions in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522–486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Assyrian and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Rawlinson correctly deduced that the Old Persian was a phonetic script and he successfully deciphered it. In 1837 he finished his copy of the Behistun inscription, and sent a translation of its opening paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic Society. Before his article could be published, however, the works of Lassen and Burnouf reached him, necessitating a revision of his article and the postponement of its publication. Then came other causes of delay. In 1847 the first part of the Rawlinson's Memoir was published; the second part did not appear until 1849. The task of deciphering the Persian cuneiform texts was virtually accomplished.

After translating the Persian, Rawlinson and, working independently of him, the Irish Assyriologist Edward Hincks, began to decipher the others. (The actual techniques used to decipher the Akkadian language have never been fully published; Hincks described how he sought the proper names already legible in the deciphered Persian while Rawlinson never said anything at all, leading some to speculate that he was secretly copying Hincks. ) They were greatly helped by the excavations of the French naturalist Paul Émile Botta and English traveler and diplomat Austen Henry Layard of the city of Nineveh from 1842. Among the treasures uncovered by Layard and his successor Hormuzd Rassam were, in 1849 and 1851, the remains of two libraries, now mixed up, usually called the Library of Ashurbanipal, a royal archive containing tens of thousands of baked clay tablets covered with cuneiform inscriptions.

By 1851, Hincks and Rawlinson could read 200 Babylonian signs. They were soon joined by two other decipherers: young German-born scholar Julius Oppert, and versatile British Orientalist William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1857 the four men met in London and took part in a famous experiment to test the accuracy of their decipherments. Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, gave each of them a copy of a recently discovered inscription from the reign of the Assyrian emperor Tiglath-Pileser I. A jury of experts was empanelled to examine the resulting translations and assess their accuracy. In all essential points the translations produced by the four scholars were found to be in close agreement with one another. There were of course some slight discrepancies. The inexperienced Talbot had made a number of mistakes, and Oppert's translation contained a few doubtful passages which the jury politely ascribed to his unfamiliarity with the English language. But Hincks' and Rawlinson's versions corresponded remarkably closely in many respects. The jury declared itself satisfied, and the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform was adjudged a fait accompli.

Deciphering proper names
In the early days of cuneiform decipherment, the reading of proper names presented the greatest difficulties. However, there is now a better understanding of the principles behind the formation and the pronunciation of the thousands of names found in historical records, business documents, votive inscriptions, literary productions and legal documents. The primary challenge was posed by the characteristic use of old Sumerian non-phonetic logograms in other languages that had different pronunciations for the same symbols. Until the exact phonetic reading of many names was determined through parallel passages or explanatory lists, scholars remained in doubt, or had recourse to conjectural or provisional readings. Fortunately, in many cases, there are variant readings, the same name being written phonetically (in whole or in part) in one instance and logographically in another.