Old Persian cuneiform

The Persian cuneiform is the latest and simplest form of cuneiform. It was deciphered by the Göttingen school teacher Georg Friedrich Grotefend and the British officer Henry Rawlinson Creswicke.

The most famous document is the so-called trilingual Behistun inscription of King Darius I on a rock wall near the Persian Behistun place. In this ancient Persian inscription Darius claims to be the inventor of this document. The fact that the Persian cuneiform script was not the official script of the Achaemenid Empire, suggests that it is not historically emerged, but a conscious re-creation was. It consists of only 41 characters. Of these, 36 phonograms, 5 frequently used logograms and 1 hyphens.

Deciphering

While Rawlinson risked his life to decipher the cuneiform, Grotefend solved the riddle at the desk. This was preceded by a bet in which he claimed that he could decipher a font from which he did not even know the language in which it was written.

As a teacher of Greek Grotefend knew the Persian kings. Then he appointed ten of the 37 characters of a text submitted to it from Persepolis by emanated from that form of the name, as occurred in the Avesta. Grotefend noted that the kings wanted neither Cyrus I could still be Cambyses I, as both name with a "k" start - According to the initial character of the sought kings, however, were different. It could also not have to be Cyrus or Artaxerxes I, as these two names were different lengths. So there were only Darius I and Xerxes II, he presented his results in his manuscript praevia de cuneatis quas vocant inscriptionibus Persepolitanis legendis et explicandis relatio, which he presented to the Society of Sciences in Göttingen on 4 September 1802.

1835 Rawlinson visited the rock relief of Behistun. He let rappel down the cliff and copied the 18 -meter-long trilingual inscription ( Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian ), which surrounds the relief. In 1846 he published the translation of the complete Behistun inscription. Today, it can neither prove nor rule out that Rawlinson knew from work Grotefends, which appeared only at the end of the century in press.

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