#decipherment

While the story of the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs via the Rosetta Stone is relatively well known, the deciphering of cuneiform is somewhat less well known. The first broadly published cuneiform occurred in 1778, a copy of Achaemenid royal inscriptions found in Persepolis by Carsten Niebuhr, but travelers in the region had noticed them for centuries and attempts were made to decipher them by Arabo-Persian historians and Islamic scholars, but these attempts were 'largely unsuccessful'. Part of the problem with deciphering cuneiform is that they were used for a broad range of languages, Sumerian, a language isolate, one with no related languages, and several Semitic languages.

European scholars made note of the 'strange writing' in and around Persia as far back as 1602, with copies of characters inscribed on bricks in Ur and Babylon being brought back to Europe as early as 1616, though these copies were not fully accurate. Despite this, it was 'understood that the writing had to be from left to right, following the direction of the wedges', though there was no attempt to decipher what was written. Another scholar wrote he 'thought some words had of the Antik Greek, shadowing out Ahasherus Theos. And though it have small concordance with the Hebrew, Greek, or Latine letter, yet questionless to the Inventor it was well knowne; and per adventure may conceale some excellent matter, though to this day wrapt up in the dim leafes of envious obscuritie [sic]'. In 1700, the inscriptions were given the name 'cuneiform' for their wedge shape, which is derived from the way the writing implement was pressed into the clay.

By Carsten Niebuhrs - https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.5586, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=129701119

Carsten Niebuhr, a German mathematician and cartographer, made 'very complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to Europe' in 1767. These would be considered the 'simplest of the three types of cuneiform scripts that had been encountered' and known as Old Persian Cuneiform. The other two, Elamite and Babylonian, were older and more complicated, so Old Persian Cuneiform was considered a 'prime candidate for decipherment'. There were, by Niebuhr's count, 42 characters, making Old Persian most likely to be an alphabetic script.

Around the same time, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, a French Indologist who learned both Pahlavi, an extinct language from Parthia which was in modern day northeastern Iran and Turkmenistan, and Persian, a Western Iranian language, published a translation of the Zend Avesta, a commentary in the liturgical language of Zoroastrianism, allowing the study of Middle Persian beginning during the French Revolution. He also made note of 'a rather stereotyped structure on the model: "Name of the King, the Great King, the King of Iran and Aniran, son of N., The King, etc…"' in inscriptions that were found in Naqsh-e Rostam, a necropolis about 13 km northwest of Persepolis, which was published in 1793.

By M.S. Saint-Martin - Journal Asiatique, II, 1823, page 66-67, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90579435

In 1798, Oluf Gerhard Tychsen, a German Orientalist, studied Niebuhr's copied inscriptions and noticed the regular use of an oblique wedge that goes from upper left to lower right, 𐏐. He hypothesized that these indicated individual words, much as a space does in Latin-based texts do today. He also noticed the frequent occurrence of seven letters 𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹, but was unable to make much more progress due to ascribing the texts to Arsacid, or Parthian, kings.

Friedrich Münter, a theologian and scholar, was able to prove the inscriptions belonged to Cyrus the Great's time, about 400 years earlier than the Arsacids, concluding that they were made in Old Persian and likely named Achaemenid kings. Because of this, he suggested that the frequent use of 𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹 likely meant that it was the word 'king' and when it was repeated, it meant 'King of Kings', and suggested that it was pronounced 'kh-sha-a-ya-th-i-ya', which is considered correct, coming from the same root as the Sanskrit word kṣatra-, meaning 'power' and 'command' with a currently accepted pronunciation of xšāyaθiya in Old Persian.

By Grotefend, in 1815 - Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90637315

Georg Friedrich Grotefend, a German philologist, or one who studies 'language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology', posited that the earlier inscriptions would follow the pattern of those that were newer, that being 'a king's name is often followed by "great king, king of kings" and the name of the king's father'. He compared the inscriptions from Niebuhr to known kings from the Greek records and was able to correctly identify the rulers mentioned as Darius the Great and Cyrus the Great, who did not have kings as fathers, with Cyrus' father and his son having the same name being the deciding factor between the two. While he was able to identify the kings correctly, he was less accurate about the sounds mapped to the symbols used, for example reading 𐎭𐎠𐎼𐎹𐎺𐎢𐏁 as d-a-r-h-e-u-sh instead of da-a-ra-ya-va-u-sha due to using the Greek rendering of Darius' name rather than the, at the time, unknown Old Persian. Despite his efforts, his work wasn't published until 1815 after being presented in 1802, and even after that was largely overlooked.

By Count Caylus (18th century) - Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90561276

In 1823, Jean-François Champollion, French decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs, translated a dedication in four languages on an alabaster vase containing the Egyptian equivalent of Xerxes. This confirmed that Grotefend's deductions were correct. The publication of Champollion's work brought more attention to cuneiform, proving that it could be done.

In 1836, Eugène Burnouf, French Indologist, was able to figure out that one of Niebuhr's inscriptions was a list of satrapies, or provinces, under Darius. With this, he was able to publish an alphabet of 30 letters, most of which were correct, as did his student and friend, Christian Lassen, who claimed to have noticed the list of satrapies independently and published a month earlier, which caused a great deal of strife between the two, with Archibald Henry Sayce, British Assyriologist and linguist, writing that Lassen's 'contributions to the decipherment of the inscriptions were numerous and important. He succeeded in fixing the true values of nearly all of 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'.

By Unknown artist - Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75781418

In 1835, Henry Rawlinson, an army officer with the British East India Company, visited the trilingual Behistun Inscriptions in Persia, with the three languages being Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite, which was then able to serve in the place of the Rosetta Stone for the scripts. Rawlinson deciphered the Old Persian version by 1837, though he received copies of Lassen and Burnouf's works, which necessitated revisions of his work before he could publish. Other issues pushed back publication until 1847 and 1849, virtually completing the task of deciphering Old Persian cuneiform and opening the door for him and Irish Assyriologist Edward Hincks to work on Elamite and Babylonian independently.

Hincks worked on deciphering Akkadian, a 'close predecessor of Babylonian', though the complete techniques were not documented beyond that he 'sought the proper names already legible in the deciphered Persian'. Rawlinson also worked on deciphering, but didn't make mention of his techniques, so some speculated he was copying Hincks' work. They benefited from the discovery of two libraries, usually now called the Library of Ashurbanipal due to being mixed up and taken as a single library rather than two. By 1851, they were able to read about 200 Akkadian signs. In 1857, they, with two other men who'd begun to study the language, were invited to take part in an experiment. They were given a copy of an inscription from Tiglath-Pileser I's reign that had been recently discovered to translate. The four were judged to be relatively in agreement, and 'the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform was adjudged a fait accompli'.

By Photograph: 0x010CTranscription: F. THUREAU-DANGIN, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90071486

The existence of bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian word lists and the many tablets that were written in both languages because of Sumerian's long usage as a literary language in Mesopotamia, aided in the decipherment of Sumerian. The most difficult part of decipherment was the use of non-phonetic Sumerian logograms in other languages that took trial and error, parallel passages, or explanatory lists to determine if the logogram produced a sound or not and which sound it was if it produced a sound.

Michael Ventris – Scientist of the Day

Michael Ventris, an English architect and linguist, was born July 12, 1922.

Though the term linguist is often used by the public to refer generally to anyone whose occupation is related to language (especially translators and interpreters), the type depicted in Arrival is a special kind of linguist who engages in the scientific study of human language: its structures, its uses, its underlying similarities, and its surprising diversity. A cryptographer simply cannot replicate the specialized training that a linguist like Louise Banks has, which takes years to learn and decades to master.