"The boy's first move was to squeeze himself up a cleft in the rock... He drove a wooden peg firmly into the cleft, fastened a rope to this, and then swang across to another cleft... having failed due to the projection of the rock, he crossed over the cleft by hanging on by his toes and fingers... driving in a second peg, he swang himself right over the projecting mass of rock. Here with a short ladder he formed a swinging seat and took the paper cast of the Babylonian translation of the records of Darius."
With these words in 1847, Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson remembered the 'wild Kurdish boy' who made 'squeezes', wet-paper impressions of the carvings of the Great King Darius, cut high into the Rock of Behistun (Bagastâna: Place of God). Years after the jaw-dropping cliff hanger, Sir Rawlinson finally deciphered the cuneiform characters and one of the Greatest Kings of Achaemenids spoke again in the ancient words ofÂryâ (Old Persian):
Dâriu the King said: I am Dâriu, the Great King, the King of Kings..."
They say cuneiform script lasted over 3,000 years.
And so here is to Sir Rawlinson, the wild Kurdish boy, and all those who came before and after, with love and gratitude for their efforts in cracking the code of silence and unlocking some of the mystries of the imperial language of the Great Achaemenids. No matter what their motives, without their efforts glorious Achaemenids would have truly been forgotten and great cuneiform languages lost forever. May their words and their deeds be recorded as 'Good' in their Houses of Song.
1620: Don Garcia: identified Persepolis inscriptions as Old Persian.
1621: Pietro della Valle: established that Old Persian inscriptions should be read left to right.
1762: J. J. Barthélemey: established the link between cuneiform markings of Babylonian and Old Persian.
1777: Thomas Herbert: suggested that cuneiform script consisted of words or syllables.
1778: Carsten Niebuhr: provided copies of most of the Persepolis inscriptions and identified 3 separate ancient languages: one alphabetic and two syllabic and ideogrammatical.
1798: Freiderich Münter: dated the Persepolis inscriptions to Achaemenids.
1798: Oluf Gerhard Tychsen: noted repeated sequences.
1802: Georg Friederich Grotefend: found correct meanings by overlapping two different sequences, recognized a word separator, and read the names of Darius, Xerxes and Hystaspes.
1823: Rasmus Rask: was the first to read the name 'Achaemenid'.
1833: Eugène Burnouf: added linguistic knowledge to decipherment.
1836: Christian Lassen: advanced the understanding of the vowel usage of the cuneiform markings.
1835-46: Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson: published 414 lines of the Behistun inscriptions. He recognized polyphony: that cuneiform signs represented more than one sound and should be interpreted differently according to context. He applied knowledge of Zand, the oldest language of Avesta, to deciphering Old Persian.
1846-66: Edward Hincks: established the semi-syllabic nature of Old Persian.
1903: A. V. Williams Jackson climbed Behistun Rock and photographed the inscriptions for the first time.
1950: George G. Cameron took photographs, made casts and recorded more accurate transcription of the fading inscriptions.
1969: Richard Treadwel Hallock published Persepolis Fortification Tablets, study of some 2,000+ Elamite texts from the Persepolis Fortification Archive which launched the rebirth of Achaemenid studies in the 1970s.
