Niebuhr had made his list of signs he naturally enough decided that this language, whatever it might be, was written in alphabetic characters, a conclusion which later investigation has not overthrown. Beyond this Niebuhr was not able to go, and not even one sign revealed its secret to his inquiry. When, however, he had published his copies (in 1777) there were other scholars ready to take up the difficult task. Two scholars independently, Olav Tychsen of Rostock and Friedrich Münter of Copenhagen, began work upon the problem. Tychsen first observed that there occurred at irregular intervals in the inscriptions of the first class a wedge that pointed neither directly to the right nor downward, but inclined diagonally. This he suggested was the dividing sign used to separate words. This very simple discovery later became of great importance in the hands of Münter. Tychsen also correctly identified the alphabetic signs for “a,” “d,” “u” and “s,” but he failed to decipher an entire inscription, chiefly perhaps because, through an error in history, he supposed that they were written during the Parthian dynasty (246 B.C.–A.D. 227). Münter was more fortunate than Tychsen in his historical researches, and this made him also more successful in linguistic attempts. He rightly identified the builders of Persepolis with the Achaemenian dynasty, and so located in time the authors of the inscriptions (538-465 B.C.). Independently of Tychsen he identified the oblique wedge as a divider between words, and found the meaning of the sign for “b.” These may appear to be small matters, but it must be remembered that they were made without the assistance of any bilingual text, and were indeed taken bodily out of the gloom which had settled upon these languages centuries before. They did not, however, bring us much nearer to the desired goal of a reading of any portion of the inscriptions. The whole case indeed seemed now perilously near a stalemate. New methods must be found, and a new worker, with patience, persistence, power of combination, insight, the historical sense and the feeling for archaeological indications.
In 1802 Georg Friedrich Grotefend (q.v.) was persuaded by the librarian of Göttingen University to essay the task. He began with the assumption that there were three languages, and that of these the first was ancient Persian, the language of the Achaemenians, who had erected these palaces and caused these inscriptions to be written. For his first attempts at decipherment he chose two of these old Persian inscriptions and laid them side by side. They were of moderate length, and the frequent recurrence of the same signs in them seemed to indicate that their contents were similar. The method which he now pursued was so simple, yet so sure, as he advanced step by step, that there seemed scarcely a chance of error. Münter had observed in all the Persian texts a word which occurred in two forms, a short and a longer form. This word appeared in Grotefend’s two texts in both long and short forms. Münter had suggested that it meant “king” in the short form and “kings” in the longer, and that when the two words occurred together the expression meant “king of kings.” But further, this word occurred in both inscriptions in the first line, and in both cases was followed by the same word. This second word Grotefend supposed to mean “great,” the combined expression being “king great,” that is, “great king.” All this found support in the phraseology of the lately deciphered Sassanian inscriptions, and it was plausible in itself. It must, however, be supported by definite facts, and furthermore each word must be separated into its alphabetic parts, every one of them identified, and the words themselves be shown to be philologically possible by the production of similar words in related languages. In other words, the archaeological method must find support in a philological method. To this Grotefend now devoted himself with equal energy. His method was as simple as before. He had made out to his own satisfaction the titles “great king, king of kings.” Now, in the Sassanian inscriptions, the first word was always the king’s name, followed immediately by “great king, king of kings,” and Grotefend reasoned that this was probably true in his texts. But if true, then these two texts were set up by two different kings, for the names were not the same at the beginning. Furthermore the name with which his text No. I. began appears in the third line of text No. II., but in a somewhat longer form, which Grotefend thought was a genitive and meant “of N.” It followed the word previously supposed to be “king” and another which might mean son (N king son), so that the whole expression would be “son of N king.” From these facts Grotefend surmised that in these two inscriptions he had the names of three rulers, grandfather, father and son. It was now easy to search the list of the Achaemenian dynasty and to find three names which would suit the conditions, and the three which he ventured to select were Hystaspes, Darius, Xerxes. According to his hypothesis the name at the beginning of inscription I. was Darius, and he was ready to translate his texts in part as follows:—
| I. | Darius, great king, king of kings . . . son of Hystaspes. . . . |
| II. | Xerxes, great king, king of kings . . . son of Darius king. |
The form which he provisionally adopted for Darius was Darheush; later investigation has shown that it ought really to be read as Daryavush, but the error was not serious, and he had safely secured at least the letters D, A, R, SH. It was a most wonderful achievement, the importance of which he did not realize, for in it was the key to the decipherment of three ancient languages. To very few men has it been given to make discoveries so important both for history and for philology.
To Grotefend it was, however, not given to translate a whole text, or even to work out all the words whose meaning he had surmised. Rasmus Christian Rask (1787–1832), who followed him, found the plural ending in Persian, which had baffled him; and Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852), by the study of a list of Persian geographical names found at Naksh-i-Rustam, discovered at a single stroke almost all the characters of the Persian alphabet, and incidentally confirmed the values already determined by his predecessors.
At the same time as Burnouf, the eminent Sanskrit scholar Professor Christian Lassen (1800–1876), of Bonn, was studying the same list of names; and his results were published at the same time. The controversy which resulted as to priority of discovery may be here passed over while we sum up the results in general conclusions. Lassen may certainly claim in the final court of history that he discovered independently of Burnouf the values of at least six and possibly of eight signs. But in another respect he made very definite progress over Burnouf. He discovered that, if the system of Grotefend were rigidly followed, and to every sign were given the value Grotefend had assigned, some words would be left wholly or almost wholly without vowels; and therefore unpronounceable. As instances of such words he mentioned ÇPRD, THTGUS, KTPTUK, FRAISJM. This situation led Lassen to a very important discovery, towards which his knowledge of the Sanskrit alphabet did much to bring him. He came, in short, to the conclusion that the ancient Persian signs were not entirely alphabetic, but were at least partially syllabic, that is, that certain signs were used to represent not merely an alphabetic character like “b,” but also a syllable such as “ba,” “bi” or “bu.” He claimed that he had successfully demonstrated that the sign for “a” was only used at the beginning of a word, or before a consonant, or before another vowel, and that in every other case it was included in the consonant sign. Thus in the inscription No I. in the second line the signs should be read VA-ZA-RA-KA. This was a most important discovery, and may be said to have revolutionized the study of these long puzzling texts.
During the entire time of this slow process of decipherment, from the first essays of Grotefend in 1802 until the publication of Lassen’s book in 1836, there were more sceptics than believers in the results of the deciphering process. Indeed the history of all forms of decipherment of unknown languages shows that scepticism concerning them is far more prevalent than credulity or even a too ready acceptance. There was need for a man of another people, of different training and a fresh and unbiased mind, to put the capstone upon the decipherment, and he was already at work when Lassen’s important researches appeared.
