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Why were Carsten Niebuhr’s copies of the Persepolis inscriptions important?
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cuneiform
An account of barley distribution, probably from Uruk, Mesopotamia, c. 3100–2900 bce; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
Carsten Niebuhr’s copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis were instrumental in the decipherment of cuneiform because they provided scholars with accurate, reliable data from trilingual texts.
These inscriptions featured three distinct scripts, which led researchers to recognize that the texts contained identical content in three different languages. By analyzing these copies, scholars identified that:
- The first script, consisting of about 40 signs, was a simple system likely representing an alphabet, which was later determined to be the Old Persian language.
- The other two scripts were more complex, suggesting they were syllabaries or word-based systems.
- The presence of a diagonal wedge served as a word-divider, which significantly simplified the process of segmenting the text.
These insights allowed scholars like Georg Friedrich Grotefend to hypothesize that the inscriptions included the names, titles, and genealogies of Achaemenid kings. This breakthrough provided the foundation for reading proper names and eventually determining the sound values of the scripts.1