_By Grotefend_, _de Sacy_, and _Rawlinson_.--A number of scholars had studied Niebuhr’s copies, but the first to read any of them correctly was Georg Friedrich Grotefend, a German scholar. He began with the assumption that the three groups of lines in the inscriptions contained respectively three languages, and that the first of these was the Persian of Cyrus and his successors. In the years 1787-1791 Sylvestre de Sacy, a French Oriental scholar, had studied and in part expounded some Sassanian alphabetic inscriptions from Persia, which had also long attracted the notice of scholars. These Sassanian inscriptions were many of them cast in the same mould. They ran thus: “X the great king, king of kings, the king of Iran and Aniran, son of Y, the great king,” etc. Grotefend had these inscriptions before him, and compared this formula with the inscriptions from Persepolis. He noted that as often as the formula contained the word “king” the inscriptions from Persepolis contained the same group of signs, and that as often as it had “of kings,” they reproduced the group with a different ending. He therefore rightly concluded that these signs were the old Persian spelling of the Persian word for “king” with its genitive plural. Taking from the Sassanian inscriptions the word for king, he proceeded to parcel out its sounds among the characters with which the word was spelled in the Persepolis inscriptions. He also found a king, who was the son of a man not a king. This, he rightly held, could be none other than Darius, the son of Hystaspes. Apportioning the proper groups of signs among the sounds of these names, he obtained still further alphabetical values. Thus a beginning was made. Grotefend was, however, unable to carry the work far, and in the years that followed Eugène Burnouf, Christian Lassen, Isidore Lowenstern, Henry C. Rawlinson, and Edward Hincks all made contributions to the subject. The honor of having first correctly read and interpreted a long inscription belongs to Rawlinson. Rawlinson was a young army officer, who as a boy had been in India, where he learned Persian and several of the dialects of India. In 1833 he was sent to Persia with other British officers to assist in the reorganization of the Persian army. Here his attention was attracted by the great Persian inscriptions in the mountains near Hamadan, the ancient Ecbatana, and in the intervals of military duties he copied and studied several of them. He was, in the early stages of his work, quite unaware of the work done by Grotefend and others, but hit independently upon the method followed by Grotefend. Owing to the fact that the inscriptions on which Rawlinson worked were longer than those accessible to Grotefend, and also contained more proper names, Rawlinson attained greater success than any of his predecessors. He did not publish his results, however, until he had become thoroughly familiar with all that others had done.