The Italian, Spanish, and English writers on Persepolis were followed by travelers and writers of other nationalities. Among these were Jean Chardin of France, Cornelis de Bruin of Holland, Engelrecht Kaempfer of Germany, and Carsten Niebuhr, a German, long in the service of Denmark. Each of these men made a contribution--small though it was--towards the decipherment of the Persepolitan inscriptions. Chardin was the first to reproduce in his superbly illustrated work[370] an entire inscription from one of the monuments of Persepolis. This, to scholars, was incomparably more valuable than any of the fragments that had hitherto come to Europe. De Bruin, who visited Persepolis in 1704, and subsequently published a book with magnificent views of the ruins of the old Achæmenia capital, together with numerous inscriptions from its monuments, put more material in the hands of scholars than had any of his predecessors. Kaempfer advanced a step further when he published in 1712 a long inscription in Assyro-Babylonian. But of the four travelers mentioned the one who performed the most important work was Niebuhr, an experienced traveler, an accurate observer and a man of broad scholarship. Besides making careful drawings and measurements of the monuments of Persepolis--monuments which in many respects were the most important in the East--he made copies of numerous cuneiform texts which had not appeared in any preceding work. His studies of the inscriptions also led him to conclude that there were three classes of them and that they were, as some of his predecessors had surmised, to be read from left to right. He had thus not only supplied scholars with new and valuable material but, by his comparative study, blazed the way which led to their final decipherment. Among the first to attempt decipherment of these inscriptions were such distinguished philologists as Professor Tychsen, of the University of Rostock, and Friedrich Munter, of Copenhagen, and such eminent Orientalists as Eugène Burnouf, Anquetil-Duperron, and Silvestre de Sacy, who was the most eminent Arabist of his age. They did not succeed in solving the problem which had so long baffled the keenest minds of Europe, but they had accumulated the material that was necessary for its solution.