Several years before Botta and Layard sent their vast stores of tablets from Nineveh and Nimroud to the Louvre and the British Museum, it was evident from the few specimens of cuneiform inscriptions which had reached Europe from Mesopotamia that the script on the Babylonian tablets was the same as one of the varieties occurring in the trilingual inscriptions of Persepolis. It was then only a step to the conclusion that these two scripts were identical and represented identical languages. Thanks to the researches of De Sacy, Burnouf, Anquetil-Duperron, and others, it was now possible to make the old Persian script--the first class--of the trilingual inscriptions of Persepolis serve as a key to the third class, or what is now designated as the Assyro-Babylonian script. The process was exactly similar to that which enabled Champollion to use the Greek on the Rosetta stone as a key to the mysterious hieroglyphics of the Egypt of the Pharaohs. But, although the method to be adopted seemed simple enough, the labor involved was incomparably greater than that which was required of the illustrious French _savant_. For the Greek on the Rosetta stone was a well-known language, whereas Old Persian, which was to serve as the key for deciphering the Babylonian script, was itself quite as unknown as the writing to be deciphered. It was only after a knowledge of Old Persian had been acquired by comparing it with Avestan, Pahlavi, and Sanscrit, that it could serve as the long-sought key to Assyro-Babylonian. The first one to read an Old Persian word was Georg Friederich Grotefend. This was in 1802, when he was only twenty-seven years of age and without any knowledge of oriental languages. Nevertheless, he was, wonderful to relate, able “to solve the riddle practically in a few days, that had puzzled much older men and scholars apparently much better qualified than himself. Under the magical touch of his hand the mystic and complicated characters of ancient Persia suddenly gained new life. But when he was far enough advanced to announce to the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen the epoch-making discovery which established his reputation for ever, that learned body, though comprising men of eminent mental training and intelligence, strange to say, declined to publish the Latin memoirs of this little-known college teacher, who did not belong to the University circle proper nor was even an Orientalist by profession. It was not until ninety years later--1893--that his original papers were rediscovered and published by Prof. Wilhelm Meyer, of Göttingen, in the Academy’s transactions--a truly unique case of _post mortem_ examination in science.”[371]