The first person to bring reports of cuneiform inscriptions to Europe was Pietro della Valle, an Italian belonging to a Roman family of noble birth. In the years 1614-26 he made a journey to Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Persia and India, and published an account of his travels in 1650, but the first communication of his discovery of cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis was contained in a letter written from Shiraz and dated October 21st, 1621. Josafat Barbaro at the end of the fifteenth century had already taken notice of the strange signs found on the monuments at Persepolis, but Pietro della Valle was the first to suspect that the inscriptions were something more than mere decorative incisions on the rock. But though Pietro della Valle had made copies of a few of the inscriptions on the walls of the ruined palaces of Persepolis as early as 1621, to Chardin (1674) belongs the honour of making the first copy of a complete cuneiform inscription, the so-called “Window-Inscription,” the shortest of the trilingual Achaemenian inscriptions, and his copy is to be found in the account of his travels (published 1711). This same inscription was copied in 1694 by Kampfer, who also copied the Babylonian text of the “H” inscription found at Persepolis, and who was the first to adopt the term “cuneiform.” In the work which he published in 1712 he discusses whether the unknown script is alphabetic, syllabic, or ideographic, and decides in favour of the last. In 1701, the Dutchman De Bruin commenced his travels: he devoted the year 1704 to an examination of the ruins at Persepolis and ten years later he published two new trilingual inscriptions in addition to an Old Persian and a Babylonian inscription, but to copy was one thing and to decipher was quite another, and well nigh a century elapsed before any real progress was made towards the unravelling of these cryptic signs, and the reconstruction of the languages which they embodied. In 1762 the inscription on the Vase of Xerxes found by Count Caylus was published, and a quadrilingual inscription of this king was published the same year. In 1765 Carsten Niebuhr, a Dane, copied several Achaemenian inscriptions at Persepolis, and pointed out that the first of the three columns on each of the trilingual inscriptions that had been found, contained only forty-two varieties of cuneiform characters from which he surmised rightly that the system in the first column was neither ideographic (each sign representing a word), nor syllabic (each sign representing a syllable), but alphabetic. From 1798 onwards, Tychsen and Münter, also a Dane, carried on the work begun by Niebuhr, and published their results in 1802. Münter had correctly guessed that the ubiquitous diagonal wedge ᐊ served to separate the words from each other, and one word which occurred at the beginning of each inscription, he rightly adjudged to be the word for “king.” In the meantime the