Meanwhile, Anquetil-Duperron, with self-sacrificing enthusiasm, had rediscovered the Zend of the later Zoroastrian faith, and de Sacy, with the help of it, had deciphered the Pehlevi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings. It was only the older Persian of the Achæmenian cuneiform inscriptions that still awaited interpretation; and a bridge had been built between it and modern Persian by means of the Zendic texts. In 1802 the guess was made which opened the way to the decipherment of the mysterious wedge-shaped signs. The inspired genius was Grotefend, an accomplished Latinist and a school-master at Frankfort-on-the-Main. He knew no Oriental languages, but his mother-wit and common-sense more than made up for the deficiency. It was clear to him that the three systems of cuneiform represented three different languages, the Persian kings being like a Turkish pasha of to-day, who, when he wishes an edict to be understood, writes it in Turkish and Arabic. It was also clear to him that the first system must be the script of the Persian kings themselves, of which the other two were translations. The preparatory work for reading this had already been done by Münter; what Grotefend now had to do was to identify and read the names to which the word for “king” was attached. On comparing the inscriptions together he found that while the word for “king” remained unchanged, the word which accompanied it at the beginning of an inscription varied on different monuments. There were, in fact, two wholly different words, one of which was peculiar to one set of monuments, the other to another set. But he also found that the first of these words followed the other on the second set of monuments, though with a different termination from that which belonged to it when it took the place of the first word. Hence he conjectured that the two words represented the names of two Persian kings, one of whom was the son of the other, the termination of the second name when it followed the first being that of the genitive. It was now necessary to discover who the kings were whose names had thus been found. Fortunately the Achæmenian dynasty was not a long one, and the number of royal names in it was not large. And of these names, Cyrus was too short and Artaxerxes too long for either of the two names which Grotefend had detected. There only remained Darius and Xerxes, and as Xerxes was the son of Darius, the name which characterized the first set of monuments must be Darius.