The discovery and decipherment of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptionsBooth, Arthur John
History
The discovery and decipherment of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptions
Booth, Arthur John
Achaemenian inscriptions; Cuneiform inscriptions
Notwithstanding the tenacity with which he adhered to some of his old
errors, his later contributions were not entirely without result. He
devoted great attention to the comparison of the language of the first
with those of the other two columns, and in this task he exhibited a
considerable amount of penetration.[341] For example the word ‘adam,’
which is constantly recurring in the Old Persian, continued to be
translated, even by Lassen in 1836, as ‘posui.’[342] It was Grotefend
who first observed that it was rendered in the other two columns by
words that were certainly elsewhere used for the pronoun, ‘mân, manâ,’
and the suggestion led to the recognition of ‘adam’ as the first person
singular, ‘ego.’[343] The writings of Burnouf and Lassen revived an
interest in cuneiform studies, and Grotefend was enabled for the first
time to publish inscriptions which he had received twenty or even thirty
years before from Bellino, and which had lain till now unseen in his
desk. He was still regarded as the chief authority upon the subject, and
newly discovered inscriptions were invariably forwarded to him. Among
these he received one that had recently found its way to the British
Museum, and in which he was able to read the name of Artaxerxes, a
king not previously met with in the inscriptions (1837). But his chief
triumph in this respect was the publication, in 1848, of an inscription
of Sennacherib. The original cylinder was said to have come from
Kouyunjik,[344] but Bellino had long ago made a copy of the inscription
and the cylinder is now called after him. When the inscription was at
length translated by Mr. Fox Talbot in 1856, it was found to relate the
first two years of the Annals of the King. Grotefend caused an admirable
engraving of it to be made on copper, and this, said the translator,
not without a tinge of irony, ‘was, I think, the greatest service that
painstaking savant rendered to the science of archæology.’[345]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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