Dr. Irving Finkel

But when they wrote Old Persian, they more or less had an alphabet made up of signs, made out of wedges, cuneiform wedges like the normal Babylonian or Sumerian signs, but very simplified.

And they took the idea of the wedge shape in different combinations to make 26 or 28 characters like an alphabet to write their language.

So this great thing up on the mountain, it looked at first like, oh no, another horrible cuneiform inscription we can't read.

But because people knew the Persian language and they knew Persian literature, there were phenomena about the Old Persian inscription which opened up the decipherment of the Old Persian cuneiform script.

And what turned out what was so marvellous is that the next column, the Babylonian one, and the one after that, the Elamite one from Iran, were translations of the text written in the Old Persian rather simple script

into mainstream cuneiform,

in Babylonian, or Elamite.

So because they could read the first one, which was really a bit of a lollipop once they got the hang of it, once they'd done that and they found that the name Darius was written Dari-ar-wu-ush, and it was king of kings, king of the mighty king or something, and they saw in the old Persian that these things were repeated, and it must be the king and his father with all his epithets and the grandfather with all his epithets, and they read the old Persian eventually because the language was still alive.

So once they'd done that, what was miraculous in a sense was looking at the Babylonian where they didn't know which way up it went before, just staring at it, it became apparent that there were certain passages in the great run of text which were repeated repeatedly.

verbatim three times in the text like in the Old Persian.

So they said, well, in that case, this must be the bit that says the king and his dad and his dad with all their epithets.

And so they assumed that the first name, which was King Darius, as we call him, or Dariawush in the Babylonian and in the Elamite,

The beginning, it ought to be something like Dari Awush.

So they took these syllables and they started thinking and then they tried to find them wherever they were.

And then they suddenly found, like that, a word or two in the Babylonian, which was a Semitic word.

For example, just by piecing things together, they got the word for river.

in Babylonian, naru, which is like nachru, and this word showed them instantly that this wall of unintelligible stuff with perhaps a glimmer here or a glimmer there was writing a language which was Semitic.

And once they knew that, they had the Hebrew and Arabic dictionaries.

They had the grammars of all the Semitic languages.

So every time they got a new idea, they could test it against the old Persian to find the words that matches.