Irving Finkel

I mean, that cannot be true that they were nomads and they cannot be true.

To get the stone and someone has to draw on the ground the plan of the building, they have to work out how thick it is going to be, how high it's going to be.

And I mean, you know, you can't just...

You know, like that, like gorillas.

So when I started, there were grammars and sign lists and dictionaries.

Everything was marvelous.

It was all basically deciphered.

All you had to do was get on with learning it.

But at the beginning, when the first tablets and bricks in cuneiform and stone inscriptions came to light, no one could read them.

But they knew they were writing, but they didn't know how to read them.

And what happened was, like you said before, with the Rosetta Stone, it was something directly comparable.

Because there was an inscription of one of the Persian kings halfway up a mountain in a place called Bisutun.

where this King Darius had written an account of his successful career in Elamite and in Babylonian and in Old Persian, the trilingual version.

And Old Persian, although it is obviously an archaic form of the language, Persian is still alive.

It was still alive in the 19th century.

So since the Old Persian was written in a very simple style of cuneiform, they deciphered it.

They twigged it was Old Persian.

They read it in Persian.

And they read the names Dari al-Wush in Old Persian.

And then suddenly somebody realized that the other two columns, about the same length,