Irving Finkel

What do you know?

And the thing is, it said, I am Darius, the great king, king of the world, son of... grandson of... So there's a whole paragraph with repeated things in the Persian, which they could understand.

So what do you know?

They're reiterated passages in the other two languages.

So that was the key.

the kind of the chisel that opened up cuneiform writing proper.

And the thing was, they soon twigged that the language of the Babylonian was a Semitic tongue.

And this was so important.

I think the first word they discovered was the word for river, which is naru in Akkadian and nachar in Arabic and Aramaic.

And when they realized that the word that corresponded to the Persian had this form,

This was a gift of gold, because everybody immediately seized their Arabic and Hebrew dictionaries and started leafing through looking for words that would fit in the context.

And they basically deciphered this inscription in that sort of way.

And of course, all the other inscriptions came in order, and there were lots and lots of difficulties which had to be resolved, but that's the basic thing.

And without that trilingual...

I don't know what would have happened.

I mean, I suppose it's conceivable that in the very modern world, something might have happened.

But as it was, it was done by sheer brainpower, by very, very clever persons just doing it.

And they cracked it.

The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too.

So it was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain.