The Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions

The decipherment of cuneiform in the 19th century ranks among the greatest intellectual adventures in human history. For centuries, the wedge-shaped marks carved into stone across ancient Persia and Mesopotamia were dismissed as decorative ornamentation, their meaning lost to time. Then, through extraordinary persistence and linguistic brilliance, a handful of scholars unlocked a writing system older than any alphabet, restoring voices that had been silent for over two millennia. Arthur John Booth's 1902 account traces this achievement from the first fumbling attempts through the breakthrough at Behistun Rock, where a three-language inscription became the key to everything. He follows Rawlinson, Hincks, and others who reconstructed a dead language from scratch, using only their knowledge of related tongues and sheer intellectual determination. The trilingual Achaemenian inscriptions emerged from this labor, revealing the genealogies, conquests, and religious practices of the great Persian emperors. This book captures a pivotal moment when the ancient Near East became readable again. It remains essential for anyone curious about how we recovered our oldest written records and what those records tell us about the first world empire.