How a 2,500-year-old script was lost and then reborn
In short: Cuneiform vanished so completely that the Greeks were practically unaware of its existence. This complex system of wedge-shaped marks fell into oblivion as more efficient scripts took over. Its resurrection required a 19th-century detective game involving trilingual inscriptions, royal genealogies, and a lucky discovery of a single word-divider.
The decline of cuneiform was a study in technological obsolescence. By 500 BCE, its international prestige had exhausted as the Phoenician script offered superior efficiency and economy. Following Mesopotamia's transition into a Persian province, cuneiform persisted merely as a dying literary style, vanishing so rapidly that only Herodotus, a famous voyager, noted "Assyrian characters."
In a strange twist, contemporary excavation started with the final secondary branch of the writing system: Achaemenid royal inscriptions from 6th to 4th centuries BCE. Because the Persians used cuneiform primarily for monumental rock carvings, these remains were accessible to Western travelers starting in the 17th century. By 1778, Carsten Niebuhr published the first complete copies of these inscriptions from Persepolis, identifying three distinct types of writing.
The breakthrough came in 1802 when Georg Friedrich Grotefend realized these were three different languages side by side. By identifying the word for "king" and using known patterns from later Iranian inscriptions, he began extracting proper names and sound values. This provided the key to the first script (Old Persian). Scholars then used those sound values to attack the second script (New Elamite) and the third, the most complex: Akkadian. Deciphering Akkadian was particularly difficult due to its "bewildering polyphony" and the mix of ideographic and syllabic uses, but once its Semitic character was established, the core of the cuneiform system became intelligible.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Cuneiform - Sumerian, Akkadian, Scripts | Britannica
- Also: Decipherment of cuneiform
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