The discovery and decipherment of the trilingual cuneiform inscriptions — Reading Notes

A Chronology of Travelers, Not Decipherers

The opening chapter names over a dozen European visitors to Persepolis and nearby sites, each contributing a sketch, a note, or a copy. Barbaro's 1472 visit to Chehel Minar and the 'Tomb of the Mother of Solomon' is the earliest recorded. Gouvea first mentions the inscriptions in 1602. Figueroa identifies Chehel Minar with Persepolis in 1618. Pietro della Valle's 'Viaggi' of 1621, Sir Thomas Herbert's 'Relation of Some Years Travaile' of 1627, and Mandelslo's 1638 view of the tomb follow. Booth treats these not as a parade of genius but as a chain of incremental documentation. The reader should note that the first copies of inscriptions—by Kaempfer and Le Bruyn in 1718—appear only after two centuries of travel writing. Booth's method is to list, date, and briefly characterize each contribution, building a foundation for the decipherment that begins in chapter two.

The Decipherment as a Collective, Competitive Effort

In the later excerpts, Booth details the work of Grotefend, Burnouf, Lassen, and Rawlinson. He specifies that Rawlinson 'had indeed succeeded in working out the whole of the alphabet by his own unaided ingenuity' but also notes that by the time Rawlinson became known to European scholars, 'only four letters of Niebuhr's list remained for which a correct or approximate value had not been found.' Booth presents Rawlinson's corrections of two signs—32 (𐎪) as j and 33 (𐎸) as m—and his suggestion that sign 13 (𐎡) is tr, anticipated by Grotefend. The narrative emphasizes priority disputes: Rawlinson 'was obliged to renounce the claim to a priority of alphabetical discovery' but consoled himself with being 'the first to present to the world a literal and, as I believe, a correct grammatical translation of nearly two hundred lines.' Booth's account is a careful balancing of claims, not a heroic story.

Rawlinson's Translations and the Afghan War Interruption

Booth reports that Rawlinson's 'great merit lay in the superiority of his translations' and that he criticized Lassen for misunderstanding 'both the etymology of the words and the grammatical structure of the language.' However, Rawlinson withheld his translation, hoping to make 'the accessories more perfect.' He began recasting his memoir in autumn 1839, expecting publication in spring 1840, but 'the outbreak of the Afghan War interrupted his literary projects and summoned him to a very different sphere of activity.' Before leaving, he made a second communication to the Asiatic Society. This detail—military duty halting scholarly work—is typical of Booth's attention to the real-world conditions of research. The reader should note that Booth does not describe the translation's content; he focuses on the process and its delays.

The Role of Copies, Fonts, and Material Evidence

Booth's book itself is a material artifact: the Project Gutenberg edition includes a transcriber's note advising readers to install a font that can render cuneiform characters such as 𐎠, 𐎡, 𐎢, and notes that signs without Unicode equivalents are given as images. This echoes the book's own concern with accurate reproduction. Booth repeatedly mentions the quality of copies—Niebuhr's, Le Bruyn's, Stolze's photographic views—as crucial to decipherment. The plan of Persepolis from Curzon's 'Persia and the Persian Question' is reproduced. The reader should consider how the availability of accurate visual records, from Grélot's drawings to photography, shaped the pace of decipherment. Booth's narrative is as much about the transmission of images as about the transmission of ideas.

Booth's book is best read as a work of intellectual history that traces how scattered observations by travelers gradually coalesced into a systematic decipherment. The excerpts show that he values precise chronology and the attribution of specific contributions over dramatic narrative. Readers should attend to the dates, the names of travelers and scholars, and the specific signs and values debated. The book does not attempt to teach cuneiform; it documents who saw what, when, and how they interpreted it. For a first reading, focus on the sequence of discoveries and the way Booth weighs competing claims.

I keep thinking about how those stones stayed silent for so long, then slowly began to speak, word by word, through patient human hands. It reminded me of something quieter, gentler about letters themselves — In the path of the alphabet an historical account of the ancient beginnings and evolution of the modern alphabet — Background and Themes — how each mark we leave behind carries a little bit of who we were, waiting for someone else to notice.