Breakthrough in Old Persian Decipherment (Early 19th Century)1802: German philologist and schoolteacher Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775–1853) achieved the first major breakthrough in deciphering Old Persian cuneiform.

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Breakthrough in Old Persian Decipherment (Early 19th Century)1802: German philologist and schoolteacher Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775–1853) achieved the first major breakthrough in deciphering Old Persian cuneiform.

 Working without formal training in Oriental languages, he analyzed copies of inscriptions from Persepolis (originally published by Carsten Niebuhr in the late 18th century).Grotefend noticed recurring patterns in the texts, such as groups of signs that appeared in parallel inscriptions but varied in length. Drawing on:

• Historical accounts from Herodotus (describing Achaemenid royal genealogies, e.g., Darius I as son of Hystaspes, who was not a king; Xerxes as son of Darius),
• Similar formulas in later Sasanian inscriptions (e.g., "great king, king of kings"), which had been partially deciphered by Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy,
• Linguistic similarities between Old Persian, Avestan, and Sanskrit (Indo-European cognates),

he correctly identified the royal names Darius, Xerxes, and Hystaspes. This allowed him to assign phonetic values to about 13 signs (though only around 8–10 were accurate) and read key phrases like:

• "Xerxes, great king, king of kings, son of Darius the king" (in one inscription),
• "Darius, great king, king of kings, son of Hystaspes."

Old Persian cuneiform is a semi-alphabetic script with roughly 40 signs (including logograms and determinatives), making it far simpler than the more complex Mesopotamian systems. Grotefend's deduction marked the start of systematic decipherment and laid the foundation for later scholars (e.g., Rasmus Rask, Eugène Burnouf, Christian Lassen, and Henry Creswicke Rawlinson) to refine the sign values and fully read the script by the 1830s–1840s.This breakthrough was presented on September 4, 1802, to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, though full publication came later (e.g., in 1805 and 1815 editions of works by A.H.L. Heeren).It opened the door to understanding Achaemenid Persian inscriptions and eventually unlocked the trilingual Behistun inscription, accelerating the decipherment of Elamite and Babylonian/Assyrian cuneiform.If you'd like to add a visual element (e.g., an image of Grotefend's proposed sign values or a Persepolis inscription example), let me know!