Irving Finkel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Brilliant. What do you know? And the thing is, it said, “I am Darius the great king, king of the world, king of the… son of… diddly, diddly, diddly, diddly… grandson of… diddly, diddly, diddly…” 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, that 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 Ɔaru in Akkadian and نحر in Arabic and Aramaic. And when they realized that the word that corresponded to the Persian had this form, this was a gift, 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, and Henry Rawlinson, who was an upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plain, thousands of feet up in the air, and brought those back, and they were used in the decipherment. So it’s very romantic. Wait a minute. More controversial statement from today. Henry Rawlinson doesn’t deserve the credit for that?…

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