Cuneiform

Cuneiform is a language written on clay tablets found in the Ancient Middle East.
It was finally deciphered between 1835 to 1842 CE.

Cuneiform consists of a series of triangular marks using a reed as a pen. Originally Cuneiform had around 1000 characters, but this gradually reduced to around 400 characters.
The language originated from c. 4000 BCE and was eventually replaced by the Phoenician Alphabet. It had become extinct by c. 100 CE.

Darius the Great ordered an inscription on a rock face on Mount Behistun between 522-486 BCE.
The Inscription is written in Cuneiform and describes Darius and his Battles to achieve power.
In 1835, an East India Company Army Officer, Henry Rawlinson, visited the ‘Behistun Inscriptions’ in Iran.
They became the Rosetta Stone of Cuneiform, because they were written simultaneously in Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite text.
This enabled the texts to be deciphered for the first time in almost two thousand years.

Further help in the decipherment of Cuneiform came in 1842, when the city of Nineveh in Iraq was uncovered.
The excavations revealed the Library of Ashurbanipal which contained tens of thousands of Cuneiform Clay Tablets.

The Inscription is written in Cuneiform in three languages, Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite.
It was inscribed by Xerxes I (486-465 BCE), son of Darius and is located in Eastern Turkey, near Van Fortress overlooking Tushpa, the Capital of the Kingdom of Urartu (9th-7th centuries BCE).

Behistun Inscription