Die altpersischen Keil-inschriften von Persepolis: And Das Lautsystem des Altpersischen

The decipherment of the ancient cuneiform scripts was one of the major breakthroughs in nineteenth-century archaeology and linguistics. Among the scholars working on Old Persian was Christian Lassen (1800–76), professor of Sanskrit at Bonn. Lassen's book on cuneiform inscriptions from Persepolis appeared in 1836, a month before his friend Eugène Burnouf independently published very similar conclusions. Lassen's account gives vivid insights into the detective work involved, as he painstaking...