The decipherment of cuneiform script
Already by the turn of the seventeeth century, European travellers in the Near East had begun to notice traces of what appeared to be writing, but in a totally unknown script. For many years there was great doubt that this was actually writing at all; even those who believed it was indeed writing feared that its secrets could never be unlocked. Although the task of deciphering this writing, now known as the cuneiform script, was indeed hard work, it was not impossible. Progress was slow, however, and the decisive breakthrough did not come until the turn of the nineteenth century with the work of a German schoolteacher, Georg Friedrich Grotefend, on Old Persian inscriptions found at the ancient capital of the Persian rulers, Persepolis. The names and titles of the famous kings of Persia, Darius and Xerxes, acted as his key. Over the course of the next half century, much progress was to be made in the decipherment of cuneiform.
A British army officer, Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, copied and published a trilingual (Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian) inscription which had been carved into the rock at Behistun, in Iran. This longer inscription allowed more Old Persian signs to be identified, and soon the Elamite version was also deciphered. By this time another language written in cuneiform script, Urartian (from the area around Lake Van), had also largely been deciphered.
The Akkadian texts known from Behistun and in ever increasing numbers from Mesopotamia itself posed a greater challenge; this form of cuneiform script made use of many more characters, and deployed them in differing ways. Some represented syllables, others whole words, others still had a different function; and not only could one sign be read several different ways, but also different signs could be used to render the same sound or word. Despite these obstacles, Akkadian soon yielded to the efforts of the decipherers, with the Irish and French scholars Edward Hincks and Jules Oppert leading the way.
A further challenge soon appeared, however. As Akkadian began to surrender its secrets, it became clear that not all of the Mesopotamian texts were written in this Semitic language. For some time afterwards controversy surrounded this apparently agglutinative language with no recognisable relation to any other known; was it a real language or just a cryptography of Akkadian scribes (as argued by the semitist, Joseph Halévy)? After much heated debate and an avalanche of new textual material from the French excavations at Al-Hiba, Sumerian was universally recognised as a language.
In the last years of the nineteenth century examples of another language written in cuneiform script began to come to notice. German excavations at the the Anatolian site of Boghazköy in the early years of the twentieth century unearthed thousands of tablets written in this language. The language turned out to be Hittite, the official language of the Hittite empire, echoes of which empire were already resounding in the other cuneiform sources.
In the 1930's, a new chapter in cuneiform studies was opened, following the discovery of texts written in totally different cuneiform script by a French expedition at the Syrian site of Ugarit. This system looked similar to the cuneiform long known from Mesopotamia but functioned very differently; instead of being logo-syllabic, the Ugaritic script was alphabetic. The language written in this cuneiform alphabet (of which there is more than one version) is Semitic and soon the texts, which included many myths and legends, were rendered comprehensible, at least more or less.
Although the greater part of the decipherment process has now been accomplished, many smaller challenges still lie ahead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Henry_Rawlinson,_1st_Baronet#Published_works
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