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pronounced them as the corresponding Akkadian words. They also kept the phonetic values but
extended them far beyond the original Sumerian inventory of simple types. Many more complex
syllabic values of Sumerian logograms were transferred to the phonetic level, and polyphony became
an increasingly serious complication in Akkadian cuneiform.
King Hammurabi of Babylon (died 1750 BC) unified all of southern Mesopotamia. Babylonia
thus became the great and influential center of Mesopotamian culture. The Code of Hammurabi is
written in Old Babylonian cuneiform, which developed throughout the shifting and less brilliant later
eras of Babylonian history into Middle and New Babylonian types.
The expansion of cuneiform writing outside Mesopotamia began in the 3rd millennium, when
the country of Elam in southwestern Iran was in contact with Mesopotamian culture and adopted the
system of writing. The Elamite sideline of cuneiform continued far into the 1st millennium BC,
when it presumably provided the Indo-European Persians with the external model for creating a new
simplified quasi-alphabetic cuneiform writing for the Old Persian language
In the 2nd millennium the Akkadian of Babylonia, frequently in somewhat distorted and
barbarous varieties, became a lingua franca of international intercourse in the entire Middle East, and
cuneiform writing thus became a universal medium of written communication.
DERIVED SCRIPTS
Complexity of the system prompted simplified versions of the script ! Old Persian was written in a
subset of simplified cuneiform characters known as Old Persian Cuneiform.
DECIPHERMENT
• 17th century (1618): European travelers return from Persia with records of inscriptions in
Old Persian on walls of ancient Persepolis, the capital of Darius and the Persian kings of the
Achaemenid dynasty
• 18th century: 1) Carsten Niebuhr noticed that many of the (new and more) inscriptions
were duplicated, enabling him to check one set of readings against another. He confirmed
the left-to-right direction of the writing. He was able to distinguish 3 unique scripts.
• knowledge of cuneiform was lost until 1835 when Henry Rawlinson found the Behistun
inscriptions in Persia.
• inscription consist of identical texts in 3 official languages of the empire: Old Persian,
Babylonian, and Elamite (3300-500BC), helped in decipherment of cuneiform.
IMPORTANT PEOPLE
• Carsten Niebuhr – a Danish traveler who noticed that there were 3 different cuneiform
scripts at Persepolis
• Grotefend – a German high school teacher who took the first serious step towards
decipherment; attempted to decipher Old Persian cuneiform; concluded that the single
slanting wedges must be word dividers and the system must be alphabetic; although not
wholly correct, it served well in identifying names which were indeed spelt alphabetically;
complied an alphabet of Old Persian, many proved wrong esp when he tried to extend his
system beyond proper name; he attempted decipherment of Old Persian as an alphabet. In
fact, the script is partially syllabic; many of his values were therefore incorrect, particularly
where he allocated more than one sign to a single sound value and more than one sound
value to a single sign
• Henry Rawlinson—the person who copied the entire Behistun inscription; generally credited
with decipherment of Babylonian cuneiform, but never explained how he did it, recent study
of his notebooks suggests that he borrowed the work of the scholar Edward Hicks w/o giving
him credit; knowledge of Avestan and Sanskirt, he expected consistent relationship btw
words of the same meaning in Avestan, Sanskirt and Old Persian ! decipherment of the
Behistun inscription in Old Persian; he came across different Babylonian signs for
ba,bi,bu,ab,ib,ub, he at first regarded the all as diff ways of writing b (homophonous);
conversely, he accepted that vertain signs could stand for more than one sound (polyphonic);