People have heard of the Rosetta Stone. They know that it’s something to do with languages and translation. A smaller subset of people know that it is something to do with Egypt. It helps that it is on public display in the British Museum and it helps that the wonders of ancient Egypt are accessible to tourists. Everyone loves pyramids and mummies.
Fewer people have heard of the Behistun Inscription. It’s not in a museum in a major city that you can pop into on your lunch break. Instead it’s on a cliff face in Iran. And yet it is as vital to our understanding of history as the Rosetta Stone. Like the Stone, it has the same text in 3 languages. However the catch is that while one of the languages of the Stone (ancient Greek) was well-known and legible, the Inscription is all in cuneiform.
Europeans had found symbols carved into walls and rocks in the ruins of the ancient Persian capital Persepolis. The man that called them cuneiform thought they were purely decorative. But others saw a language and started to guess at its meaning. One common set of symbols probably meant king. And some of the other sets of symbols could be names of kings. Human vanity has its uses.
One of the inscriptions at Behuistun was indeed in Old Persian. It told of the awesomeness of Darius the Great who ruled an empire from the Balkans to the Indus Valley. Just to make sure people got the message about his awesomeness, it was written in Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite and had a picture of Darius standing on one of his enemies. Human vanity has its uses.
Babylonian was translated next. It is a Semitic language (from the same family as Hebrew and Arabic). From it could be translated the similar languages of Assyrian and Akkadian. Elamite has no relatives.
In the mid-19th century, excavations at Nineveh unearthed tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets (often in fragments) - the Library of Ashurbanipal. Other cultures used papyrus which rotted away. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia pressed marks into clay tablets with a reed stylus. Clay and reeds being plentiful in the marshy land between the two rivers. Like any librarian, Ashurbanipal treasured the written word. Unlike most librarians, he was a fierce warrior who blackmailed his neighbors to get his hands on more texts (stories that a descendent of his founded the library in Pawnee are unconfirmed).
When Nineveh was sacked by neighbors (presumably annoyed by Ashurbanipal’s never ending requests for interlibrary loans), the palace was set aflame - a circumstance that partially baked the clay tablets and thus helped to preserve them.
Later in the 19th century, it became apparent that another culture had pre-dated Akkadian and invented cuneiform. The Sumerians slowly emerged from their texts. Like Elamite, Sumerian is a language isolate - it does not appear to be connected to any other languages living or dead.
The earliest writing by them is not poetic nor religious. It is administrative. So many bushels of wheat. So many head of cattle. We think of ancient warriors and gods and goddesses but will no one think of the bureaucrats? The Sumerians invent history by accident.
The stylus and the tablet together are a time machine.
