The philologist Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775 1853) combined his career as a senior master at schools in Frankfurt and Hannover with the publication of school textbooks on German and Latin, and academic research in ancient history and languages. He was a co-founder of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series of historical sources, still widely consulted today, and is also remembered for his role in the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform. During his lifetime he was best known for his studies of the Umbrian and Oscan languages (also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection) and this...