Born in Hamburg to Jewish parents, Julius Oppert (1825 1905) later moved to France, where he established a reputation as a remarkably gifted Assyriologist, making significant contributions to the decipherment of cuneiform Akkadian. Between 1851 and 1854, he accompanied the orientalist Fulgence Fresnel (1795 1855) on the French expedition to Mesopotamia. In recognition of his role, involving important excavations at the site of the ancient city of Babylon, Oppert was granted French citizenship. In May 1855, however, a great many of the discovered antiquities were lost when the raft...

Born in Hamburg to Jewish parents, Julius Oppert (1825 1905) later moved to France, where he established a reputation as a remarkably gifted Assyriologist, making significant contributions to the decipherment of cuneiform Akkadian. Between 1851 and 1854, he accompanied the orientalist Fulgence Fresnel (1795 1855) on the French expedition to Mesopotamia. In recognition of his role, involving important excavations at the site of the ancient city of Babylon, Oppert was granted French citizenship. In May 1855, however, a great many of the discovered antiquities were lost when the raft...

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 Eugene Burnouf independently published very similar conclusions. Lassen's account gives vivid insights into the detective work involved, as he painstakingly compares individual words and grammatical forms with their Avestan and Sanskrit equivalents, and...