Old Persian, recorded in cuneiform inscriptions from the first millennium BCE, remained undeciphered until the nineteenth century. Christian Lassen (1800-76) and Julius Oppert (1825-1905) both contributed to solving the puzzle, and these publications, from 1836 and 1847, reveal their painstaking work and their excitement at the results.

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 Eugène 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 proposes sounds for the symbols. The book uses a specially designed cuneiform font, and credits the printer, Georgi of Bonn. This Cambridge Library Collection volume also includes a short monograph on Old Persian phonology published in Berlin in 1847 by the Assyriologist Julius Oppert (1825-1905). Oppert revisits Lassen's conclusions in the light of Henry Creswicke Rawlinson's important 1846 memoir on the trilingual Behistun inscription.