The Mystery of the Oldest Writing System Remained Unsolved Until 1856
5 comments
·March 23, 2025yubblegum
science4sail
After looking at the author's bio, I don't think that the author of this article is particularly specialized in the Middle East. They probably have the same level of understanding of the area's ethnography as most Americans: an Arab is anyone who isn't an Israeli.
Therefore, Persians, Assyrians, Kurds, and Lawrence of Arabia are all Arabs. It's unclear where Arab Israelis fall in this taxonomy.
z3t4
How do you decipher writing? Do you just guess what one glyph means and then try to figure out the context!? What is the Rawlinson Method?
yorwba
[...] by searching for the names of ancient Persian kings in the parallel inscriptions [...] the names would have been pronounced approximately the same way in Old Persian and Akkadian.
Compare also how Old Persian had been deciphered by Grotefend using a similar method. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Friedrich_Grotefend#Deci...
(An uncharitable reading of the story in the article is that the "Rawlinson method" consists of claiming credit for discoveries made by Hincks.)
KingLancelot
[dead]
> Layard and his protégé, a Christian Arab from Mosul named Hormuzd Rassam ...
Hormuzd Rassam was not an "Arab". He was an Assyrian. Not many (any, ever?) "Arabs" go around sporting an ancient Iranian name for God (Hormuzd) for their first name, though it is interesting how that name somehow got adopted by the Chaldean Christian Assyrian community. And based on his bio on wikipedia, it appears his mother was in fact from a Jewish family since her father's name was Isaak Halabee (which is the Arabized variant of יצחק חליבה).
One expects more from a magazine published by the Smithsonian, and rather ironic in an article about ancient languages of that region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormuzd_Rassam#Early_life
https://www.uncomfortableoxford.com/unburying-an-archaeologi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishak_Haleva - not his grandfather but the same exact name.