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85 years
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Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, 1st Baronet GCB was an English soldier, diplomat and orientalist. He is sometimes referred to as the "Father of Assyriology." Knowledge of cuneiform was lost until 1835 when Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company army officer, found the Behistun inscriptions in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522 BC–486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs....
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Cuneiform Script, Earliest Writing System
Cuneiform script is the earliest known writing system in the world. Cuneiform writing emerged in the Sumerian civilization of southern Iraq around the 34th century BC during the middle Uruk period, beginning as a pictographic system of writing. Cun... |
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Darius The Great, King of Persia
Darius I was the third king of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Also called Darius the Great, he ruled the empire at its peak, when it included much of West Asia, the Caucasus, parts of the Balkans (Thrace-Macedonia and Paeonia), most of the Black Sea... |
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Behistun Inscription, Darius I
The Behistun Inscription is to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptian hieroglyphs: the document most crucial in the decipherment of a previously lost script. It is located in the Kermanshah Province of Iran. The inscription includes three ve... |
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Herodotus, Histories of the Greco-Persian Wars
Herodotus of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BC in Halicarnassus, Caria; Bodrum in modern Turkey. He is regarded as the "Father of History" in Western culture. He was the first historian known to collect his materials... |
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The Rosetta Stone, Found in 1799
The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the... |
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Champollion, Deciphering Hieroglyphics
Anyone who has studied ancient Egypt will be familiar with Jean Francois Champollion, The Father of Egyptology. He was, after all, credited with deciphering hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone and thus giving scholars the key to understanding hierog... |
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Austen Henry Layard, Excavator of Nimrud and Nineveh
Sir Austen Henry Layard was an English traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. He is best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Nineveh, where he uncovered a large proportion of the As... |
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First Anglo-Afghan War
The First Anglo-Afghan War (also known as Auckland's Folly) was fought between British East India Company and Afghanistan from 1839 to 1842, which resulted in the deaths of 4,500 British and Indian soldiers, plus 12,000 of their camp followers by the... |
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George Smith, Translated Gilgamesh
George Smith was a pioneering English Assyriologist who first discovered and translated the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest-known written work of literature. From his youth, he was fascinated with Assyrian culture and history. In his spare time, he rea... |
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