Thursday, May 15, 2014

Behistun Inscription


The Rosetta Stone is a stone in a museum, about 45 inches tall. Because it contains three scripts of the same text (Egyptian/Demotic/Greek), it was used to unlock Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Behistun Inscription, 50 feet by 80 feet, carved in limestone on the side of a mountain in Iran, is just like the Rosetta Stone: composed of three different scripts (Sumerian/Akkadian/Persian), and used to unlock a mysterious language--Sumerian cuneiform. Because the Behistun Inscription is composed with scripts older than those of the Rosetta Stone it’s a much better filter towards seeing what we’re actually looking at when looking at human history.

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