Grotefend's Decipherment of Old Persian

摘要

Working in the rich cultural environment of Goettingen University in the early 7 9th Century, Georg Friedrich Grotefend bet that he could decipher the cuneiform script of Old Persian—and succeeded in record time. How does a scientific discovery occur? How is it that one individual succeeds in cracking a problem which had been nothing but a stubborn, hardened nut for those coming before him? Human history is full of such accounts; indeed, the individual's discovery of universal principles is the red thread which winds throughout the history of man's successive breakthroughs, whereby he masters those universal principles, and thus participates in the ongoing process of creation. One of the most intriguing examples of creative break- throughs is given us in the area of philology, specifically, the decipherment of "lost" languages.