Georg Friedrich Grotefend (June 9, 1775 – December 15, 1853) was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 epigraphist.

Life

He was born at Hann. Münden

Hann. Münden

Hann. Münden is the German official name of a town in Lower Saxony, Germany. The city is located in the district of Göttingen at the confluence of the Fulda and Werra rivers, which join to form the river Weser. It has 28,000 inhabitants...

 and died in Hanover

Hanover

Hanover or Hannover, on the river Leine, is the capital of the federal state of Lower Saxony , Germany and was once by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of Great Britain, under their title as the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg...

. He was educated partly in his native town, partly at Ilfeld, where he remained till 1795, when he entered the university of Göttingen, and there became the friend of Heyne

Christian Gottlob Heyne

Christian Gottlob Heyne was a German classical scholar and archaeologist as well as long-time director of the Göttingen State and University Library.-Biography:He was born in Chemnitz, Electorate of Saxony...

, Tychsen

Thomas Christian Tychsen

Thomas Christian Tychsen was a German orientalist and Lutheran theologian. He is known for his 1823 grammar of the Arabic language.-External links:...

 and Heeren

Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren

Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren was a German historian.He was born at Arbergen, near Bremen. He studied philosophy, theology and history at the University of Göttingen, and then travelled in France, Italy and the Netherlands...

. Heyne's recommendation procured for him an assistant mastership in the Göttingen gymnasium in 1797. While there he published his work De pasigraphia sive scriptura universali (1799), which led to his appointment in 1803 as prorector of the gymnasium of Frankfurt

Frankfurt

Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...

, and shortly afterwards as conrector. In 1821 he became director of the gymnasium at Hanover, a post which he retained till his retirement in 1849.

Works

Grotefend was best known during his lifetime as a Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 and Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

 philologist, though the attention he paid to his own language is shown by his Anfangsgründe der deutschen Poesie, published in 1815, and his foundation of a society for investigating the German tongue in 1817. In 1823-1824 appeared his revised edition of Helfrich Bernhard Wenck

Helfrich Bernhard Wenck

Helfrich Bernhard Wenck was a German historian and educator born in Idstein, Hesse.From 1761 until his death he was associated with the Darmstadt Pädagogium, Here he was appointed prorector in 1769, worked as an historiographer and later attained the position of Consistorialrath .His best known...

's Latin grammar, in two volumes, followed by a smaller grammar for the use of schools in 1826; in 1835-1838 a systematic attempt to explain the fragmentary remains of the Umbrian dialect

Umbrian language

Umbrian is an extinct Italic language formerly spoken by the Umbri in the ancient Italian region of Umbria. Within the Italic languages it is closely related to the Oscan group and is therefore associated with it in the group of Osco-Umbrian languages...

, entitled Rudimenta linguae Umbricae ex inscriptionibus antiquis enodata (in eight parts); and in 1839 a work of similar character upon Oscan (Rudimenta linguae Oscae). In the same year he published a memoir on the coins of Bactria

Bactria

Bactria and also appears in the Zend Avesta as Bukhdi. It is the ancient name of a historical region located between south of the Amu Darya and west of the Indus River...

, under the name of Die Münzen der griechischen, parthischen und indoskythischen Könige von Baktrien und den Ländern am Indus.

He soon, however, returned to his favourite subject, and brought out a work in five parts, Zur Geographie und Geschichte von Alt-Italien (1840-1842.). Previously, in 1836, he had written a preface to Friedrich Wagenfeld

Friedrich Wagenfeld

Friedrich Wagenfeld was a German philologist and author born in Bremen.From 1829 to 1832 he studied philology in Göttingen, and subsequently spent several years serving as a tutor in Brinkum...

's translation of the Sanchoniathon of Philo of Byblos

Philo of Byblos

Philo of Byblos was an antiquarian writer of grammatical, lexical and historical works in Greek. He is chiefly known for his Phoenician history assembled from the writings of Sanchuniathon.-Life:...

, which was alleged to have been discovered in the preceding year in the Portuguese convent of Santa Maria de Merinhão.

But it was in the East rather than in the West that Grotefend did his greatest work. The cuneiform

Cuneiform script

Cuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...

 inscriptions of Persia had for some time been attracting attention in Europe; exact copies of them had been published by the Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 artist Cornelis de Bruijn

Cornelis de Bruijn

Cornelis de Bruijn was a Dutch artist and traveler. He made two large tours and published illustrated books with his observations of people, buildings, plants and animals.- Biography :...

 and the Danish

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

 traveller Niebuhr

Carsten Niebuhr

Carsten Niebuhr or Karsten Niebuhr , a German mathematician, cartographer, and explorer in the service of Denmark, is renowned for his travels on the Arabian peninsula.-Biography:...

, who lost his eyesight over the work; and Grotefend's friend, Tychsen of Rostock

Oluf Gerhard Tychsen

Oluf Gerhard Tychsen was a German Orientalist and Hebrew scholar. He is known today as one of the founding fathers of Islamic numismatics....

, believed that he had ascertained the characters in the column, now known to be Persian, to be alphabetic.

At this point Grotefend took the matter up. His first discovery was communicated to the Royal Society of Göttingen in 1802, and reviewed by Tychsen two years afterwards. In 1815 he gave an account of it in Heeren's work on ancient history,. and in 1837 published his Neue Beiträge zur Erläuterung der persepolitanischen Keilschrift. Three years later appeared his Neue Beiträge zur Erläuterung der babylonischen Keilschrift. His discovery may be summed up as follows:

1. that the Persian inscriptions contain three different forms of cuneiform writing, so that the decipherment of the one would give the key to the decipherment of the others
2. that the characters of the Persian column are alphabetic and not syllabic
3. that they must be read from left to right
4. that the alphabet consists of forty letters, including signs for long and short vowels
5. that the Persepolitan inscriptions are written in Zend
   Zend
   Zend can mean:*Zend, commentaries on the Avesta, the sacred texts of the Zoroastrian religion.**In older texts, Zend can refer to the Avestan language*Salla Zend, a character in Star Wars*Zend Technologies, a PHP-focused company...
   
    (which, however, is not the case), and must be ascribed to the age of the Achaemenian princes
6. that a specific frequent word could refer to the Persian word for "king"
7. that the inscriptions satisfy the two following schemes: A) X king, great king of king, son of Y king; B) Y king, great king of king, son of Z;
8. that the presence of the two schemes A) and B) gives an opportunity to identify the people involved; it is necessary that X was a Persian king, his father was a Persian king too, but his grandfather was not king
9. according to this idea Grotefend was able to identify X for Xerxes
   Xerxes I of Persia
   Xerxes I of Persia , Ḫšayāršā, ), also known as Xerxes the Great, was the fifth king of kings of the Achaemenid Empire.-Youth and rise to power:...
   
   , Y for Darius
   Darius I of Persia
   Darius I , also known as Darius the Great, was the third king of kings of the Achaemenid Empire...
   
    and Z with Hystaspes
   Hystaspes
   Vishtaspa, Hellenized as Hystaspes , may refer to:* Vishtaspa , the first patron of Zoroaster...
   
   .

A basis had now been laid for the interpretation of the Persian inscriptions. What remained was to work out the results of Grotefend's discovery, a task performed by Eugène Burnouf

Eugène Burnouf

Eugène Burnouf was an eminent French scholar and orientalist who made significant contributions to the deciphering of Old Persian cuneiform....

, Christian Lassen

Christian Lassen

Christian Lassen was a Norwegian-German orientalist.-Life:He was born at Bergen, Norway. Having received a university education at Oslo, he went to Germany and continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Bonn. In Bonn, Lassen acquired a sound knowledge of Sanskrit...

 and George Rawlinson

George Rawlinson

Canon George Rawlinson was a 19th century English scholar, historian, and Christian theologian. He was born at Chadlington, Oxfordshire, and was the younger brother of Sir Henry Rawlinson....

. Interestingly, this work of Grotefend was spurred on by a simple bet which Grotefend made with a friend.