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The Rock of Behistun became as famous as the Stone of Rosetta and Rawlinson shared the honors of deciphering the old nail-writing with Grotefend. Although they had never seen each other or heard each other's names, the German schoolmaster and the British officer worked together for a common purpose as all good scientific men should do. Another human mystery had been solved.
The elaborate system of nail-writing of the ancient Sumerians was too involved for the Aramaean business man. He invented a new alphabet which could be written much faster than the old wedge-shaped figures of Babylon. The spoken language of the Aramaeans followed their business correspondence. Aramaean became the English of the ancient world.
Then it took thirty years before a patient German school-master by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four letters, the D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian King Darius. And another twenty years had to go by until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail-writing of western Asia.
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