GROTEFEND, Georg Friedrich (1775-1853), to whose patience and ingenuity the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions was originally due, was born at Münden in Hanover, June 9, 1775. 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, Tychsen, and Heeren. Heyne’s recommendation procured for him an assistant mastership in the Göttingen gymnasium in 1797. While there he published his work De Pasigraphia sive Scriptlira Universali (1799), which first brought him into notice, and led to his appointment in 1803 as prorector of the gymnasium of Frankfort-on-the-Main, and shortly afterwards as conrector. Grotefend was best known during his lifetime as a Latin and Italian philologist, though the attention he paid to hi3 own language is shown by hi3 Anfangsgründe der deutschen Poesie, published in 1815, and his foundation of a society for investigating the German tongue in 1817. In 1821 he became director of the gymnasium at Hanover, a post which he retained till his retirement in 1849, four years before his death. In 1823-4 appeared his revised edition of Wenck’s Latin grammar, in two volumes, followed by a smaller grammar for the use of schools in 1826; in 1835-8 a systematic attempt to explain the fragmentary remains of the Umbrian dialect, entitled Rudimenta Linguoe Umbricoe ex Inscriptionibus antiquis enodata(va eight parts); and in 1839 a work of similar character upon Oscan (Rudimenta Linguoe Oscoe). In the same year he published an important memoir on the coins of Bactria, under the name of Die Münzen der griechischen, ρarthischen, und indoskythischen Könige von Bactrien 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 Altitalien (1840-2). Previously, in 1830, he had written a preface to Wagenfeld’s translation of the spurious Sanchoniathon of Philo Byblius, which professed to have been discovered in the preceding year in the Portuguese convent of Santa Maria de Merinhao. But it was in the East rather than in the West that Grotefend did the work which has given him a lasting name. The mysterious cuneiform inscriptions of Persia had for some time been attracting attention in Europe; exact copies of them had been published by the elder Niebuhr, who lost his eyesight over the work; and Grotefend’s friend, Tych3en of Rostock, 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 1800, and reviewed by Tychsen two years afterwards. In 1815 he gave an account of it in Heeren’s great work on ancient history, and in 1837 published his Neue Beiträge zur Erläuterung der persepolitanischen Keilschrift. Three years later appeared his Neue Beitrage 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; and (5) that the Perse-politan inscriptions are written in Zend (which, however, is not the case), and must be ascribed to the age of the Achaemenian princes. The process whereby Grotefend arrived at these conclusions is a prominent illustration of persevering genius. History made it clear that the monuments to which the inscriptions were attached belonged to Cyrus and his successors, whose names ought accordingly to be found in them. By a comparison of texts Grotefend determined the groups of characters by which these names were expressed, and by further observing what characters were common to the several groups, and of how many characters each group consisted, he was able to assign the conjectural values of d-a-r-h-e-u-sch or Darius to the letters of a frequently recurring one. The native pronunciation of Darius was furnished by Strabo and the Old Testament. The names of Xerxes and Artaxerxes were next deciphered, and the phonetic powers of a good many characters were thus ascertained. The correctness of the decipherment was verified, not only by the fact that the right letters were always found in the right places in each name, but also by the discovery that the word which invariably followed each name, and therefore presumably meant “king,” when read by the new alphabet, presented the same form as the Zend term for “monarch.” It w as clear that a solid basis had been laid for the interpretation of the Persian inscriptions, and all that remained was to work out the results of Grotefend’s brilliant discovery, a task ably performed by Burnouf, Lassen, and Rawlinson. Grotefend died the 15th of December 1853.
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