Editing Cuneiform (section)

==Decipherment==
{{main|Decipherment of cuneiform}}
{{multiple image
|image1=Comentarios de don García de Silva que contienen su viaje a la India y de ella a Persia cosas notables que vió en él y los sucesos de la embajada al Sophi Manuscrito 559.jpg
|image2= Pietro Della Valle katibe mikhi.png
|caption1=[[García de Silva Figueroa]] (1620)
|caption2=[[Pietro Della Valle]] (1621)
|width1=170
|width2=123
|footer=The first cuneiform inscriptions published in modern times, both copied from [[Achaemenid royal inscriptions]] in [[Persepolis]] in the early 17th century. Pietro Della Valle's inscription, today known as XPb, is from the Palace of Xerxes.<ref name=":12" />
}}

The decipherment of cuneiform began with the decipherment of [[Old Persian cuneiform]] in 1836.

The first cuneiform inscriptions published in modern times were copied from the [[Achaemenid royal inscriptions]] in the ruins of [[Persepolis]], with the first complete and accurate copy being published in 1778 by [[Carsten Niebuhr]]. Niebuhr's publication was used by Grotefend in 1802 to make the first breakthrough – the realization that Niebuhr had published three different languages side by side and the recognition of the word "king".<ref>[https://archive.org/stream/archaeologyofcun00sayc#page/n7/mode/2up][[Archibald Sayce|Sayce, Rev. A. H.]], "The Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions", Second Edition-revised, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, Brighton, New York, 1908 (Reprint – {{ISBN|978-1-108-08239-6}})</ref>

The rediscovery and publication of cuneiform took place in the early 17th century, and early conclusions were drawn such as the writing direction and that the Achaemenid royal inscriptions are three different languages, with two different scripts. In 1620, [[García de Silva Figueroa]] dated the inscriptions of Persepolis to the Achaemenid period, identified them as Old Persian, and concluded that the ruins were the ancient residence of Persepolis. In 1621, [[Pietro Della Valle]] specified the direction of writing from left to right.

In 1762, [[Jean-Jacques Barthélemy]] found that an inscription in Persepolis resembled that found on a brick in Babylon. [[Carsten Niebuhr]] made the first copies of the inscriptions of Persepolis in 1778 and settled on three different types of writing, which subsequently became known as Niebuhr I, II and III. He was the first to discover the sign for a word division in one of the scriptures. [[Oluf Gerhard Tychsen]] was the first to list 24 phonetic or alphabetic values for the characters in 1798.

Actual decipherment did not take place until the beginning of the 19th century, initiated by [[Georg Friedrich Grotefend]] in his study of [[Old Persian cuneiform]]. He was followed by [[Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin]] in 1822 and [[Rasmus Rask|Rasmus Christian Rask]] in 1823, who was the first to decipher the name Achaemenides and the consonants m and n. [[Eugène Burnouf]] identified the names of various satrapies and the consonants k and z in 1833–1835. [[Christian Lassen]] contributed significantly to the grammatical understanding of the Old Persian language and the use of vowels. The decipherers used the short trilingual inscriptions from Persepolis and the inscriptions from [[Ganjnameh|Ganjnāme]] for their work.

<gallery widths="350px" heights="200px" perrow="4" class="center">
File:Niebuhr inscription 1 with word for King.jpg|Niebuhr inscription 1, with the suggested words for "King" ({{Script|Xpeo|𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹}}) highlighted, repeated three times. Inscription now known to mean "Darius the Great King, King of Kings, King of countries, son of Hystaspes, an Achaemenian, who built this Palace".<ref name=":12" /> Today known as '''[[: File:Persepolis, Palace of Darius, Inscription DPa.jpg|DPa]]''', from the Palace of Darius in Persepolis, above figures of the king and attendants<ref>{{cite web | title=DPa | website=Livius | date=2020-04-16 | url=https://www.livius.org/sources/content/achaemenid-royal-inscriptions/dpa/ | access-date=2023-03-19}}</ref>
File:Niebuhr inscription 2 with word for King.jpg|Niebuhr inscription 2, with the suggested words for "King" ({{Script|Xpeo|𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹}}) highlighted, repeated four times. Inscription now known to mean "Xerxes the Great King, King of Kings, son of Darius the King, an Achaemenian".<ref name=":12" /> Today known as '''[[:File:Persepolis, Palace of Xerxes, Inscription XPe.jpg|XPe]]''', the text of fourteen inscriptions in three languages (Old Persian, Elamite, Babylonian) from the Palace of Xerxes in Persepolis.<ref>{{cite web | title=XPe | website=Livius | date=2020-09-24 | url=https://www.livius.org/sources/content/achaemenid-royal-inscriptions/xpe/ | access-date=2023-03-19}}</ref>
</gallery>

In a final step, the decipherment of the trilingual [[Behistun Inscription]] was completed by [[Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1st Baronet|Henry Rawlinson]] and [[Edward Hincks]]. Edward Hincks discovered that Old Persian is partly a syllabary.

In 2023 it was shown that automatic high-quality translation of cuneiform languages like Akkadian can be achieved using [[natural language processing]] methods with [[convolutional neural network]]s.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Gutherz |first1=Gai |last2=Gordin |first2=Shai |last3=Sáenz |first3=Luis |last4=Levy |first4=Omer |last5=Berant |first5=Jonathan |date=2023-05-02 |editor-last=Kearns |editor-first=Michael |title=Translating Akkadian to English with neural machine translation |url=https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/doi/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad096/7147349 |journal=PNAS Nexus |language=en |volume=2 |issue=5 |pages=pgad096 |doi=10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad096 |issn=2752-6542 |pmc=10153418 |pmid=37143863}}</ref>