The New Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum

The first traveller who brought copies of Pahlavi inscriptions to Europe was Garsten Niebuhr. On 2 March 1765, he arrived at Shīrāz, and on 13 March he went to Persepolis. In its surroundings he sojourned till 7 April, almost every day visiting its ruins and the monuments of Naqš-i Raj ab and Naqš-i Rustam, all of which he describes very minutely (Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern, 11, Copenhagen, 1778, 121-63). In the ruins of Persepolis he found and copied the Old Persian inscriptions on which Grotefend, in 1802, based the first decipherment of the Persian cuneiform script. At Naqš-i Rajab he copied three short inscriptions, each in two Pahlavi versions and a Greek translation, of the Sasanian kings Ardashir I, Shapur I, and Hornmd; and at Naqš-i Rustam the left corner, the tails of 23 very long lines, of a Pahlavi inscription which he could not identify at all. The short inscriptions, together with two kindred inscriptions of Shapur II and Shapur III at Tāq-i Bostān, were deciphered by Silvestre de Sacy (Mémoires sur diverses antiquités de la Perse, Paris, 1793), who thus initiated the Pahlavi palaeography. Carsten Niebuhr and Silvestre de Sacy have a claim to be called the fathers of this branch of Oriental research

Ancient history · Art · Cuneiform · Decipherment · Literature · Palaeography · Eurasian Exchange Networks · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History

• Akten des vierundzwanzigsten Internationalen Orientalisten-Kongresses München (28. August bis 4. September 1957)

  Denzel Carr, Herbert Franke•Journal of the American Oriental…•1960

  Add to list