After the deciphering of the Old Persian version of the trilingual inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings, scholars focused their efforts on the version that was then described as "Assyrian", because of its kinship with texts discovered in northern Iraq, at Khorsabad, Nineveh and Nimrud. Oppert wrote: "Assyrian, the Semitic language of Nineveh and Babylon", whereas today we distinguish between Assyrian and Babylonian, two variants of a Semitic language that the Mesopotamiansthemselves called Akkadian.
Decisive progress was made in deciphering the language between 1851 and 1857. First of all, it was necessary to get rid of the idea that the simple precedes the complex: for a long time, it had been believed that the Persepolitan script was the oldest of the three scripts in the Achaemenid inscriptions, whereas the exact opposite is true. It should also be pointed out that, in the deciphering of Assyrian cuneiform, the Behistun trilingual did not playas crucial a role as most accounts suggest, drawing an exaggerated parallel with the Rosetta Stone: first the Khorsabad inscriptions, then the tablets in the library of Assurbanipal in Nineveh played at least as important a role. It was soon recognized by the main players in the deciphering process that Assyrian belonged to the Semitic language family: indeed, it was Rawlinson's knowledge of Persian, but much less of Hebrew and Arabic, that prevented him from playingas important a role in the deciphering of Assyrianas he had in the deciphering of texts written in Old Persian. The cuneiform script used to write Assyrian turned out to be far more complicated than the Persepolitan alphabet, due to several features: the presence of determinatives, homophony and polyphony. Homophony refers to the fact that different signs note thesame sound. Polyphony, on the other hand, allows the same sign to have several different readings, depending on the context. It was Hincks who discovered this principle as early as 1846: not only could the same sign correspond to different syllables, it could even record an entire word (thus constituting what is known as a logogram). On his return from Babylon, Oppert worked in 1855 on the tablets from King Assurbanipal's library, brought back to London from Nineveh; he was the first to make use not only of syllabaries, but also of grammatical texts, and reported on his progress in a report published in May 1856. In February 1857, Oppert edited the Nebuchadnezzar II inscription relating to the temple of Nabu at Borsippa: this was the first time an entire Babylonian text had been transcribed and translated in this way without the existence of another version, such as Old Persian.
