The History of Cuneiform Texts

The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs by the French philologist Jean-Francois Campaglion in the subsequent decades allowed a seriologist to correlate cuneiform texts against Egyptian texts. In 1857, four scholars claimed that they were able to read Akkadian texts and these claims were put to attest. Hugo Winkler made the first attempt at deciphering astronomical texts towards the end of the 1800s. By the early 1900s, this work started to reveal some tantalizing clues as to when some of these inscriptions were written.