Deciphering Ancient Languages

Written by: Dr. Scott Stripling an Open Bible (2025) advisor and contributor.

Written accounts of ancient events are critical to proper historiography. Western explorers discovered two monumental inscriptions which unlocked the forgotten languages and literature of the Egyptians and Hittites, ancient Israel’s southern and northern neighbors respectively. With a knowledge of these cryptic languages, the flood of soon-to-be-discovered artifacts Could fit into an identifiable context.

The Rosetta Stone (1798)

In 1798 at Rosetta (Rashid), an officer in Napolean’s Egypt expedition discovered a linguistic treasure near the westernmost mouth of the Nile River. The trilingually inscribed black basalt slab served as the key to unlock the knowledge of the language and literature of ancient Egypt. This watershed discovery launched the modern discipline of Biblical Archaeology.

The three languages written on the monument were Ptolemaic Greek of ca. 200 BC and two forms of Egyptian writing—an older, more complicated hieroglyphic script and a later simplified and more common demotic writing. Since Greek was a known language, epigraphers and linguists used it to decipher the other two ancient Egyptian scripts. Sylvester de Sacy of France and John David Akerblad of Sweden succeeded in unraveling the demotic Egyptian by identifying the Greek personal names it contained: Ptolemy, Arsinoe, and Berenike. Thomas Young of England then identified the name of Ptolemy in the hieroglyphic portion, where groups of characters enclosed in oval frames, called cartouches, had already been surmised to be royal names. From this point, the young Frenchman Jean François Champollion (1790–1832) was able to decipher the hieroglyphics of the monument, show the true nature of this script, make a dictionary, formulate a grammar, and translate numerous Egyptian texts. 

Champollion’s achievement initiated the science of Egyptology. Thanks to his work, scholars can read Egyptian monumental inscriptions and reliefs as well as papyri. Today many universities maintain chairs in the language and culture of ancient Egypt. These studies have opened previously unknown vistas of history so that from the beginning of Egypt ca. 2800 BC to 63 BC when Rome extended its hegemony over Israel’s southern neighbor, the entire history of the land of the Nile can be traced with a reasonable degree of certainty.

All of this helps illuminate the background of the Bible, since Egypt provided a backdrop for much of the Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch. As a result, the story of Joseph, the Israelites’ Egyptian sojourn, their deliverance under Moses, much of their desert wanderings, and their later history in Canaan can be interpreted within a general framework of contemporaneous Egyptian history. The context of Old Testament history in its broad span from Abraham to Jesus is made immeasurably clearer because of the vast strides in our knowledge of the empire on the Nile, as that great nation interacted with the mighty Assyro-Babylonian empires between the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers and the Hittite power on the Halys River across the thin land bridge known as the Promised Land. 

The Behistun Inscription

This famous monument was the key to understanding the languages of Assyria and Babylonia. It consists of a large relief panel containing numerous inscribed columns on the face of a mountain ca. 152 m. above the surrounding plain of Karmanshah on the old caravan route from Babylon to Ecbatana. Unlike the trilingual Rosetta Stone, the 1200-line Behistun Inscription was written in the Akkadian wedge-shaped characters of ancient Assyria-Babylonia and inscribed in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian. Akkadian was the diplomatic language of ancient Assyria and Babylonia in which scribes wrote texts on thousands of clay tablets discovered around the Southern Levant. 

        Linguists made almost no progress deciphering Akkadian until 1835 when a young British officer assigned to the Persian army, Henry Rawlinson, made the dangerous climb to the Behistun Inscription to make copies and impressions of it. Rawlinson knew modern Persian and worked to decipher the old Persian cuneiform part. After a decade of labor, he finally succeeded in translating the five columns, totaling nearly 400 lines of the old Persian portion of the Behistun Inscription. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society published the translation and commentary in 1847.

In conjunction with the literary part of the monument was a life-sized figure with numerous individuals bowing before it. This person turned out to be Darius I “the Great” (ca. 522–486 BC), the Achaemenid prince who saved the Persian Empire from a rebellion. The scene depicts the king, as Rawlinson’s translation of the Persian portion of the inscription shows, receiving the submitting rebels. At the top of the relief, two attendants accompany the emperor. His foot presses upon the prostrate form of a rebel leader. The king’s left hand holds a bow, while his right hand rises toward the winged disc symbolizing Ahura-Mazda, the spirit of good, whom Darius worshiped as a committed follower of Zoroaster. Behind the rebel stands a procession of conquered foes, roped together by their necks. 

Beside and beneath the sculptured panel the numerous columns of the inscription appear relating how Darius defended the throne and crushed the revolt. Supposing that the other inscriptions duplicated the story, scholars soon deciphered the second language (Elamite or Susian) and finally Akkadian or Assyro-Babylonian. This breakthrough opened a vast new biblical background so that, as in the case of the Rosetta Stone opening the science of Egyptology, the Behistun Inscription gave birth to the discipline of Assyriology. Both Egyptology and Assyriology are vital to understanding biblical backgrounds.  

The library of Ashurbanipal (ca. 669­–625 BC) contained approximately 22,000 Akkadian cuneiform tablets. Among the tablets unearthed in this collection and sent to the British Museum were Assyrian copies of the Babylonian Creation (“Enuma Elish”) and Flood (“Gilgamesh Epic”) stories. The identification and decipherment of these tablets by George Smith in 1872 produced great excitement in the archaeological world because of their similarities to the biblical accounts. Also of immense importance are the Amarna Letters from Egypt, which came to light in 1886 at Tell el-Amarna, ca. 322 km. south of modern Cairo. The next section deals with their relevance. 

Other important bodies of cuneiform literature bearing upon the Bible have been retrieved from Boghazkoy and Kanish in Asia Minor. Others come from Susa and Elam, Mari on the middle Euphrates, and Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) in northern Syria, mentioned in the Amarna Letters. Others stem from various sites within and without Babylonia. Ultimately, the Rosetta Stone from Egypt and the Behistun Inscription from Babylonia unlocked several of the more prominent languages of the biblical world and laid the foundation for the key discoveries of the twentieth century.