European scholars publish the first transcriptions of cuneiform, rediscovered only in 1618 by the Spanish ambassador to Persia. Local populations had always had this script before their eyes for at least three millennia, but no one, as far as we know, had ever bothered to decipher it. According to Yuval Noah Harari, the difference is one of approach: Western culture (which would spread throughout the world in the late 20th century) is based on the assumption of ignorance, which drives conquest and discovery, while most previous cultures are based on the assumption of wisdom. In the 1830s, British officer Henry Rawlinson was shown an enormous stele with inscriptions in cuneiform, Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. He enlisted a Kurdish boy to hang it from the gigantic stele and copy the entire text, letter by letter, which was then sent to Europe and deciphered. For the first time, doors open to lost kingdoms of millennia past: Sumerian bazaars, Assyrian kings, Babylonian bureaucrats.
