Who DECIPHERED CUNEIFORM???

The Mystery of Cuneiform, or, Deciphering a Dead Script - how do we know what cuneiform even says, anyway? How did scholars get from complete confusion when confronted with these little wedges to being able to provide complete translations?

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Bibliography and Sources:
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Hincks, E. 1857. 'On the relation between the newly-discovered Accadian Language and the Indo-European, Semitic, and Egyptian Languages; with remarks on the original values of certain Semitic Letters, and on the state of the Greek Alphabet at different periods', in the Report of the Twenty-Seventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science p. 134- 143 (https://bit.ly/2Jmel7L).
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Larsen, M. T. 1997. 'Hincks Versus Rawlinson: The decipherment of the cuneiform system of writing: The decipherment of the cuneiform system of writing', in Ultra terminum vagari: Scritti in onore di Carl Nylander. p. 339-356.
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Niebuhr, C. 1778. 'Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern, Volume 2' (https://bit.ly/2Xxa2dP).
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