During this time he had become fascinated by the trilingual inscriptions carved on the orders of the Achaemenid King Darius at nearby Behistan, the Rosetta Stone of ancient Persia. Every evening he would clamber his way up the near-vertical rock face, or even have himself lowered in a laundry basket, to take rubbings, then return to his tent to labour away into the night in an ultimately successful attempt to decode the Persian cuneiform script on the cliff wall.
