Julius Oppert

[4] His account of the Fresnel mission and the results of his consequent study were published as Expédition Scientifique en Mésopotamie (1859–1863),[5] with the second volume entitled Déchiffrement des inscriptions cunéiformes.

[6] Although the classification of the "Casdo-Scythian" inscriptions as Turanian would later be rejected by scholars, research would confirm Oppert in his identification of the distinctness of the Sumerian language (as he renamed it in 1869) and the origin of its script.

In 1857 he was appointed professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology in the school of languages connected with the National Library of France, and in this capacity he produced his Grammaire Sanscrite (1859).

[2] In 1865 he published a history of Assyria and Chaldaea (Histoire des Empires de Chaldée et d'Assyrie) in the context of new archaeological findings.

[2] In 1876 Oppert began to focus on the antiquities of ancient Media and its language, writing Le Peuple et la langue des Médes (1879).