 Rawlinson began to study Persian inscriptions, more particularly those in the cuneiform character, which had only been partially deciphered by Grotefend and Saint-Martin.From 1836 he was in the vicinity of the great cuneiform inscription at Behistun, near the city of Kermanshah in western Iran, for two years.He was the first Westerner to transcribe the Old Persian portion of the trilingual inscriptions in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian (a later form of Akkadian) written by Darius the Great sometime between his coronation as king of the Persian Empire in the summer of 522 BC and his death in autumn of 486 BC.