But it was in the East rather than in the West that Grotefend did his greatest work. The Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions of Persia had for some time been attracting attention in Europe; exact copies of them had been published by Jean Chardin in 1711, the Dutch artist Cornelis de Bruijn and the German traveller Niebuhr, who lost his eyesight over the work; and Grotefend's friend, Tychsen of Rostock, believed that he had ascertained the characters in the column, now known to be Persian, to be alphabetic.