In 1798, Oluf Gerhard Tychsen made the first study of the inscriptions of Persepolis copied by Niebuhr. He discovered that series of characters in the Persian inscriptions were divided from one another by an oblique wedge () and that these must be individual words. He also found that a specific group of seven letters () was recurring in the inscriptions, and that they had a few recurring terminations of three to four letters. However, Münter mistakenly attributed the texts to Arsacid kings, and therefore was unable to make further progress.