It was one of history’s great vanishing acts. Around 3,400 BCE, a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For the next three thousand years, wedge-shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great kingdoms of Mesopotamia. And then…the meaning of the characters was lost.
London, 1857. In an era obsessed with human progress, mysterious palaces emerging from the desert sands have captured the Victorian public’s imagination. Assyria, Babylon, the mighty Persian Empire… these civilizations had gone down in the annals as the great antagonists to ancient Greece and ancient Israel. What did these “bad guys” of Western history have to say for themselves? What were their values, their rituals, their understandings of their place in the universe? What was it like simply to be human at the dawn of recorded history?
Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher the script that would enable humans to peer farther back into our history than ever before. From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, let The Mesopotamian Riddle whisk you off on “an epic intellectual adventure” (The Wall Street Journal) through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand where we came from—and where we perhaps might go.]]>
A CONTEST ON NEW BURLINGTON STREET On a late-summer day in 1856, a letter carrier for metropolitan London’s Post Office stepped from a mail coach in front of a three-story town house in Mayfair. Crossing the threshold, the courier—nattily attired in a black-silk top hat, scarlet frock coat, black-and-white-checkered vest, and dark gray trousers—handed a wax-sealed envelope to a clerk. The missive was addressed to Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
The anonymous postman had no way of knowing that the envelope he was bearing would help rewrite the story of civilization’s origins and ignite a neck-and-neck contest for international renown. At stake: the immortality conferred on those who make once-in-a-century intellectual breakthroughs.
Though none had written the letter, three men—driven by boundless curiosity, a love of risk, and the distinctive demons of aspiration and ambition—were most responsible for making the contest possible.
One, Austen Henry Layard, was the son of an English colonial civil servant. At age twenty-two, he had fled the drudgery of clerkship tasks in his uncle’s law office for a life of adventure on the lawless backroads of the Ottoman Empire. Bandits robbed him three times and once left him to wander half-naked and barefoot through the desert. He joined a rebellious mountain tribe in Persia and spied in the Balkans for the British ambassador in Constantinople. At last he reached the mounds of Mesopotamia, where he transformed himself into the most celebrated archaeologist of the age.
Victorian postman on his rounds
Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, living in the shadow of a rich and influential father and an accomplished older brother, had decided that he could carve out his own identity only in exile. As a twenty-three-year-old military officer of the East India Company, he found himself in Persia. There he demonstrated a flair for languages, a skill at scaling heights in search of millennia-old inscriptions, and a powerful yearning, he confided to his sister, to do something to attract the world’s attention. In his early thirties, he deciphered the writing of the ancient Persian Empire. The achievement, considered as fantastic in his time as mapping mitochondrial DNA in ours, brought Rawlinson his first taste of fame. And more dead languages were waiting to be understood.
Finally, there was Edward Hincks, a country parson in a remote corner of Ireland: brilliant, tormented by crippling anxiety and the specter of financial ruin, hungry for peer recognition of his linguistic gifts, and principled to a fault. Huddled for endless hours over his desk in his rectory, Hincks had tested his formidable intellect and escaped his many troubles by translating obscure texts written in Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Hebrew. Eventually he set his sights on the most tantalizing prize of them all.
By 1856 the paths of these three men had converged in a sometimes friendly, often combustible pas de trois. Now, with Layard watching from a judicious distance, Hincks and Rawlinson were about to become the prime contestants in a challenge to determine, once and for all, whether the oldest writing system in the world could be deciphered. However esoteric this might sound, the question was the subject of intense public debate in capitals on both sides of the Atlantic. For mid-nineteenth-century Britons, proving that this elusive script could be understood meant pulling back the curtain on a distant, vanished, yet hauntingly familiar world, one that had given birth to humanity’s modern mind.
Until the 1840s, few people had known anything about the great civilizations that had begun their rise along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers about 2000 BCE and endured for more than 1500 years. Assyria and its vassal state (and sometime rival) Babylon had once dominated the Near East and beyond. Classical writers described Assyria, which reached its zenith about 700 BCE, as the first true empire; the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Babylon “surpasses in splendor any city in the known world.” But a coalition of enemies had destroyed Assyria in the late seventh century BCE, and Babylon was neglected, ransacked, and left to die out five hundred years later. “Today the greatest world city of antiquity is a mound of desert earth,” one theologian wrote. By the mid-1800s, these societies had been almost entirely forgotten. At the British Museum, the world’s preeminent repository of antiquities, the relics of Assyria and Babylon, including writings inscribed on clay bricks and stone, filled one three-foot-by-three-foot-by-three-foot cabinet.
But the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the mid-1700s had inspired a new science: investigating antiquity by digging objects out of the earth. And Layard was its most spectacularly successful practitioner. Enduring lethal epidemics, stultifying heat, vermin-infested camps, and the hostility of Ottoman authorities, he made a series of remarkable discoveries beginning in the mid-1840s: 2,500-year-old Assyrian palaces paneled with exquisite alabaster bas-reliefs and guarded by stone gods and monsters. In vivid and often shocking detail, the friezes depicted corpse-covered battlefields, battering-ram-wielding soldiers breaking down city ramparts, archers in stallion-drawn chariots, lines of bedraggled captives, vassals bearing tributes, kings attended by a retinue of eunuchs, and royal lion hunts in the bush. Unreadable inscriptions swirled around the carvings. Layard and his protégé, a Christian Arab from Mosul named Hormuzd Rassam, had also recently unearthed thousands of inscribed clay tablets in the royal library of the burned Assyrian capital, Nineveh: the tablets seemed to be filled with information about astronomy, medicine, religion, politics, laws, and everyday life.
The rediscovery of this lost civilization, which had controlled the Near East like no other empire before or since, seized the public’s imagination. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the Crystal Palace in south London in 1854 to gaze at the “Nineveh Court,” a fanciful reinvention of the royal palace, with lotus gardens, multicolored bas-reliefs, and blue-headed bull capitals perched atop Doric columns. Newspapers chronicled the arrival in England of giant winged lions and other stone colossi that testified to Assyria’s artistic mastery and rich mythology. “The monuments [Layard] has sent home from the plains of Assyria… excited a livelier interest than anything else I saw in the Museum,” proclaimed an American visitor in the Natchez Courier in Mississippi. “There they are, disinterred from the oblivion of ages, the last survivors, the sole historic monuments of Nineveh, her kings, and her people, and her glory!”
For the first time, too, museumgoers and newspaper readers could examine large samples of the vanished civilization’s writing, which had predated Egyptian hieroglyphs by centuries. Assyrian and Babylonian scribes had ingeniously utilized the thick stem of a reed that grows in the wetlands of the Middle East, the Arundo donax, and split these stalks to create a trapezoidal tip. Then they pressed signs into damp clay and fired the inscribed tablets in a kiln, making them almost indestructible. Over time, scribes also carved the characters into copper and stone.
Cuneiform (the term derives from the Latin cuneus, or “wedge,” referring to the characters’ distinctive shape) lacked the beauty of hieroglyphs. One jokester would say that the signs looked like “what you might get if a flock of birds with obsessive-compulsive disorder took a walk across wet clay.” But the writing system had taken over the ancient world. From Mesopotamia, cuneiform had traveled east to the Kingdom of Elam, on the plains of Persia. The Kingdom of Urartu, southeast of the Black Sea and dominated by the biblical Mount Ararat (where Noah’s ark came to rest after the flood), adopted the writing for its language isolate, as did the Hittite Empire, an Indo-European power in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) that had reached its zenith during the mid-fourteenth century BCE. A simplified form took hold in Ugarit, a prosperous city-state on the Mediterranean coast, and finally in the Persian-speaking Achaemenid Empire, which, under Kings Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, had ruled Central Asia and parts of Africa and Europe from the sixth century to the fourth century BCE.
The wedge-based script endured for some 2,500 years. But papyrus gradually supplanted clay, new scripts made cuneiform obsolete, and the fifteen languages that used it died out. (The last datable cuneiform tablet is an astronomical almanac predicting the appearances of stars, planets, and other heavenly bodies inscribed around 79 CE; it was found in the early 1900s in Southern Mesopotamia.) By the second century CE, knowledge of the phonetic values and meaning of the characters had faded away.
In the 1820s the Englishman Thomas Young and his rival, the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, had solved the riddle of the hieroglyphs. Scholars could now read the love poetry and funerary texts of the ancient Egyptians, study the military campaigns of the pharaohs, and learn how the dwellers along the Nile treated toothaches, performed surgeries, and measured time. With Layard’s finds, the public now clamored for linguists to unravel the mysteries of cuneiform too. Believers were thrilled by the possibility that the royal annals of Nineveh, Nimrud (another destroyed Assyrian capital), and Babylon might corroborate tales from the Old Testament. The Hebrew Prophets had described Assyria’s deportation of the ten Jewish tribes from Samaria in 721 BCE and the siege of Jerusalem twenty years later. Unfortunately, these accounts weren’t corroborated by any other surviving records, which made them suspect to nineteenth-century historians. At a time when atheists, agnostics, and other skeptics were casting doubt on Scripture, the writing on the walls could turn out to be nothing less than proof of the veracity of the word of God.
Cuneiform also dangled the possibility of peering back even further in time. New excavations along the Euphrates River in Southern Mesopotamia had turned up tablets written in cuneiform that appeared to predate the finds at Nineveh by nearly 2,000 years, originating around 2500 BCE. The characters were familiar, but the language seemed different. If this far more ancient script were deciphered, it would offer insights into the very cradle of civilization—a place nearly as remote from the time of Assyria and Babylon as those city-states were from the Victorian era. In this flat, fertile zone humans established the first permanent communities, developed agriculture, scratched out pictures of objects that became writing, and slowly organized themselves into the types of complex hierarchical societies that remain recognizable today. Here also lay the supposed birthplace of Abraham, who had founded a new nation in the land of Canaan around 2100 BCE. Could it truly be possible to read records preserved from this distant time?
After going down blind alleys and stumbling into dead ends for years, Rawlinson and Hincks both claimed by the 1850s to be making great progress understanding the “arrowhead script.” Academics, literary journals, and the public marveled at their apparent insights. But there was a problem. The rival philologists concurred on one thing: the writing of Babylon and Assyria was bewilderingly complex. Its most striking characteristic was what was called polyphony: many characters, they maintained, could be read in six, seven, even eight different ways.
Critics reacted “with shouts of incredulity,” wrote the Oxford historian A. H. Sayce. Under the supposed rules of the Assyrian and Babylonian script, the Dublin University Magazine declared, “[a] modern decipherer could… make out any proposed name whatever from any assigned group of [characters].” Charles Wall, a professor of Hebrew at Trinity College Dublin, analyzed the signs said to make up the name of the Babylonian king who had captured Jerusalem in 597 BCE and marched the Jews into captivity. “[T]he various values capable of being assigned to the eight characters which are supposed to form the name of Nebuchadnezzar,” he had calculated, “are such that the word might be read 393,216 different ways.”
The American newspaper The National Era, founded in 1847 by the abolitionist editor Gamaliel Bailey, suggested that the so-called experts were perpetrating a hoax to cover up their befuddlement: “[I]t has now come to a question whether this system of translations be not altogether arbitrary, or, in a word, no translation at all,” the journal proclaimed. The French Academy in Paris, it reported, “laughs at all decipherments, and treats the so-called translations as pure quackery.”
Some academics were convinced that the writing would never be cracked. History is filled with examples of dead scripts that couldn’t be deciphered, leaving their creators a blank slate. The Phaistos Disc, a fired-clay plate from a Bronze Age palace in Crete, contains forty-five distinct pictograms—a plumed head, a bell, a building shaped like a beehive—in a 242-character text that spirals across the surface like the pattern of a nautilus. The inscription has mystified philologists for more than a century.
At least one hundred would-be decipherers have offered theories about the Indus script, created by a proto-Indo-European civilization in what is now Pakistan and northwest India around 2500 BCE. Some have linked the writing, found on stone seals and pottery, to the still-undeciphered rongorongo runes on Easter Island. The celebrated Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie surmised that the seals were the stamps of high officials. One, he claimed, meant “the agent of the registrar of timber,” another “the agent of irrigated land.” None of this proved to be anything more than wild conjecture, and the writing remains an enigma. Was cuneiform destined for the same fate?
In 1854, a unique opportunity presented itself. Austen Layard’s protégé, Rassam, had discovered a relic buried beneath a temple in what was believed to be the oldest Assyrian capital, Ashur, in the semi-desert forty miles south of Rassam’s hometown of Mosul. Nineteen inches tall and 2.5 inches wide, the octagonal column, known as a “prism,” was inscribed with eight hundred lines of tiny cuneiform characters. It was believed to date to 1100 BCE—around the time that war was raging between the Trojans and the Greeks, and the prophet Samuel led the Israelites to victory against the Philistines. The mystifying cylinder was now in the custody of the British Museum. Rawlinson, who had close ties to the museum, was working on an official translation; the institution planned to publish it as soon as it was done.
As Rawlinson proceeded, a wealthy inventor with a passion for intellectual puzzles burst onto the scene. William Henry Fox Talbot had made his name two decades earlier by devising a method for fixing images from life onto chemically treated, light-sensitive paper. The breakthrough had earned him the title—shared with the Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre—the “father of photography.” Talbot had lately devoted himself to a new enthusiasm: Assyro-Babylonian decipherment. He was pained to think that some of his peers were dismissing it as “quackery.” Nearing sixty, he was determined to put doubts to rest about the passion that was consuming him in semi-retirement.
Talbot dispatched a letter—the letter that would change everything—to the Royal Asiatic Society, one of the leading research institutions of the day, offering to send in his own translation and have a panel of judges compare his with Rawlinson’s. If the versions turned out to be identical or even close, he wrote from his estate, Lacock Abbey, a former nunnery 85 miles west of London that Henry VIII had confiscated and sold to one of Talbot’s ancestors, “it must indicate that they have Truth for their basis.” After a negotiation with Rawlinson and the British Museum, Talbot received a lithograph copy of the inscriptions in January 1857 and got to work.
Six weeks later, Talbot placed six notebooks in an envelope, sealed the package with wax, and dispatched it to the Royal Asiatic Society in Mayfair. To assure the public that he had prepared it “before the appearance of Sir H Rawlinson’s translation,” Talbot gave instructions to the society’s secretary, Edwin Norris, to guard it. “Our next meeting is on the 21st… when I shall have much pleasure in presenting your sealed packet to the meeting of Council,” Norris wrote back on March 13. “I will then lock it up in a strong box, of which I keep the key.”
Eight days later, on March 21, two dozen members of the society converged on 5 New Burlington Street for their regular Saturday conclave. Hansom cabs clattered along the narrow lane, a few blocks east of Grosvenor Square, depositing the men before a three-story town house designed in the early eighteenth century by Nicholas Hawksmoor, a partner of Sir Christopher Wren. A discreet brass nameplate on the front door identified the building as the society’s headquarters. They filed through the spacious interior, checked their topcoats and hats, and made their way to a ground-floor gallery.
Sitting in the room that afternoon was another man whose name would soon be linked to Rawlinson’s and Talbot’s by history: a thirty-one-year-old classicist and adventurer named Jules Oppert. Oppert was a descendant of Samuel Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish banker in Hamburg and the financier of the seventeenth-century Holy Roman emperor Leopold I. After being denied a position at German universities because of institutional antisemitism, Oppert had joined a three-year French archaeological expedition in Babylon and Northern Mesopotamia. Now his was a star on the rise. “His spontaneous wit, his extraordinary memory, and ready erudition… made companionship with him a delight,” gushed a Times correspondent. The charming Parisian boulevardier asked if he could undertake a translation as well. “By affording three independent versions of the same document,” he argued, an agreement among the decipherers could be even more persuasive.
But what about Edward Hincks? The churchman’s fraught relationship with Henry Rawlinson had been marked by backstabbing, filched notebooks, accusations of stolen credit, withering reviews, infuriating discrepancies, and a snub by the British Museum that had cost Hincks a good part of his livelihood. Carrying a perennial chip on his shoulder, Hincks could be cantankerous and sharp-tongued, especially if he felt he wasn’t being treated with sufficient respect. Determined to give the man his due, Edwin Norris recommended that the society dispatch lithographs of the texts at once to the reclusive pastor at his rectory in the village of Killyleagh, south of Belfast. It would be impolite to leave him out.
And so, after a decades-long saga of global adventures, near-death experiences, and eureka moments, the hour of reckoning was at hand. Now Rawlinson, Hincks, Talbot, Oppert, and eager bystanders—philologists, historians, theologians, literary editors, and other enthusiasts from London to Paris to New York—would discover whether the secrets of the most powerful ancient empire could be verifiably understood. And yet what the four would be undertaking wasn’t any ordinary race to the finish line. To convince the public that their translations weren’t hoaxes, they’d all have to be right. Each still hoped to be the most right, but each knew that his competitors couldn’t be far behind, or his brilliance would be laughed off as a scam.
The stakes, they knew, were huge: A positive outcome had the potential not only to silence doubters and immortalize their names in the field of linguistic archaeology but also to confirm their insights into the thoughts, myths, preoccupations, calculations, and achievements of some of the first literate human beings in history. Failure would leave the scholars humiliated before their peers, their government—Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was a principal patron of the Royal Asiatic Society—and a global public. They would have to accept that they’d been fooling themselves for years—in Rawlinson’s case, for decades. Deciphering these characters had become his life.
Now that two more decipherers had been added to the challenge, Norris proposed a deadline for all the submissions two months away, at which point a panel of judges “whose names it was thought would command general respect” would compare the four translations. Norris fixed another meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society for Wednesday, May 20, when the four sealed packets would be opened before witnesses and the “literary inquest” could take place.
The game was on.
]]>
—Barbara Demick, author of Eat the Buddha ]]>