Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon

Dedication

To Roy, for everything

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Empires: Key Events

Rawlinson’s Rock

ONE: Into India

TWO: From Poona to Panwell

THREE: In the Service of the Shah

FOUR: The Cuneiform Conundrum

FIVE: Discovering Darius

SIX: Bewitched by Bisitun

SEVEN: Royal Societies

EIGHT: An Afghan Adventure

NINE: Back to Baghdad

TEN: Introduction to Layard

ELEVEN: Old Persian Published

TWELVE: Nimrud, Niffer and Nineveh

THIRTEEN: An Irish Intruder

FOURTEEN: Battling with Babylonian

FIFTEEN: A Brief Encounter

SIXTEEN: Celebrity

SEVENTEEN: Rivals

EIGHTEEN: Magic at Borsippa

NINETEEN: The Final Test

Digging Down to Babylon

P.S.: Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

Portrait

Life at a Glance

Favourite Reads

About the Book

A Critical Eye

Cover Story

Henry Rawlinson: A Life in Brief

Read On

Have You Read?

If You Loved This, You’ll Like …

Find Out More

Bibliography

Index

Afterword and Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

By the Same Author

List of Illustrations

Recommended Reading

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

Empires: Key Events

The following list gives often approximate dates to show the order of events, mainly occurring in Mesopotamia and Persia:

Dates BC

Dates AD

Rawlinson’s Rock

Henry Rawlinson was hanging by his arms, watched in horror by his two companions. What had stopped him plunging to his death was the grip of his hands on the remaining length of wood that bridged the gap in the ledge – the ledge beneath the great cuneiform inscription cut into the side of a mountain at Bisitun in Persia. Years before, Rawlinson had thought nothing of climbing up and down this perpendicular rock with nobody to help him, defying the intentions of Darius the Great, King of Persia, who more than two thousand years earlier had ordered the cliff face below his monument to be cut back and smoothed to prevent anyone climbing up and vandalizing it. Rawlinson was no longer an agile young soldier, but a thirty-four-year-old diplomat in Baghdad, yet he had lost none of his mountaineering expertise and remained physically fit through horse riding and hunting. He had made the long journey on horseback to Bisitun with ropes, ladders and men to try to copy much more of the inscription, as well as the enormous relief sculpture itself.

It was only for a few moments that Rawlinson clung to the piece of wood across the break in the ledge. More than 200 feet above the boulders strewn at the foot of the mountain, the ledge was for much of its length hardly 2 feet wide, but occasionally it increased to 5 feet. In places it petered out altogether, with a sheer drop to the rocks below. Above rose the huge inscription, surrounding the sculptured scenes of Darius and the rebel leaders he had defeated. Overall, the monument measured nearly 25 feet high and 70 feet wide, with line after line of strange cuneiform signs, the earliest form of writing in the world. Although finely cut, many signs had been virtually obliterated by weathering and so required the closest examination to make an accurate copy.

Ladders had never been used on the ledge before, and Rawlinson found the ones he had brought were too long – when propped against the inscription, the angle was too steep to climb up without toppling over backwards and plunging down the cliff. The only solution was to shorten his ladder, which worked well for the middle of the inscription, but for the upper lines it meant standing on the very top rung, clinging to the rock face with one hand, while struggling to copy the signs with the other, a task that required total concentration and commitment, an unshakeable nerve and the muscle-control of an athlete.

Despite the danger, Rawlinson and his companions made good progress until they reached a point where the ledge was missing. Rawlinson intended laying his ladder flat across the gap, but because he had shortened it, the ladder would only reach the opposite ledge close up to the rock face. Away from the cliff, the gap was wider than the length of the ladder, and barely three out of the four ends could rest flat on the ledge at any one time. Because this makeshift bridge would have tilted over if Rawlinson had stood on it, he decided to turn the ladder on its side, so that one long side firmly spanned the gap and the now-vertical rungs supported the other long side suspended beneath. He began to edge along this bridge, with his feet on the lower side and his hands on the upper side to steady himself, but he had only gone a short distance when the ladder suddenly disintegrated. The rungs had not been securely fixed, and Rawlinson was left hanging by his arms from the upper side of the ladder. Fortunately it did not snap with the sudden jolt, and he was able to inch his way back to his companions, who recovered from their shock and hauled him to comparative safety on the narrow ledge once again.

The next attempt to make a bridge was done with a longer ladder laid flat across the gap, so that Rawlinson could reach the ledge beyond and also stand on this ladder bridge to copy the inscription above. In order to reach the upper lines, there was no choice but to prop a vertical ladder precariously on the rungs of the horizontal ladder bridge. Standing at the top of this ladder to copy the cuneiform signs was the most dangerous task of this perilous project, but Rawlinson achieved it without further accidents. By the end of the work in the intense summer heat of 1844, much of the relief sculptures and inscription had been successfully copied, but one part of the inscription proved impossible to reach and would have to be tackled in a further expedition a few years later.

What Rawlinson was copying at Bisitun was the most important trilingual inscription of the ancient world – the same message written three times, in three different languages and three different types of cuneiform script. The importance of the inscription lay in its considerable length, because although short trilingual inscriptions had already been copied, a much longer example was needed as an aid to the decipherment of cuneiform. Bisitun has the longest trilingual cuneiform inscription known, which eventually provided many clues to unscrambling the various types of cuneiform writing. It proved far more important than Egypt’s Rosetta Stone.

The monument at Bisitun was carved to exalt the triumphs of the Persian king Darius the Great, beginning with the words, ‘I am Darius, the great king, the king of kings, the king of Persia, king of countries, son of Hystaspes, the grandson of Arsames, an Achaemenian’. In the three decades before the inscription was cut, the Persian Empire had expanded rapidly and ruthlessly under King Cyrus the Great, who overwhelmed great tracts of land from the Indus River to the Black Sea. He was killed in battle against a remote tribe east of the Aral Sea in 530 BC, but the war machine continued under his son and successor Cambyses II, who captured Egypt, the greatest prize of all. Here the good fortune of the Achaemenid dynasty failed, as Cambyses’s campaign was beset by problems and his army perished in the desert. When news reached Cambyses that a priest by the name of Gaumata had seized the throne in Persia, he hurriedly left Egypt, only to die on the journey – from blood poisoning caused by accidentally wounding himself with his own sword. This was the year 522 BC, and Darius, who may have been one of the king’s courtiers and a distant relation, seized the initiative by executing Gaumata and declaring himself king. He went on to brutally suppress the many rebellions that erupted throughout his empire.

His triumphs were recorded on the mountainside at Bisitun, forming a landmark along the important caravan route through the Zagros mountains between the two ancient cities of Babylon and Ecbatana. The monument fulfilled an important propaganda role by proclaiming that Darius was the true king of Persia and by acting as a warning to other would-be usurpers of the throne. In the relief sculpture Darius is shown as the tallest and therefore most important figure, with an imposing long rectangular beard, wearing the full, pleated Persian costume, armed with a bow and with his right foot on the helpless body of Gaumata. Nine diminutive rebel leaders stand before Darius, roped together at the neck and with their hands bound behind their backs, and the scene is watched over by the winged figure of the great Persian god Ahuramazda.

The Bisitun inscription was carved entirely in cuneiform, which was not a language but a means of writing using signs made up of combinations of strokes and arrows. The remarkable aspect of the inscription is that Darius invented a simplified form of cuneiform specifically for Old Persian, the formal language of his court that had never before been written down. He even boasted in the inscription that he distributed copies to each province of his empire, a statement that has been verified by duplicate versions found as far afield as Babylon and southern Egypt. That Darius chose to invent a form of cuneiform for writing down the Persian language was not a strange act, because for centuries cuneiform had been the universal writing system for international relations: diplomatic correspondence between the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Palestine, Syria and even Egypt (with its own hieroglyphic writing system) was all written in cuneiform on clay tablets.

Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform was not a single system of writing representing just one language – it was used for numerous languages over 3,000 years and varied from language to language. Three languages were present in the Bisitun inscription – Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Although it was the Babylonian that Rawlinson failed to copy on this occasion, at the risk of his life he had obtained the full Old Persian and Elamite texts: over 650 lines of cuneiform signs written in eight columns. He not only had the dedication and skill to copy the inscription, but he also possessed the linguistic abilities to tackle the decipherment, impelled by an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of history and ancient geography and a driving ambition to be first in anything he undertook.

Having copied parts of the Old Persian inscription on previous occasions, Rawlinson had already made significant progress in the decipherment of that particular script and language and now knew what Darius had written at Bisitun. On his return to Baghdad, Rawlinson forged ahead with unravelling Babylonian, his ambition now further fuelled by competition from an increasing number of rivals. This was a critical time, because the mounds of Mesopotamia, once ancient cities, were just starting to be explored, with exciting discoveries of palaces filled with astonishing finds. Rawlinson was in a prime position to examine the cuneiform inscriptions covering the relief sculptures and colossal statues, as well as the thousands of cuneiform tablets that had belonged to the palace libraries.

Following in Rawlinson’s footsteps, other cuneiform scripts have since been successfully deciphered, and it is now known that cuneiform was used within an area of at least 600,000 square miles for writing documents as diverse as diplomatic correspondence, accounts, mathematics, legal contracts, astronomy and astrology, as well as history, medicine, magic and religion, epic stories and political propaganda. The decipherment of cuneiform literally revealed a completely undiscovered and unsuspected dimension of the ancient world, not only betraying the long-forgotten secrets of cities like Babylon, Nineveh and Nimrud, but other civilizations whose very names had been lost long ago.

One: Into India

A few days before Henry Creswicke Rawlinson’s fifth birthday, he watched the Royal Scots Greys in their magnificent dress uniforms marching out of Bristol. Reputedly the finest cavalry in Europe, though few had seen active service, these troops and their splendid grey horses were heading from their winter quarters to fame and glory at the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated on 18 June 1815. Many of them would not return from the slaughter. The sight of the cavalry parading down the steep hill of Park Street in Bristol was Rawlinson’s earliest distinct memory – and perhaps his first encouragement to be a horseman and a soldier.