Empires of the Plain

HENRY RAWLINSON AND THE LOST

LANGUAGES OF BABYLON

Lesley Adkins

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

8000 | First use of clay tokens
3600 | Cylinder seals appear
3500 | Numerical clay tablets appear
3300–2900 | Proto-cuneiform clay tablets
3100–2700 | Proto-Elamite cuneiform
3000–2300 | Sumerian civilization
2800 | Sumerian is first written down (not technically as cuneiform)
2600 | Possible date for Gilgamesh as king of Uruk
2600 | Sumerian is written using a true cuneiform script
2500–2000 | Old Akkadian cuneiform
2300 | Elamite cuneiform begins
2300 | Akkadian Empire begins under King Sargon
2200 | Akkadian Empire collapses
2000 | Sumerian ceases as an everyday language
2000–1600 | Old Babylonian cuneiform
2000–1500 | Old Assyrian cuneiform
1792–1750 | Hammurabi is king of Babylon
1600–1000 | Middle Babylonian cuneiform
1500–1000 | Middle Assyrian cuneiform
1400 | Babylonian cuneiform becomes the lingua franca
1235 | Assyria sacks Babylon
1115–1077 | Tiglath-Pileser I is king of Assyria: first use of clay prisms
1000–600 | Neo-Assyrian cuneiform
1000–600 | Neo-Babylonian cuneiform
930 | Neo-Assyrian Empire begins
883–859 | Ashurnasirpal II is king of Assyria and builds a palace at Nimrud
878 | Nimrud becomes the capital city of Assyria (moved from Ashur)
858–824 | Shalmaneser III is king of Assyria and builds a new palace at Nimrud
825 | The Black Obelisk is erected at Nimrud by Shalmaneser III
800 | Aramaic language and script begin to spread in Mesopotamia and Persia
753 | Mythical foundation of Rome
713 | Sargon II of Assyria founds Khorsabad as his capital city (moved from Nimrud)
704–681 | Sennacherib is king of Assyria and moves the capital from Khorsabad to Nineveh
668–627 | Ashurbanipal is king of Assyria
612 | Nineveh is sacked: collapse of the Neo-Assyrian Empire
605–562 | Nebuchadnezzar II is king of Babylon
600 BC–AD75 | Late Babylonian cuneiform
559–530 | Cyrus the Great is king of Persia and founder of the Achaemenid dynasty
555–539 | Nabonidus is king of Babylon
530–522 | Cambyses II is king of Persia
522–486 | Darius the Great is king of Persia
520 | The Bisitun monument is started and Old Persian cuneiform is invented
486–465 | Xerxes I is king of Persia
401 | Cyrus the Younger is killed at the battle of Cunaxa
336–331 | Darius III is king of Persia
333 | Alexander the Great of Macedonia defeats Darius III at the battle of Issus
331 | Persepolis is destroyed by Alexander the Great
330 | Babylon is taken by Alexander the Great
330 | Darius III is murdered: end of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, which now comes under Macedonian Greek control
323 | Alexander the Great dies at Babylon
238 | The Parthians (nomads from central Asia) begin to take over the former Persian Empire
141 | Seleucia on the Tigris is taken by the Parthians

Dates AD

75 | The last known use of cuneiform (at Babylon)
224 | Sasanians conquer the Parthian Empire
240 | Shapur I becomes the second ruler of the Sasanian Empire
260 | The Roman emperor Valerian is captured by the Sasanians
594–628 | Khusro II is ruler of the Sasanian Empire
651 | The Sasanian Empire falls to the Arabs
762 | Baghdad is founded by al-Mansur
1258 | Baghdad falls to the Mongols
1299 | Beginning of the Ottoman Empire
1588–1629 | Shah Abbas I is ruler of Persia
1600 | The East India Company is formed
1602 | Cuneiform is observed for the first time at Persepolis
1623 | Shah Abbas I of Persia captures Baghdad
1638 | Baghdad is taken by Murad IV of the Ottoman Empire
1661 | Bombay is ceded to Britain by Portugal
1722 | Afghans besiege Isfahan
1789 | Tehran becomes the capital of Persia
1792 | Edward Hincks is born
1798–1834 | Fath Ali is Shah of Persia
1802 | The first cuneiform decipherment by Grotefend
1810 | Henry Rawlinson is born
1815 | Battle of Waterloo (final defeat of Napoleon)
1817 | Austen Henry Layard is born
1827 | Rawlinson goes to India
1829 | First ascent of Mount Ararat
1833 | Rawlinson leaves India for Persia
1834 | Fath Ali Shah of Persia dies
1838 | Coronation of Queen Victoria
1839 | Layard leaves England for Ceylon
1839–42 | First Anglo-Afghan War
1848 | Revolutions in Europe
1849 | Rawlinson and Layard meet at Nimrud
1849–51 | Rawlinson is in England
1855 | Rawlinson leaves Baghdad for good and returns to England
1857 | The cuneiform competition is held
1859 | Rawlinson goes to Tehran as Envoy
1860 | Rawlinson resigns from his post at Tehran
1862 | Rawlinson marries
1866 | Hincks dies
1872 | Discovery of the Flood tablet
1887 | Discovery of the Amarna Letters
1889 | Rawlinson’s wife dies
1894 | Layard dies
1895 | Rawlinson dies

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.

Nearly five years earlier, despite the chill of gloomy, showery spring weather, Wednesday 11 April 1810 had been a day of rejoicing for Abram and Eliza Rawlinson, when their second son was born at Chadlington in north Oxfordshire. Henry’s birth came at a time of continuing upheaval and worry in Europe. That same month Napoleon’s troops began to annex Holland, and the Emperor himself married Marie-Louise, Archduchess of Austria, while France headed towards deep economic crisis. As the year wore on, the Napoleonic Wars were concentrated in Spain and Portugal, where the British troops fought the French under the command of Wellington. In Britain King George III’s mental condition deteriorated, and the following year he was declared insane; his son the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, ruled in his stead as the Prince Regent.

The Rawlinson family had already grown many branches, but their roots were in Lancashire in northern England – respectable but hardly noteworthy members of the gentry, who owned land mainly in the isolated Furness area. The derivation of the surname remains uncertain, possibly ‘son of Roland’, as in the associated surnames Rowlinson and Rollinson, yet these names occur in Lancashire only from the sixteenth century, decades later than Rawlinson. One of Henry’s ancestors was Daniel Rawlinson, a wealthy London vintner, tea merchant and keeper of the Mitre Tavern in Fenchurch Street, much frequented by his friend and neighbour Samuel Pepys until its destruction in the Great Fire of 1666. Daniel’s son Sir Thomas Rawlinson, who inherited his estates and businesses, was Lord Mayor of London in 1705–6. His own eldest son Thomas developed a passion for books and manuscripts, amassing over 50,000 volumes and 1,000 manuscripts that were eventually sold to settle his debts. This unpalatable task was forced upon his younger brother Richard, himself a book collector and antiquary, who in 1750 set up an endowment for a professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. Now called the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon, its most notable incumbent was J. R. R. Tolkien. Another Anglo-Saxon scholar was Henry’s ancestor Christopher Rawlinson, born in 1677, who is most famous for having prepared and published an Anglo-Saxon edition of King Alfred’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.

Although Henry was not directly descended from Daniel and Christopher, they could all trace their roots back to two brothers, William and John, in the reign of Henry VIII. Earlier still the family tree lacks detail, but ancestors certainly served at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 under Henry V, who awarded the Rawlinson coat-of-arms that has three silver-bladed swords with gold hilts on a sable ground, and for the crest a lower arm sheathed in armour, with the hand grasping a sword. Henry’s own father, Abram Tyzack Rawlinson, was the elder of the twin sons of Henry Rawlinson, a merchant and Member of Parliament for Liverpool who married a Newcastle upon Tyne heiress, Martha Tyzack. The twins’ father died in 1786 when they were nine years old, but they continued to live at Caton near Lancaster, in the ancestral home of Grassyard (now Gresgarth) Hall. Here Abram and his twin Henry Lindow were raised by their mother and subsequently educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, where they concentrated on sporting, not educational attainment. On inheriting Grassyard Hall and its estate, Abram promptly sold up and began to look for an estate ‘in the more civilised part of England’,¹having come to despise northern England ‘for its roughness, its coarseness, and its “savagery”’.² In August 1800 at St George’s Church in Hanover Square, London, he married Eliza Eudocia Albinia Creswicke, who had inherited the enormous sum of £20,000 from her deceased brother Henry.

Six years after his marriage to Eliza, Abram bought a 700-acre agricultural estate at Chadlington, an ancient pre-Domesday village just south of Chipping Norton and 13 miles north-west of Oxford – close to his wife’s former home at Moreton-in-Marsh. The spacious L-shaped manor house at Chadlington, where Henry Creswicke Rawlinson was born and spent his childhood, was built of Cotswold stone and was separated from the medieval church of St Nicholas and the village to the north by a belt of trees, while in front was a lawn terrace, a ha-ha and a hay meadow. The extensive view across the Evenlode Valley first took in clumps of elms and oaks in the meadow, with fields and copses beyond as far as the river, while the extensive Wychwood forest covered the hillside in the distance. It was a perfect place to live.

For much of the day Abram rode from field to field, watching over the running of his largely arable farm, talking to the labourers and discussing business matters with his bailiff. The months of September and October were occupied by shooting and the rest of the autumn and winter by riding with the Duke of Beaufort’s hunt. Another of Abram’s passions was the breeding and training of racehorses, in which he had several successes, and he was also involved in civic duties as a Justice of the Peace and a Deputy-Lieutenant of Oxfordshire.

When Henry was born, he was the seventh, but not the last, of Abram’s children – he and his older brother Abram and sisters Anna, Eudocia, Maria, Georgiana and Caroline were soon joined by four more brothers – Edward (who died only a few months old), George, Richard and, three months after the Battle of Waterloo, another Edward. At a time when a farm labourer was earning less than £30 per year, the income of the Rawlinson family in good years was around £2,000, partly from property Abram had inherited in the West Indies, but primarily from the farm. The ending of the Napoleonic Wars in June 1815, though, witnessed a period of severe agricultural depression in Britain that affected income from the land, and freak weather the following year led to harvest failures, starvation, unemployment, bankruptcies, increased emigration, demonstrations and riots. Although Abram sent his eldest son to Rugby School, he was forced to economize on the education of the other boys during this period of financial uncertainty, and so up to the age of eleven Henry attended a day school at Chadlington and was also educated at home by his mother, learning Latin, English grammar and arithmetic, supplemented by lessons from his sisters’ governesses.

Not only did Henry spend his early years in rural Chadlington, but also in the contrasting environment of the city of Bristol. For over five years, from the time the Royal Scots Greys marched to Waterloo, he often lived with his maternal aunt Anna and her husband Richard Smith, in their elegant terrace house at 38 (now 80) Park Street, and for a short while attended a day school in the city. Richard Smith was a surgeon to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, and he successfully treated his nephew’s serious eye condition that had threatened his vision, so that in the end only his left eye was partially impaired. When Henry was seventeen years old, he was told a story about ‘good Aunt Smith’s marriage’, that she was engaged to Henry Pelly, but he went to sea to make his fortune, and on returning discovered that Anna, like Henry’s own mother, had inherited a fortune. He was too proud to approach her, and because she was annoyed at being ignored, Anna eloped with another admirer, Richard Smith. In view of Henry’s sight being saved, this was a happy outcome, and he himself noted: ‘Who that has seen their perfect content and happiness will ever believe in the inevitable miseries of an elopement.’³

At Bristol, Henry came under the influence of his aunt’s wide literary circle, including Hannah More, a poet and playwright who had achieved great success in London and whose hugely popular religious tracts aimed at the reform of conditions for the poor had led to the founding of the Religious Tract Society in 1799. She was then living at Wrington in Somerset, to the south-west of Bristol, where Henry’s maternal grandmother also had her home. From 1813 his aunt’s closest companion was Mrs Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, an author of popular religious and educational works and a campaigner for the abolition of slavery. She often talked to Henry, who recorded that she ‘took a great interest and taught me scraps of Hebrew’,⁴ which she herself was studying with his aunt.

In January 1821, eight months after the death of his eleven-year-old sister Caroline, Henry was sent to a boarding school at Wrington. He later condemned his two-and-a-half years there as of limited use, because he ‘got well grounded in Latin and Greek. Also in General History but learned no Mathematics’.⁵ Much more influential for him must have been spending nearly every Sunday in the company of Hannah More and her supporters. A few weeks after starting this school, just before Easter, Henry undoubtedly heard about his uncle’s involvement with John Horwood, hanged at Bristol’s New Gaol on Friday 13 April for murdering a woman who had rejected him. By order of the court, Horwood’s body was released to Richard Smith at the Bristol Royal Infirmary for dissection, which was carried out before a large audience and was followed by several lectures. Smith had an account of the trial, execution and dissection bound into a book that was covered by Horwood’s own tanned skin – a macabre volume now held in the Bristol Record Office.

Henry’s older sister Anna Maria died in 1823, and in August the following year he was moved to the much larger Great Ealing School, then considered to be ‘the best private school in England’.⁶ Although now swamped by the suburban spread of London, the village of Ealing was predominantly agricultural, dotted with fashionable country houses. Henry judged his two-and-a-half years at this school to have been crucial, because for the first time he developed a desire to excel in academic studies rather than just in sports. He acquired such a good command of Classical languages that by the time he left he was first in Greek and second in Latin within the entire school, a substantial accomplishment considering his previous piecemeal education. Even so, he had no intention of going to university, as he had long cherished an ambition to seek adventure by entering the army; apart from his nickname of ‘Beagle’, from an early age his brothers and sisters called him ‘the General’.⁷

Although diligent in his school work, Henry was a strong character, not above breaking the rules when it suited him. On one occasion he was caught with another boy, Frank Turner, after they had walked to and from London to see an opera. The penalty for such a premeditated breach of the school’s strict discipline could be harsh – flogging or expulsion. Instead they were set the task of learning by heart, in the original Latin, all 476 lines of the Ars Poetica, written by the Roman poet Horace around 19 BC in the form of a letter giving views on the nature of poetry. After a fortnight, Henry completed the task and recited the lengthy poem without a flaw, but the other boy failed and was expelled.

As might be expected from a family background so steeped in field sports, Henry had a natural talent for all the games played at the school: prisoners’ base, cricket, football and fives. He was exceptionally gifted at fives, a rough ball game that required great physical endurance, using the hands rather than bats or rackets. He spent the school holidays at Chadlington entirely immersed in the outdoor pursuits of hunting, shooting and fishing, and at times was invited by Lord Normanton to attend shooting parties with his father in the woods east of Chadlington that formed part of the Ditchley Park estate. On his first occasion Henry shot and killed every pheasant before Lord Normanton had taken aim, and so he had to be advised of the correct etiquette. He then held back, only to prove himself the best shot after Lord Normanton had fired – in the sporting slang of the time, ‘wiping his lordship’s eye’.⁸

In December 1825, Henry’s older sister Eudocia died at Bristol at the age of twenty-three. Five months later, when he was sixteen years old, Henry left school with a nomination to a cadetship in the East India Company, a position he owed to the influence of his mother’s half-brother, although his formal nominator was William Taylor Money, one of the Company’s directors. Henry was now 6 feet tall (6 inches above the average height at the time) and was ‘broad-chested, strong limbed, with excellent thews and sinews, and at the same time with a steady head, a clear sight, and a nerve that few of his co-mates equalled’.⁹ In fact, with all the qualities of a young soldier.

For the sons of gentry, entering the British army as an officer meant buying a commission and having a private income to supplement the low pay, but this burden could be avoided by entering the army of the East India Company as a cadet and rising through the ranks by promotion – which Henry Rawlinson proposed to do. Granted a charter on the last day of December 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I, the East India Company (more correctly ‘The Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East Indies’) had exclusive rights to trade with the ‘East Indies’, a term covering the entire south-east expanse of Asia. Initially, the Company competed with the Dutch for the Indonesian spice trade, but after the ‘Massacre of Amboyna’ in 1623 when Company merchants and their servants were tortured and executed by the Dutch, the Company turned to the subcontinent of India.

In the mid-eighteenth century the East India Company was still a purely commercial company, importing and exporting goods from its bases at Bombay on the west coast, Madras on the east coast and Calcutta on the Hooghly River in the north-east. So successful was its business that it was able to loan money to the British government, but all this began to change, because conflict with the French and the crumbling of the Mughal Empire provoked the Company’s intervention in political and military struggles in India, initially in the south and east. In 1756 the new nawab (ruler) of Bengal captured Calcutta, where scores of his prisoners suffocated in an airless room, an incident dubbed ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’. In revenge, the Company’s army, led by Robert Clive, recovered Calcutta and took control of the entire province of Bengal. The land tax revenue from this new territory enabled the Company to build up a sophisticated civil service and an extensive army, which gave them the means to conquer further territory and defeat the French.

By this time, many Company employees found themselves able to amass huge fortunes, often by unscrupulous means, while soldiers and officers were eager for further military campaigns because of the resulting opportunities to acquire loot and prize money. These ‘nabobs’ (a corruption of nawab) would retire to Britain with their new wealth, causing much resentment of their lavish lifestyles and their efforts to gain political advancement. Perceived as being answerable only to its shareholders, the Company was the target of several hostile government reports, and with mounting debts, the Company’s Board of Directors was obliged to accept a degree of government control under Acts of Parliament in 1773 and 1784.

The East India Company, also known as John Company, became primarily an administrative rather than a commercial body, acting as an agent of the government and no longer relying on trade, but on the collection of land taxes from the territories it ruled. The Governor of the Bengal Presidency, based at Calcutta, was now also the Governor-General of India, exercising superiority over the Bombay and Madras presidencies. By the time Henry arrived in India, large swathes of the area now divided into India and Pakistan were ruled by the Company through conquest, or indirectly through alliances with hundreds of small states ruled by Indian princes. The Company’s army was 300,000 strong and was split between the three presidencies; it accounted for over three-quarters of the Company’s expenditure. Most of the East India Company troops were native sepoys (from the Persian word sipahi, ‘soldier’) and their officers were mainly British, but all were regarded as inferior to the regular British army, a judgement based on class rather than efficiency.

Having been nominated directly, Henry could have sailed for India immediately, as he was not obliged to attend the Company’s Military Seminary at Addiscombe, near Croydon. Instead, he chose to receive private tuition from Thomas Myers, a mathematician and geographer and formerly a professor at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. Myers was now living and teaching at Blackheath village, a small and affluent suburb just over 5 miles south-east of London. ‘Here’, Henry noted, ‘I learned Hindestanee and Persian, surveying, advance Mathematics, Military drawing, fencing and all other requisites for an Indian soldier’s life.’¹⁰ Numerous languages were spoken throughout India, but it was important to have some knowledge of the Hindustani language (known today as Urdu), because it was the main language of communication between East India Company officials and the natives. It had its origins in the Muslim courts and cities of northern India. For hundreds of years Persian had been the language of administration in India, although by the nineteenth century the version of Persian used in India was very different to the language used in Persia. In Persian, Hindustan meant ‘land of the Hindus’.

Impatient to embark on his new career, Henry regarded the six months spent at Blackheath with Myers as wasted. By the end of 1826 he was ready to leave on the first available ship for India, but was destined to be disappointed, because early in the new year he fell ill of typhus fever during an epidemic at Bristol when he was staying with his aunt and uncle. He was looked after by his beloved sister Maria and for that reason he later remembered this moment as one of his happiest. Spring and summer 1827 were spent in convalescence at Chadlington in the continuous company of his three younger brothers George, Richard and Edward, who were also home from school following a bout of the fever. Henry ordered them to do constant broadsword exercises, while he entertained them with tales of the war with Burma and graphically hacked the trunk and lower branches of a tree near the house in imitation of the terrible wounds he intended inflicting on his barbarian opponents. This was an idyllic time for Henry and his younger brothers, all innocent of the fact that one of them would be dead and the rest grown men before Henry set foot in England again.

After the long months of waiting, the seventeen-year-old nearly missed setting sail for India. Thinking there was time to spare, he had gone to see one of his father’s horses win in the races at Cheltenham, but a messenger rushed up to him with the news that the ship was about to leave London Docks for Portsmouth. Hurrying back to London, Henry managed to get kitted out and rapidly purchased around one hundred books. Even without the necessity of buying a commission, it was still an expensive undertaking to send Henry as a cadet to India, as his passage alone cost over £100, while his father spent a further £500 on his kit, and he himself would only be paid from his arrival at Bombay. Henry managed to reach the south coast just before the 644-ton chartered ship Neptune set sail for Bombay from Portsmouth harbour on 6 July 1827. An old East Indiaman vessel built in 1815, it was captained by its owner John Cumberlege.

The Neptune followed the fastest route available, around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, but even so the journey lasted four months. From the outset Henry was desperately homesick, missing above all else his two surviving sisters, Maria and Georgiana. Having promised Maria that he would keep a journal to send home, he often recorded his adolescent feelings of misery and anxiety in a style that was intimate, spontaneous, often poetic and lacking the polished structure and formality of his later writing. He began the journal on his very first day: ‘Shook hands with my brother Abram and stept into the boat at Portsmouth which was about to bear me from my native shore, to exchange the society of parents, friends, brothers and sisters whom I love with an affection never to be shaken for a life of misery and sorrow among strangers and barbarians. During my crossing over to the ship the beautiful blue waves, glittering beneath a July sun and placid as the calm I once enjoyed, lulled my feelings into something like repose, and I reached the ship Neptune in a species of mental stupefaction … The calling of the sea makes any head so giddy that I can hardly tell what I am about, and my fellow passengers so disturb my attention that it is only when I sit by myself on the poop and view the moon beams glancing on the silvery sea that I can believe I am wretched, miserable, alone, in one word that I am an exile.’¹¹

Three days later, he felt no better: ‘It is now Saturday July 7th 6 o’clock in the evening and I am sitting alone in my cabin writing this commencement to my journal. Maria, if your bright blue eyes should ever chance to rest on these promised pages, know that I am now thinking of your lovely face which, perchance, I never may behold again, and I swear that I may be destined to pass the remainder of my days in banishment and misery. Whenever the natural instability of my disposition may bring me to engage in a quarrel, I will think of your angelic form, and I shall be the coolest of the cool, and though you seem to think that I shall never remember you, be informed that not a day or an hour will ever elapse without your sweet face being presented to my memory, and whatever may be my fate, prosperous or unhappy, good or bad, I never never will forget you. I think I have been writing a great deal of nonsense which can be of no interest to anyone, but I was alone, I was unhappy, the bitterness of my feelings seemed to overpower my understanding, and I have shed tears of the bitterest anguish. We are now sailing down the channel at the rate of 9 knots an hour, but every league I proceed adds but another link to the chain of my misery, for I am sailing farther and farther away from everything which I love in this world. I intend commencing hard fagging [hard work] as soon as this cabin, which I have with another man of the same following, is in tolerable order … now for a tune on my flute and then a walk upon deck.’¹²

The next day, Sunday, Henry wrote: ‘I am in rather better spirits today, I am come down to my cabin to proceed with my journal. We are sailing down the channel at a tolerable pace and they say today we shall pass Land’s End.’¹³ Although less homesick, he was awkward and unhappy in his relationships with the other passengers, being constrained by etiquette in approaching them. He felt especially ignored by Sir John Malcolm, who was on his way to Bombay to take up the governorship: ‘Sir John now speaks to every other passenger on board except me, and as I cannot get introduced to him I see no probability of our ever conversing.’¹⁴ Misery again overwhelmed Henry: ‘I am sure I shall hate India and [wish] that I was once more in England – could I but once more see Georgiana and Maria, there is no situation however menial that I feel at present I had not rather undergo in my native land than be a private among strangers and savages … the rest of my life will be merely a mechanical employment of the body … I cannot write without becoming unhappy so I had better conclude for the present and read Scott’s Life of Napoleon.’¹⁵

The advice given in The Cadet’s Guide to India was to pass the time usefully and ‘to devote two or three hours in the morning to the study of the Hindoostan language; then let reading, or drawing, fill up the space after dinner, after which he [the cadet] will be at leisure and like to walk the quarter-deck with his companions, or partake of their rational sports’.¹⁶ Henry began to follow this advice, as seen in his journal entry for 9 July: ‘It has been a very uncomfortable day and I have been all day in my cabin reading, fagging and playing the flute. Begin to get rather more comfortable, though I cannot as yet reflect with any comfort on my future destiny. Until I become tolerably habituated to banishment, I should deem it best to think as little as possible of my former happiness … Maria and Georgiana – I still think of you, and whatever pain the thought may cost me, the recollection of my home and infancy shall never be forgotten.’¹⁷

Henry’s ambitions began to stir when he was finally noticed: ‘Sir John drank wine with me at dinner … it will be no very difficult thing to bring myself into his notice as most of my fellow passengers are sad stupes. He scribbles poetry so I’ll try an ode … We have been crossing the Bay of Biscay these last two days and I have hitherto escaped sickness. I think myself pretty safe now for the rest of my voyage.’¹⁸ But for 11 July he recorded: ‘Rather stormy and very heavy sea which made me a little sick but nothing to signify – have been talking to Sir John Malcolm – shall never persuade myself to cringe and toad-eat him as some of the fellows do … indeed I cannot think he likes it as he is a very clever man himself and often says that everyone’s promotion must depend on his own talents and he will never give a place to any one unfit for it, however strongly recommended – can get no one to join me in my Hindoostanee as they are all only just beginning. Played some whist … and by a continued run of good cards cleaned them out of 14 shillings. I have now, Maria, written one sheet of my promised journal and will send it by the first conveyance.’¹⁹

The next day a severe storm threatened: ‘We have now passed the Bay of Biscay and they say the coast of Spain was to be seen … After dinner there was a tolerable commotion as the Captain … prognosticated a hurricane. The sails were all taken down or furled, the decks were cleared and we all waited in anxious suspense. The stormy Petrel skimmed along the waves, the sky became covered with lurid and spiral clouds and the waves rose portentously – however like the fable of the mountain and the mouse, while we were thus all raised to the highest pitch of expectation, a few gulls huddled fitfully among the shrouds, a few large heavy drops descended upon the deck and it was gone. The waves again subsided, the sails were unfurled and we soon left far behind us the boisterous and uneasy waters of the Bay of Biscay. This is my first adventure and I flatter myself I have described it very prettily.’²⁰

A week into the voyage brought better weather, but Henry’s mood remained melancholy: ‘This has been the first warm day. The evening was delightful – the blue expanse of heaven where the stars glittered with ethereal splendour was lighted occasionally by gleaming meteors, and the silent and placid water over which we glided appeared frequently ignited. The luminous nature of the phosphorus sometimes sparkling and sometimes winding in wreaths of transient light around the vessel occasioned this extraordinary appearance … had I been in the company of Georgiana or Maria, I had [would have] been happy – but real pure happiness I have lost for at least 10 years if not for ever. In future every pleasure I enjoy must be embittered with the reflexions that I have no one who loves me to share it with me, and what are all the delights and enjoyments of the body compared with pure genuine and unsophisticated love!’²¹

The next day, Henry suffered his first proper bout of seasickness: ‘Very high sea and the waves were really for some time beautiful, but the ship rolled so, that I was for the first time sea sick and so was deprived of the pleasure of viewing them – however after I had slept for an hour, eaten a hearty dinner and drank lots of wine I was quite well.’²² He went on to regret the lack of women on board – these was only one (Sir John’s daughter), and she was married. Gradually, Henry became more confident with the people on board and professed admiration for Sir John, who ‘must be an exceedingly clever person, and he seems possessed of such a fund of anecdotes that though he has been unremittingly employed in telling stories ever since he came on board, he still goes on at such a rate as to keep the whole table in a continual roar in which he himself always heartily joins’.²³ Many of his tales were of Persian history and literature, which inspired Henry to resume studying Persian when he reached India. Sir John also believed it his duty to urge all the cadets on board to strive for the greatest success, encouraging them throughout the journey by lending them books and giving them tasks to perform, such as copying out his manuscripts.

At last Henry was enjoying himself: ‘After tea we have plenty of amusements beginning with fencing and singlestick – afterwards dancing and music and finishing with chess, cards, backgammon &c. We have a little band on board belonging to the ship consisting of clarionets, fifes, trumpet, violin and drum, which they play reels, waltzes, the quadrilles as much as we like. Sir John goes on laughing, talking and story telling as much as ever … I have not yet given way to my temper at all, notwithstanding I have had many provocations.’²⁴ Henry also recorded that he was now ‘quite an expert sailor, having been up higher [in the rigging] than any of the Passengers except McDougal, who is a regular dab at it. All laugh at him about his foolhardiness, but I must own that I admire it.’²⁵ His own bravado and agility would later serve him well when climbing the rock face of Bisitun.

What Henry regretted was his tendency to drink too much wine, and after one particularly heavy session drinking punch, he felt quite unwell and was ‘determined to be abstemious’,²⁶ though soon after he was drinking his brother Abram’s health on his birthday ‘in a bumper of claret’.²⁷ He might try to be abstemious, but he could not avoid wine and beer altogether, for the water on board was so bad that Henry refused to drink it. Personal hygiene must also have been sparing, to judge from the advice given to cadets: ‘Washing of linen is not permitted at sea, as the fresh water cannot be spared for it. Hence it will be proper for the Cadet not to change his linen oftener than is absolutely necessary to his own comfort and decent appearance before other persons.’²⁸ The cadet manual set great store by proper appearance, but said nothing about smell, although now they were in a warm climate, the cadets could bathe in a sail filled with sea water. On one occasion in a dead calm, they ignored the advice of the Neptune’s crew concerning sharks and dived into the sea for a swim, until a cry of ‘War Shark’ caused a frantic rush for the ship, with Henry being first to haul himself up on a rope. The crew caught the huge shark, and Henry recorded that ‘they then cut a slice out of his Cheek and gave us shark cutlets for breakfast, which I beg to state were extremely tasty’.²⁹

After only a fortnight into the voyage, Henry was already overcoming his homesickness, as he admitted to Maria: ‘this sheet is written in a different tone from the last, but my dearest Maria, though I am now tolerably comfortable, I still and ever shall think of my absent sisters with the deepest affection and hoping they will not forget me’.³⁰ Towards the end of August, he published his first issue of Herald of the Deep, a weekly newspaper, copied out by hand, for the amusement of the passengers, in which he included anonymously poems that he had written. Amusements aside, Henry could not avoid the reality that he was travelling to India to join the army, whose discipline was made apparent towards the end of the journey when a private of the Dragoons was court-martialled for impudence to his corporal and received a sentence of one hundred lashes. ‘The flagillators would not cut it in tight,’ Henry noted, ‘so that the fellow got tolerably well off, never uttering a sound during the process – the punishment was nothing to what I had been led to expect.’³¹

On Friday 26 October 1827, Bombay came into view, and from now on Henry regarded the date of 26 October as very special, ‘my fatal day during all the early part of my life – especially in cycles of 6 years’.³² As the ship approached the coast of India and the view of Bombay grew steadily clearer, Henry wrote an excited journal entry, the last of the voyage: ‘I cannot be melancholy now, but Oh! How I wish you were here to enjoy my pleasure with me – the picture is beautiful – islands, mountains, boats, ships, tents, blacks, whites, browns, greens, Oh it is lovely after 4 months of sea and sky.’³³

Two: From Poona to Panwell

The low-lying fortified island of Bombay (now called Mumbai) was known as Bom Bahia (‘good bay’) when it was a Portuguese possession. In 1661 it became British when ceded to Charles II as part of the dowry of his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, and seven years later it was leased to the East India Company for an annual rent of £10. The city with its sheltered harbour developed rapidly as more islands were reclaimed from the marshland, and apart from the fort and esplanade, there was an extensive native town. Over two decades before Henry Rawlinson’s arrival, a fire broke out in the fort, which led to the destruction of many houses, but allowed improved rebuilding along wider streets.

Rawlinson initially attended cadet classes, but was soon attached as ensign, the lowest-ranking officer, to the 2nd European Infantry Regiment, known as the Bombay Buffs. His first military duty was Saturday 1 December 1827, when he attended the early morning muster of the regiment. The next day he agreed to accompany a shooting party, explaining to his sisters that Sundays were not regarded as a holy day of rest: ‘This day is considered here as no more than any other day with respect to shooting, playing billiards &c. Indeed it is generally pitched upon us an excursion day; notwithstanding how much your ideas of propriety may be shocked, you must not consider us at anything particular in us rising at 2 in the morning, and having sent our servants on before with lots of tuck, in starting with guns, powder and shot on a shooting excursion to Kourlee in Salsette.’¹ They arrived just as it was light enough to begin shooting, and, wrote Rawlinson, ‘No sooner had we began to beat than four quails got up, at which of course I immediately blazed away, and running to pick up my game was rather astounded at perceiving the effect of my shott in a group of beaters … lying prostrate and bleeding on the ground – they had just left the road to begin beating, and being hidden from my sight by a thin bush received the whole contents of my charge to their no slight confusion and dismay – only one was hurt at all seriously, who had about a dozen shot a few inches in his legs and face – however he was speedily reconciled to his condition by a douceur of 2 rupees.’²

This was the first time Rawlinson had seen anything of the Indian countryside, which to him appeared ‘extremely prepossessing. The woods were filled with birds of the brightest colours and butterflies of a magnitude which [would] rather surprise Georgiana.’³ Wildlife abounded, and conservation was never an issue, only the sport. The day’s shooting was fairly successful, and Rawlinson told his sisters: ‘The following items compose my days sport – 6 beaters, more or less damaged, 3 black pigeons, one splendid kingfisher, one muena (a most beautiful blue and scarlet bird), one hoopooe, 2 quails both lost in the long grass, one hawk, one rook, one gull, one paddy bird and eight sand snipers – we were much disappointed at not meeting with any partridges … We had lots of beer and returned home very merry at about 9 oclock at night racing our buggies all the way.’⁴ At the age of seventeen he found himself in an exotic world where he wielded power even as the lowest-ranking officer and, compared to the indigenous population, immense riches – for an immature young man it was intoxicating.

Military activities for Rawlinson in India were not onerous, though he studied with a native language teacher (a munshi). The day after his excursion he declared himself ‘too lazy to do much with my moonshee’.⁵ Instead, he went pigeon shooting with his friends Hogg and Philipps: ‘I backed every shot of mine against theirs at a rupee a shot and after about two hours shooting I came off a winner of fifteen rupees … I rode my horse in the evening being the first time for this last week as he has been in physick – saw a good many cronies on the Esplanade and dealt out a little nonsense to my friend Mrs Hull, by far the prettiest lady there.’⁶

Next occurred an event that threatened his future in the army: ‘Met Brown who asked me to dine with him at seven which I accordingly did, found a party of 8 jolly fellows assembled at dinner and spent the pleasantest evening I ever did since I have been here – lots of Claret, Beer, Punch – and sallying out for a lark at about 10 oclock, commenced levelling all the tents in the vicinity – it was glorious fun, but I am afraid we shall get into a terrible row about it. I am always exceedingly sorry after such parties that I have made myself such a fool, yet I have not sufficient resolution to resist the temptation of attending them.’⁷ The following day an official complaint was made of their behaviour, and Rawlinson was dismayed at the possible outcome: ‘there seems every probability of our being brought to a Court Martial and dismissed the service. I am really quite disgusted with the world now – if I am now really cashiered for such a trifling offence, I shall immediately tell the fellows who prosecute that they are no gentlemen and if they shoot me they may – if I survive I shall enter into the King of Persia’s services and try if I cannot make some figure in the world there. India is too narrow a field for my ambition – everything here goes by interest and it is impossible to get into notice unless patronized by some of the Grandees. I cannot bear the idea of creeping unknown through the world.’⁸ To his relief, no more was heard of the court martial and he vowed never to get drunk again.

By now Rawlinson was hoping to receive letters from home, but was bitterly disappointed when the Upton Castle came in. ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ he complained, ‘I suppose I am now entirely forgotten by all my friends in England … I have [made] minute enquiries and find that there is no letter, packet or parcel of any description, come out for me by the Upton Castle, which has not only surprised but greatly annoyed me as I did not expect to be forgotten quite so soon as it appears I am.’⁹

The following Sunday he marched to church with the regiment, but was not impressed with the service: ‘Carr the clergyman gave us a terrible long sermon about Serjeant Tedman who has lately “gone out”. The deaths here are really quite awful.’¹⁰ Among Europeans in India the death rate was especially high, from causes such as malaria, cholera, dysentery, smallpox, dog bites, snakes and scorpions. Because of these threats, Rawlinson considered a new career in England: ‘I am frequently resolved to adopt an entirely new course of life, to give up all the future prospect of glory and delight, which I have so often and so fondly pictured to my ardent mind, and turn religious. I used at one time certainly to be really pious and in a fit state to be called into the presence of my maker, but I was then a child, I was then a stranger to the temptations of the world and had then never experienced what I am afraid I shall never have sufficient strength and resolution to withstand.’¹¹ He had little regard for Carr, adding: ‘I am not as yet sufficiently under the influence of the Spirit of God to relish three hours prosing controversy on disputed texts … I hope and trust I may in time acquire the power of abstracting my mind in prayer which for any length of time, I find at present particularly difficult.’¹² The subject of religion was a recurring topic in Rawlinson’s early journals, and it obviously bothered him that, as a Christian, his beliefs were not as strong as he wished.

He was now hard at work studying Hindustani and in mid-December wrote: ‘I was obliged to go to Fort George to meet my new Moonshee at 10 oclock. I like him much better than the last; tho’ he is a little high and connected, he is certainly very clever and I stand a much greater chance of improving under his tuition.’¹³ Three days later he was less happy, writing that he ‘waited for my moonshee till 10 oclock – blew him up sky high for not coming earlier – he tells me I shall not pass unless I fagg very hard – now as it is impossible to fagg even tolerably hard in this climate, I shall give up all ideas of passing this examination and not try until the next.’¹⁴

A mood of depression set in, fuelled by unhappiness at receiving no word from England on the arrival of two more ships, especially as all the other officers received letters, ‘which makes my disappointment more cutting’.¹⁵ On Sunday 16 December, Rawlinson marched to church early in the morning with his regiment, but was suffering from a bad cold and sore throat, so did not go out again afterwards: ‘I have been very low all day. I neither like the climate, country, inhabitants or profession and shall be most heartily glad to get back to England again. If an officer has neither a regimental, nor general staff appointment his life here must be the idlest, and least profitable, occupation in the World – far from being able to lay by money, his pay will be inadequate to his expenses, especially if at a dear station like Bombay – my mind is I think extremely fickle. I am sometimes elated with ideas of wealth, glory and happiness, and again if anything should happen to depress my spirits (such as those bitter disappointments in not hearing from England) I can see nothing before me but want, penury and distress. Oh money, money, how vain and yet how indispensable thou art in a great measure to human happiness.’¹⁶

To add to his mood, on Monday he received ‘another blowing up … for not attending parade at gunfire, for which however I had never received any orders … I am in future to attend all parades’.¹⁷ He had, though, decided to take his Hindustani examination in the new year after all, even though it was difficult to work: ‘Fag a little now and then with my moonshee; I am fully aware of the necessity of the most assiduous study, if I hope to be ready for the next examination, yet such is the relaxing nature of the climate, that it is with the utmost difficulty I can bring myself to get even a page of the Bagh & Buhar [a story written to teach students Hindustani] ready for my moonshee – there is consequently very little if any chance of my passing in January … I really must fagg … these lazy habits will not do. I must study 4 hours a day at least … I have not been out to a party this age – it is really very stupid here and if I can but pass next month, get posted to a regiment and start off up the country, why I may perhaps be a little more comfortable.’¹⁸ He had now been in Bombay just fifty-two days.

Rawlinson still indulged in shooting, going to dinner, drinking tea, writing poetry and a play, and singing at parties, even though he claimed not to have attended any party recently. On 22 December his first poem was published in the Bombay Courier. Eleven verses long and entitled On the first sight of land, the poem appeared ‘with a most insulting Editor’s note’.¹⁹ Wisely, Rawlinson used a pseudonym, because reaction was not favourable: ‘With respect to the poetry in the Courier, there are various opinions concerning it, and as it is considered by the majority to be trash, I have not ventured to avow the authorship except to a few of my particular cronies.’²⁰ Further disappointment occurred when another ship came in with no mail, but Rawlinson was now somewhat happier. On 24 December he noted: ‘The parade bugle sounded at gunfire and we marched out to a grand Brigade parade – there were four regiments consisting altogether of about 3000 men … I know enough of the drill now to manoeuvre with any company and got through the parade without a single blunder.’²¹

On Christmas Day, he admitted: ‘I begin to like my situation a great deal better than I have done as I am getting better acquainted with my fellow officers. I used to fancy that they treated me particularly coldly, which I supposed had arisen from the row I had got into about the tents … I have in fact hardly any doubt that this was the case. I am fully resolved now never to indulge in future at any of the mess parties so as to get in the least inebriated. I do it chiefly out of my love of fun and jollity and certainly not out of any fondness for liquor, as with the exception of a few wines I absolutely hate.’²²

In late January 1828 he was working hard for his examination, as he explained to Maria in his journal: ‘I … really do begin to have some hopes of success in the examination which takes place on Febry 15. The Regiment is to start for Deesa on the 5th of February (your birthday). I have not made up my mind as yet to what course I shall adopt with respect to stopping in Bombay after the Corps is gone, but rather think I shall apply for leave to pitch my tent on the Esplanade and do nothing until the Examinations … My Monshees encourage me and tell me that there is a very good chance of my passing, but I am by no means confident of any knowledge as I find myself woefully deficient in the Colloquial examination which we have to undergo.’²³ Due to a scarcity of officers, Rawlinson’s application to remain in Bombay and work for his examination in two weeks’ time was refused, but when he found himself called as a witness in a court case at Bombay, he transferred to the 7th Native Infantry Regiment: ‘I am at present living in a tent in the seventh lines, that is with the officers of the Seventh Reg., with which corps I am now doing duty. My old Corps the Europeans left Bombay for Deesa about a week ago and I got myself removed from them to the seventh in order to wait for the examination.’²⁴

On Saturday 16 February, the examination over, Rawlinson wrote: ‘I was called up the very first which is a great disadvantage, and my examination did not last more than half an hour during which time however they kept me pretty well close at it – Courts Martial to be translated, General Orders to be read off in Hindoostanee, Bagh & Buhar, Idiomatical Questions and Conversations by a Moonshee (who by the bye happened rather fortunately to be my own private Moonshee) formed the Ordeal – and as I got through them all pretty tolerably, if I have not passed I am close upon it.’²⁵ Should he fail, Rawlinson was determined not to give up: ‘I shall go up again in May when I think I shall be pretty sure of passing – if they give me an affirmative I shall immediately begin to study Persian in readiness for the Russian Invasion.’²⁶

‘My old Moonshee has just entered with the news – I have not passed,’ continued Rawlinson’s journal, ‘I was within an inch of passing and in fact ought to have passed. There are five members, two of whom voted for me and 3 against – my translations both from Hindostanee into English and from English into Hindoostanee were actually the best of the whole lot.’²⁷ One reason for failure was not being sufficiently acquainted with idiomatic expressions, or ‘the manners of the natives’,²⁸ but the examiners also thought Rawlinson too young and immature. Had he been in India two or three months longer, they would have passed him, even without doing as well. Sensitive to failure, Rawlinson wrote that ‘they mentioned all this in the report which was sent to the Commander in Chief, but he did not think fit to publish it in General Orders, as recommended by the Committee, which I consider a great shame. There were only 4 passed out of 10. I consider myself perfectly sure of it next May – and as I am subpoened to Hockin’s trial at the end of April, it will be no inconvenience to me stopping here.’²⁹ He was heartened by the support of the governor Sir John Malcolm: ‘I went out to breakfast with him and he talked to me a good deal about it, advising to fag hard to be ready for the next time.’³⁰

Rawlinson also continued his Classical studies, as he reminisced years later: ‘I kept up my Latin and Greek and translated Greek Chorusses for the Bombay Gazette … I was a fair classic in those days – and when an Inscription was wanted I remember being asked to write it for the Municipality of Bombay.’³¹ Indulging as well his love of writing, he was thrilled to be published again, as he noted in mid-March: ‘I have again appeared in print – my muse this time has taken a classical flight and I have translated a Chorus from Aeschylus. I had the satisfaction to hear one day at dinner a Captain of the 7th – who is considered a clever man, say in reading it – “This is very very good only a little too long to be read”. This is the delight of anonymous publication – that single sentence of accidental praise was worth to me a month of labour.’³²

He was less happy with news about Maria that he heard when dining with an officer newly arrived from Bristol: ‘he is a relation of the Brook Smiths and knows Abram a little, he said he had heard young Brooks was to be married and was very anxious to know who the lady was to be’.³³ Rawlinson knew it was Maria: ‘I wish I could hear something from you – it really does seem very odd to be hearing news of my own family from strangers. He and young Brown are the only people whom I have heard speak of young Brooke and they both call him a most insufferable dandy. I myself really think that you are a great deal too good for him.’³⁴He continued bitterly: ‘I have now given up all hopes of hearing from you at all, I have been waiting nearly 5 months now in expectation of a letter. I had fondly hoped I had friends in England to whom I was so dear as they are and ever will be to me – what can be the reason for your not writing yourself? I cannot understand it at all – it is now nearly 9 months since I left England and I have not heard a syllable from any of you – what changes and revolutions may have happened since that time! I rather expect you and Georgiana are both married. I feel a presentiment that you will be sooner or later Mrs B Smith.’³⁵ His presentiment was right, although Maria did not marry Brooke Smith for another four years.

At the beginning of May, Rawlinson sat the Hindustani examination again and wrote excitedly in his journal: ‘I have just passed an Examination in Hindoostanee and am reported qualified to act as Interpreter in that language.’³⁶ In Bombay he had also developed a particular passion for reading about history and was buying increasing numbers of books. ‘I seldom went to bed,’ he commented, ‘without being conscious that I had gained some information in the course of the day of which I had been ignorant when I arose – there is something extremely gratifying in being conscious of continual progression in knowledge.’³⁷ His thirst for learning led him into debt: ‘The Borkas are a class of men who go about selling mostly books, and of them I bought most of mine, especially oriental works. The only time I ever got into trouble for debt was with one of these Borkas, a pock marked brute with big turban. I had a row with him and refused to pay him, and he had me arrested. I was on the point of starting up the country to Ahmedabad and Guzerat, and I owed him 75 Rupees – but with expenses the sum amounted to double and then other claims came in upon me.’³⁸ He was loaned £50 to help settle his debts, and towards the end of his life noted that apart from a further £50 borrowed from his father, he never owed money again.

On 1 June 1828, Rawlinson travelled over 300 miles north to join his new regiment, the 1st Grenadier Native Infantry, at Ahmedabad, the capital city of Gujarat that had been founded in the fifteenth century. Here he remained desperately unhappy that he had heard nothing from his family, noting sadly in his journal on 6 July: ‘On this day twelvemonth I bade adieu to the fair, the lovely shores of Albion. I have since never passed a day, I might almost say an hour, without thinking of my early friends, of sisters who in days of yore protested that they loved me – but mark their conduct – they have let me languish on a foreign shore, unnoticed and uncheered by one single line or token of recollection for a long lonely year. They have forgotten me and I will forget them … I am resolved. I will forget you all, until I again believe you worthy of my regard. I am wretched, I am miserable, but I swear – never to think on you again … henceforward my thoughts shall be of myself, my mind shall rest upon the future. I have set the stamp of everlasting misery on my brow – but I swear, I swear, I swear would that I would die.’³⁹

Rather than admit he was miserable, Rawlinson resorted to pleasure and neglected his studies, about which he was later ashamed: ‘my days were spent in gambling, my nights in drinking – the billiard table and the Mess room were my only supports.’⁴⁰ It was not until 21 October that he received ‘a very nice long letter from Abram’,⁴¹ but still nothing from his sisters. Three days later came the long-awaited news from Maria, and with great relief Rawlinson wrote: ‘now indeed that I have received your journal I feel a pleasure in sitting down in the evening and recording my adventures (such as they are)’.⁴² What he did put in his journal was the routine of his life at Ahmedabad: ‘Saturday [25 October]. The days all pass much in the same manner. Parade at sunrise, they last until 7 – breakfast at 8 – study more or less till 11 – write, play billiards, go out visiting, idle or sleep until ½ past 2, dress for dinner at 3 – pool or billiards afterward, then out riding until dark, and in the evening sometimes cards, but generally we retire quietly to our respective domiciles and pass the evening as best we may, not but that it is far from unusual to have a bit of supper swilled down with a pint or two … and sometimes too we go so far as to indulge in a bit of a spree in the bazaar afterwards – this you must allow is a most monstrous course of life even when compared with yours at Chadlington – I am really quite sick of it.’⁴³

From now on he was more relaxed and less than a week later he fell in love with a young widow, Mrs Doherty: ‘I mustered courage to go up and have a chat – she was rather entertaining, and I of course was immediately over head and ears in love – this seldom lasts more than a day or two.’⁴⁴ After only two days he commented: ‘it cannot be said that I am at all seriously committed, but really a pretty woman is such a scarcity here that we transform her into an angel.’⁴⁵ Over the following days the eighteen-year-old ensign did his utmost to accept invitations where she would be present and was extremely happy when ‘she evidently showed a decided preference for my conversation above the others’.⁴⁶ By late November he admitted that he was totally lovesick. He obviously considered marrying her, but his regiment soon left for Bombay, and she later married a judge.

The regiment was back in Bombay on 1 December, and by now Rawlinson had received two more family letters – one from Georgiana and the other from his younger brother George. He resumed his studies, concentrating on Marathi, the language of the Maharastra state in which Bombay is situated. The following year, 1829, he ‘worked like a horse at languages’,⁴⁷ then passed his Marathi examination, and in July gained the post of Quartermaster, Paymaster and Interpreter with his regiment. He resumed a vigorous social life, being ‘Steward of the Balls, Manager of the theatre, head of the Billiard & Racquet Rooms’.⁴⁸ In addition, he was involved in hunting, shooting and horseracing and was constantly trying to impress the women in Bombay, where ‘I do flatter myself that I cut no very disreputable figure’.⁴⁹ In private, though, Rawlinson noted that ‘I was educating myself by an extensive course of reading … From this time dates my passion for books.’⁵⁰

In 1830 the regiment moved to Poona (now known as Pune) in the Western Ghats mountain chain, a march of nearly 100 miles south-eastwards from Bombay. Poona acted as a refuge from the summer heat for those in Bombay, with an extensive military camp about 2 miles from the town. Here Rawlinson remained for over three years, another militarily inactive period, but one that continued to be highly enjoyable. Years later he wrote that this period was ‘the most enjoyable of my life. I had excellent health, was in the heyday of youth, tremendous spirits, was celebrated in all athletic amusements, riding, shooting and especially hunting, and with the whole world before me.’⁵¹ He was so busy that he did not resume his journal until 11 April 1831, his twenty-first birthday, evidently irritated that nobody had marked the occasion, which recalled ‘more forcibly to my mind the loss I experienced in being thus far absent from the bosom of my family’.⁵² In years to come he kept returning on his birthday to this same journal entry in order to add comments on the progress in his life.

At Poona, Rawlinson’s maxim was: ‘“never engage in anything unless there is every chance of becoming first in it” – if I did not think I could be first I gave it up.’⁵³ He was so good at sports that nobody would accept his challenge to compete for the considerable stake of £100 in a combined competition of ‘running, jumping, quoits, racquets, billiards, pigeon-shooting, pig-sticking, steeple-chasing, chess, and games of skill at cards’.⁵⁴ In November 1831 at Newmarket in England, George Osbaldeston undertook a momentous horseracing match, completing 200 miles in less than eight hours using twenty-eight horses. It received massive attention, and the officers in Poona debated how they could emulate this success. It was Rawlinson who accepted a wager to race from Poona to Panwell, the mainland port of Bombay. The distance was 72 miles and the stake was £100, with a forfeit of 4 rupees to be paid for every minute over the four hours and the same amount to be paid to the rider for every minute under that time. ‘The general opinion,’ Rawlinson noted, ‘was that the match would not be won.’⁵⁵

At quarter-past-five in the morning of 22 May 1832, the 6-foot tall, 12-stone, twenty-two-year-old rider set off, dressed in ‘hunting costume, jockey cap, thick ticking jacket, with a watch sewn into the waistband, samberskin breeches, and a pair of easy old boots’.⁵⁶ He encountered numerous setbacks, from being forced to scramble with his horse over the backs of bullocks that were obstructing his way to descending the precipitous Ghats with his horse out of control. He changed horses ten times, on the third occasion being forced to abandon the exhausted animal and run uphill for a quarter of a mile to meet his next mount, because it had been stationed in the wrong place. Thousands of villagers lined the last three miles, and to the incredulity of the umpires he rode into the compound of Panwell tavern after a ride of just three hours and seven minutes, soundly winning the wager. Riding back to Poona in the afternoon with the same horses and in almost the same time, he ‘appeared at a party the same evening apparently as fresh as a lark but this was swagger!’⁵⁷

So remarkable was Rawlinson’s achievement that it was reported in newspapers in both India and England, yet in spite of these diversions he still found time for study and wrote in his journal: ‘I read a great deal, and passed a first-class examination in Persian, and in fact I believe I was a general favourite.’⁵⁸

Three: In the Service of the Shah

Having arrived in Bombay as a raw and immature East India Company cadet in 1827, on his ‘fatal day’ of 26 October, Rawlinson left India exactly six years later, a more mature and experienced officer, especially competent in the Hindustani, Marathi and Persian languages. His destination was Persia, known today as Iran.

The East India Company’s interest in Persia was originally commercial, but over the previous three decades every diplomatic effort had been made to maintain the country’s independence so that it could not be used as a base by Russia, Afghanistan or France for an invasion of British India, a threat that was felt to be very real. Fath Ali Shah, the ruler of Persia (‘Shah’ being the Persian title given to the country’s king), had made alliances with Britain and then France, but turned to Britain again in 1809. The following year British officers began to train the Shah’s army and accompany it into battle, but once peace was established between Britain and Russia in 1813 and Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo two years later, this military presence was largely withdrawn.

By the early 1830s, Russian influence in Tehran began to alarm the British to such a degree that the Company formed a new military detachment, drawn from all over India. Under the command of the forty-four-year-old Cornishman Colonel William Pasmore of the Bengal Native Infantry, the detachment consisted of native troops, eight officers, fourteen sergeants and an assistant apothecary. Rawlinson was chosen because of his proficiency in Persian, a language he was inspired to pursue by Sir John Malcolm, who had died of influenza in England a few months earlier. That inspiration caused ‘the most momentous change in his whole life’¹ and would have a profound impact on the study of ancient cuneiform writing.

The military detachment sailed from Bombay on 26 October 1833 and completed the 1,700-mile journey to Bushire in early November. Known today as Bushehr, this Persian Gulf port is situated at the northernmost end of a narrow promontory, and the East India Company set up a factory there in 1763, although it was of little use as a port because ships had to drop anchor 2 to 3 miles offshore and transfer cargo in small boats. Rawlinson and his fellow officers were heading for Tehran and so needed to cross the coastal strip and make their way through the formidable Zagros mountains, rising to over 13,000 feet in height. News that the narrow mountain passes were already blocked with deep snow forced them to remain nearly three months in Bushire, considered ‘a most wretched place’,² but their stay did at least coincide with the cooler weather and enabled sufficient baggage animals to be organized for the long trek ahead.

At the beginning of February 1834 Colonel Pasmore at last ordered his men to leave Bushire, and after a climb of 120 miles up through the mountains they reached Shiraz. This city is at an altitude of 5,000 feet and it became the capital of the province of Fars in the late seventh century, after the Arab conquest. From the thirteenth century it was renowned as a literary centre, especially because of two poets who were born and buried there: Sa’di (died 1292) and Háfez (died 1390). To the north of Shiraz the mountains rise steeply, and deep snow in the passes brought a halt to their journey.

Rawlinson made use of his enforced stay at Shiraz by immediately riding out to the ruins of Persepolis, some 30 miles away. Known now as Takht-i Jamshid (Throne of Jamshid) after a mythical king of Persia, Persepolis lies on the edge of a wide plain. It was Darius the Great, soon after his accession as King of Persia in 522 BC, who decided to build an impressive new capital city there, which he called ‘Parsa’. The city had monumental palace buildings constructed on a huge artificial stone terrace overshadowed by a fortified hill. The ancient Greek name of Persepolis may be a contraction of ‘Persai polis’ (meaning ‘the city in Persis’), or it can be translated as ‘destroyer of cities’, a more apt phrase for the site because nearly two centuries later, in 331 BC, it was looted and burned to the ground by Alexander the Great and his troops who had set out from Greece to conquer the Persian Empire. The destroyed city was abandoned and never rebuilt, but great stone columns, gateways, staircases and impressive relief sculptures remained standing, and Rawlinson spent many hours examining these ruins and copied some of the cuneiform inscriptions – strange writing with abstract, geometric signs. Though this site had been visited and recorded by many European travellers, he had not encountered such inscriptions before and was fascinated.

Still unable to move on to Tehran, Rawlinson made a further trip with two other officers and his head groom back into the mountains, this time to explore the deserted ruins of Bishapur – ‘The Beautiful [City of] Shapur’ – a city that had been founded nearly eight centuries after Persepolis. It took its name from the second Sasanian ruler of Persia, Shapur I, who ruled for over three decades from AD 240. He belonged to the Sasanian (or Sassanian) dynasty that was founded by Ardashir, supposedly a descendant of the legendary ruler Sasan. Shapur himself was particularly successful in battle against the powerful Roman Empire, defeating two of its emperors and even capturing Valerian in AD 260 – the only time a Roman emperor was taken prisoner. At Bishapur Shapur’s victories were commemorated in three sculptured reliefs on the rock faces of a river gorge, showing the king on horseback trampling and receiving in submission his Roman enemies, while beyond the gorge at the foot of a mountain he built the royal city of Bishapur.

Rawlinson had been warned that ‘a notorious Robber chief had possession of the whole country and it was as much as my life was worth to venture into his lands. I also learnt from my servant who had been in his service, that Bakir Khan the son was in reality a very good fellow, smoking his segar [cigar], and taking his glass of wine as kindly as any English gentleman – he was also a very good rider and first rate shot … I took the precaution therefore before starting to take a few presents, on the chance of meeting Bakir Khan, and above all I put aside a few bottles of sherry and brandy.’³

After some hours sketching ruins and copying inscriptions, they rode on a few miles and agreed to climb a steep mountain to look for the famous Cave of Shapur with its colossal statue of Shapur I, once over 20 feet high, but now collapsed. ‘Up to this time,’ Rawlinson recorded, ‘we had not seen a single soul in any part of the ruins and so hoped to escape all observation of the robber tribes who lived near.’⁴ Leaving their horses with the groom, they began the difficult climb in the sweltering heat. Although they were all capable, resourceful soldiers, only Rawlinson had the nerve and climbing ability to reach the cave: ‘The ascent of the mountain was exceedingly difficult, and my two companions … gave in before reaching the summit. I went on, found the cave and carved my name on the statue.’⁵ Some years later he was told that ‘some travellers, penetrating to the statue and imagining they were the first Europeans to visit the spot, were misdeceived and astonished by finding it’.⁶

For two hours Rawlinson stayed in the cave, while his companions returned to camp, so when he returned to his groom, he was alarmed to be surrounded by Persian horsemen, followers of Bakir Khan, who was himself visible in the distance. In order to avert a potentially dangerous situation, Rawlinson rode straight up to him and greeted him in Persian. Although he was reproached for coming to the area like a spy, a friendly conversation followed, ending with Bakir Khan asking for something to drink. Rawlinson’s groom filled up a drinking cup with half a bottle of brandy, which Bakir proceeded to drink rather rapidly until he staggered about and collapsed. Immediately Bakir’s men aimed their long matchlock guns at Rawlinson, who seized the cup and drank the remaining liquid in case it was thought to be poisoned. While they hesitated to fire, Bakir Khan showed signs of recovery and asked: ‘Sahib, what was that liquid fire you gave me? It was very good but awfully strong. I thought it was sherry, but it was the father of all sherries, where did it come from?’⁷ Rawlinson diplomatically replied that he had given him brandy, the strongest of all liquors, having heard he could drink anything. Before leaving, Bakir promised ‘to take care of any travellers who might bring letters from me, and I believe he acted up to this promise [and] always behaved well to Englishmen’.⁸ Rawlinson was saddened a few years later when Bakir Khan was killed by government forces ‘for some banditti proceedings’.⁹

With weather conditions improving, the detachment set off from Shiraz towards the end of February and managed to travel 250 miles until hampered by deep snow in the mountain passes beyond Isfahan. From the late sixteenth century, Isfahan had been transformed into one of the most magnificent cities of Persia by Shah Abbas I (ruler from 1588 to 1629), who made it his capital. Its splendour was short-lived, as the Afghans invaded Persia and besieged the city in 1722, massacring most of its inhabitants, and it never recovered its former glory. After a week, the British detachment advanced as far as Qum (pronounced Ghom in Persian), one of the most sacred places of pilgrimage for the Shi’ite Muslims.

In AD 817, Fatima al-Ma’suma died on a journey to her brother, Imam Ali Reza, and was buried at Qum, where her shrine became a site of pilgrimage. Imam Ali Reza died a year later and was buried at Messed in north-east Persia, the country’s holiest city. Both the shrine of Imam Reza and that of Fatima were restored some eight hundred years later by Shah Abbas I and, not long before Rawlinson’s visit, the reigning Shah, Fath Ali, had repaired Fatima’s shrine and embellished the dome with gilding. The shrine was strictly barred to non-believers, but Rawlinson was determined to be the first European to gain entry, even though it was ‘whispered that instant death would be the portion of the audacious infidel who should be found intruding into its hallowed precincts’.¹⁰ Over fifty years later, he wrote that ‘I visited the sacred shrine in the disguise of a pilgrim, a visit of great danger which has never been repeated by any one up to the present time’.¹¹ Thrilled to be inside, he was nearly detected by turning his back on the holy spot as he viewed everything around him, but realized his error in time – and came out alive.

The detachment continued northwards from Qum for another 90 miles and finally reached Tehran in mid-March. The city lies in the foothills of the Elburz mountains, a snowy backdrop dominated by the dormant volcano Damavand, which is the highest mountain in Persia at 18,600 feet. It was only a modest trading town when it became the capital city of Persia in 1789, but over half a century later Tehran’s population had risen to around 50,000. A near-contemporary description of the city was uncomplimentary, reckoning that the ‘streets swarm in the day time with beggars from every region in Asia, their attire as diversified as their extraction … The Bazaars of Teheran are constructed in the form of long, covered corridors, lighted from above. On either side of the interior, are ranges of shops, occupied by dealers and working people, each quietly plying his avocation … The Bazaar is both a market and a factory … The streets of Teheran have never been cleaned since the place was built … The public ways are infested with the remains of camels, apes, mules, horses, dogs and cats; and here they lie, until some starving dog strips the bones of their flesh, and leaves them to the gradual corrosion of time’.¹² The detachment remained at Tehran for several months ‘studying Persian and becoming acquainted with the country’.¹³

To emphasize his importance, Fath Ali Shah, the second ruler of the Qajar dynasty, kept the officers of the detachment waiting a few weeks before receiving them, and Rawlinson’s own observations of the occasion indicate his opinion of the absurd pomp and rigid etiquette. In order to impress the Persians, Rawlinson and the other officers formed a glittering and gaudy spectacle as they set out on their horses from the residence of the British Envoy in the south of the city. ‘A party of two-and-twenty Europeans thus brilliantly attired,’ Rawlinson noted, ‘is a spectacle to which the eyes of the Teheranees are but little accustomed.’¹⁴ Riding through the narrow streets and bazaars, they reached the Golestan Palace, dismounted and were led through courtyards and gloomy passages to the splendid Golestan Garden. The Shah was in an adjoining audience room, ‘but, it being utterly inconsistent with etiquette that we should proceed thither by the direct route, we were paraded half round the enclosure before being permitted to approach the throne’.¹⁵ Seated on a throne in one corner of the room overlooking the garden, the Shah was surrounded by sword and shield bearers and miscellaneous princes, who were attired in expensive robes and equipped with jewel-encrusted weapons. The throne, Rawlinson observed, ‘was shaped much like a large high-backed old-fashioned easy chair, and, though made of gold, and studded throughout with emeralds and rubies, appeared a most strange ungainly piece of furniture’.¹⁶

This display of wealth contrasted with the simplicity of the room and with the appearance of the elderly Shah (then sixty-four years of age). Although portrayed in numerous flattering paintings gorgeously attired and with a beard down to his waist, Rawlinson thought him a person of ‘a plain and almost mean appearance. The old man’s beard is still of prodigious length, but its claim to supremacy in this respect may, I think, be fairly questioned. His face is dark and wrinkled; his teeth have all fallen out from age; and he retains not a trace of that manly beauty which is said to have distinguished him in former days, and which characterizes even now the pictures which are daily taken of him.’¹⁷ In a polite conversation lasting just fifteen minutes, the Shah expressed the value he placed on the detachment, and they were then dismissed with the greatest honour.

As his son Crown Prince Abbas Mirza had died the year before after a long illness, Fath Ali now appointed as his successor his twenty-six-year-old grandson Muhammed Mirza (‘Mirza’ being a Persian title meaning ‘born of a prince’, given to those of good birth), who was one of the twenty-six sons of Abbas Mirza. This announcement dashed the hopes of Fath Ali’s other sons and grandsons, who, according to Rawlinson, numbered nearly three thousand, ‘and every Persian in consequence felt a pride in being the subject of such a king. The greatest misfortune, indeed, that can befall a man in Persia is to be childless. When a chief’s “hearthstone,” as it was said, “was dark,” he lost all respect.’¹⁸ Summoned from his military campaigns beyond the north-eastern border of Persia, Muhammed Mirza lifted his siege of the Afghan city of Herat and entered Tehran in a grand procession on 14 June. He was proclaimed Crown Prince straightaway, and the British detachment was transferred to him as a bodyguard, accompanying him at his investiture a few days later.

Because the city of Tabriz, capital of the province of Azerbaijan, was also the official residence of the heir-apparent, Muhammed Mirza was sent there as governor by the Shah. Situated in the far north-west of Persia, this was strategically important territory as it bordered Russia and the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Tabriz had been captured by Russia as recently as 1827, after provocation by Persia, although it was restored the following year. The city was located in a valley at the foot of the mountains, and had over the centuries been battered by invading armies, epidemics and devastating, frequent earthquakes, as well as bitterly cold winters with heavy snowfall and hot, dry summers. Accompanied by Colonel Pasmore’s British detachment, Muhammed and the Persian army from his Herat campaign set off from Tehran on 4 July after delays finding sufficient transport animals for the journey of over 300 miles.

Most of the British officers suffered from illness on the march, including Rawlinson who had to be carried for much of the way in a palanquin (a covered litter). ‘Prostrated by fever and ague’,¹⁹ he was most likely suffering from malaria, although it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that the cause of the illness was found to be a microscopic parasite transmitted through mosquito bites. The symptoms of malaria include violent shivering, followed by a fever with very high temperature, then profuse sweating, as well as headaches and vomiting, culminating in a period of fatigue. Such symptoms caused Rawlinson to spend several days in bed when they reached their destination towards the end of July.

Throughout August and September 1834 the British officers relentlessly trained the Persian troops, stationed on the disputed frontier region. In mid-October Rawlinson and two colleagues obtained a few days’ leave and headed across the border towards Bayazit, a town of about three thousand Armenian inhabitants, 20 miles south-west of Mount Ararat, where a Turkish force was encamped. In the nearby village of Ahura, on the south-eastern slope of Mount Ararat, a legend persisted that a shepherd had once seen a great wooden ship on their mountain, which was believed to be none other than Noah’s Ark of the Old Testament book of Genesis. Today three main controversies still surround Noah’s Ark. Where did it land? Could it have survived to the present day? And did it ever exist? As related in Genesis, God decided to destroy everything living on earth with a catastrophic flood because wickedness among people was so great, but Noah, a righteous man, was told to build an ark (a box-like boat) to protect himself, his family and a pair of every bird and animal. Of enormous size (300 cubits long, equivalent to 450 feet), the ark was equipped with three decks and took over one hundred years to build. The flood, caused by relentless rainfall for forty days and forty nights, did not begin to subside until after a hundred and fifty days, and the tops of mountains only began to be visible after a further two months.

Genesis, originally written in Hebrew, does not say that the ark came to rest on a specific peak, but on the ‘mountains of Ararat’, and for believers in the literal story of the ark, the imposing Mount Ararat has been favoured as the resting place since medieval times. The mountain actually has two peaks 7 miles apart, the highest being Great Ararat, which rises to 16,945 feet and has a permanent ice cap and glaciers. It was not originally known as Ararat, but as Masis to the Armenians and Agri Dag in Turkish. The reference in Genesis is probably to Urartu, a very powerful state in the Lake Van area in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, extending into what is now Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The name Urartu is found in the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria, its great rival to the south, although the people of Urartu actually called their own land Bianili.

From the mid-nineteenth century there have been over forty claims of spotting the ark on Mount Ararat, at times seen embedded in ice or submerged in a lake, since when about 140 expeditions have attempted to find the ark. Ancient wood can survive for thousands of years in very dry or in waterlogged conditions, but Mount Ararat is a large and inhospitable dormant volcano, although no known eruptions have occurred in historical times. There is no evidence of marine deposits from a flood, and the volcano has probably erupted within the last 10,000 years, since any Biblical flood. The ice cap, hundreds of feet thick, is thought to be the most likely hiding place for the ark, and yet the movement of the glaciers would pulverize a wooden vessel.

The summit of Mount Ararat was reached for the first time, on his third attempt, in October 1829 by a German professor of natural philosophy, Friedrich Parrot, only five years before Rawlinson’s visit. Rawlinson was unaware of Parrot’s success, and although he believed in the ark story, he was less certain that Ararat was its resting place. Nevertheless, it was an irresistible, formidable challenge: ‘I should enter on the attempt with sanguine expectations, and if ever I have an opportunity for putting my wishes in execution during my residence in the North of Persia, I shall certainly avail myself of it in the middle of August as the most favourable time for the ascent.’²⁰ The opportunity never arose, but years later the search for Noah’s Ark was overshadowed by the decipherment of similar flood stories from earlier civilizations written in cuneiform on clay tablets.

On 10 November news reached the British camp of the sudden and unexpected death three weeks earlier of Fath Ali Shah at Isfahan and his burial at Qum in the shrine of Fatima. With the Persian troops, Rawlinson marched back to Tabriz, where the Scottish General Henry Lindesay-Bethune had just arrived to take over from Colonel Pasmore. Lindesay-Bethune was an impressive figure ‘six foot eight inches in height (without his shoes), and thus realized, in the minds of the Persians, their ideas of the old heroes of romance’.²¹ Fath Ali may have been poisoned, and the delay in Muhammed Mirza hearing about the death had allowed his position as heir to the throne to be disputed by other claimants. Muhammed was unable to advance on Tehran in force because his Persian troops had not been paid for four years, and so Russia and Britain agreed to ensure his succession, with the British Envoy providing funds for the soldiers’ pay. A few days later Lindesay-Bethune set off with the troops for Tehran and on the way forced the surrender of the army of one of Muhammed’s uncles who had proclaimed himself Shah. Tehran was reached in late December, and on 2 January 1835 Muhammed, as the new Shah, entered the city. Lindesay-Bethune marched the Persian troops to Isfahan and Shiraz to put down further resistance, after which Muhammed Shah had various uncles, brothers and nephews exiled, imprisoned or blinded.

In mid-January Rawlinson and some of his fellow officers met Muhammed Shah for the first time in the main reception room of the palace, but Rawlinson’s verdict, recorded in his private journal, was damning: ‘[he] has little appearance of Eastern sovereignty about him. Instead of a fine, bold, manly bearing, with the gleam of intellect upon his brow … he possesses a gross, unwieldy person, a thick, rapid, unimpressive utterance, an unmeaning countenance, and a general bearing more clownish and commonplace than is often met with even in the middle ranks of Persian society. There is in his appearance no spark of grace, dignity, or intelligence.’²²

By contrast, the palace reception room was considered by Rawlinson to be ‘probably the most splendid apartment in Persia’,²³ the focus being the magnificent seventeenth-century Peacock Throne with its 26,000 emeralds, rubies, diamonds and pearls. Commissioned by the Mughal Emperor of India, Shah Jehan, for his Red Fort at Delhi, it had been brought back to Persia by Nadir Shah in 1739 as part of the treasure he had looted from the city after massacring some 20,000 of its citizens. Muhammed Shah, who had chosen not to sit on the throne but on more comfortable velvet cushions, firmly announced his wish ‘to have an army of 100,000 disciplined troops, and – Inshallah – to revive the days of Nadir in Iran. Otherwise the conversation related chiefly to the wonders of European science – balloons, steam guns, Herschel’s telescope, and the subject of aerolites were successively touched upon.’²⁴

The coronation of the new Shah took place on the last day of January, and those attending included ‘the chief executioner and his establishment, who, with their very red robes and turbans and axes of office, presented a very imposing appearance’.²⁵ Rawlinson had not changed his opinion of the Shah, who ‘waddled in his usual undignified manner across the chamber to the foot of the throne, clambered up the steps, and sat himself down at the further end, leaning against the richly carved marble back. His appearance was rendered more ludicrous on this occasion than I ever previously beheld it, by his being obliged to keep one hand up at his head in order to preserve the ponderous top-heavy crown, which he wore, in its place … It appeared to be made of white cloth, and owed its weight, of course, to the vast quantity of jewels with which it was adorned.’²⁶

Rawlinson, newly promoted to Lieutenant, evidently impressed the Shah, however, as he was chosen to raise and train troops from Kurdish tribes in the province of Kermanshah for the Governor Bahram Mirza, who was the Shah’s own brother. Accompanied by one other European – Sergeant George Page – Rawlinson left Tehran on 10 April for the town of Kermanshah (today renamed Bakhtaran), 300 miles to the south-west in the Zagros mountains. The following day was his twenty-fifth birthday and he made an extremely brief journal entry: ‘The year has evolved and brought no material change, either in my fortune or my feelings.’²⁷

Kermanshah was on the main trade route between Tehran and Baghdad, in a region rich in ancient rock-cut reliefs and inscriptions of varying dates. Just over halfway there, Rawlinson passed the large town of Hamadan at the foot of Mount Elwand (or Alvand), once the ancient city of Ecbatana, which was founded as the capital of the empire of the Medes in the eighth century BC. At an altitude of 5,900 feet in the mountains, Ecbatana controlled the major east – west route from the plains of Mesopotamia to the central Iranian plateau. Famous in ancient times for its vast wealth and architectural splendour, Ecbatana became part of the Persian Empire when it was conquered in 550 BC by King Cyrus the Great, who used it as his summer capital. Passing through this area so rich in the remains of ancient and largely unknown civilizations, Rawlinson was in his element, appealing as it did to his flair for exploration and linguistics, and his growing interest in ancient history.

A detour was made to find cuneiform inscriptions Rawlinson had heard about a few miles away along a wooded gorge of Mount Elwand, aware that other travellers had seen them but unaware that copies had been done as recently as 1827 and subsequently given to Friedrich Edward Schulz. A German professor of philosophy, Schulz had himself been recording inscriptions and other antiquities for the French government in the Lake Van area, until he was murdered by Kurds in 1829. His papers passed to Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin, an Oriental scholar in Paris who had been a great friend of Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs, until politics tore them apart. Although Saint-Martin intended to publish these inscriptions from Mount Elwand, he died of cholera at the age of forty-one in 1832, only months after Champollion’s death. Saint-Martin’s papers passed to Eugène Burnouf, another Oriental scholar in Paris who had replaced Champollion as a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and became Professor of Sanskrit at the College of France. While Rawlinson was copying the Elwand inscriptions, Burnouf was preparing them for publication.

In the Elwand Gorge, two adjacent square panels of trilingual cuneiform inscriptions, one slightly higher than the other, had been cut into the steep rock face, praising Ahuramazda (Persian for ‘Great God’) and recording the lineages and prowess of the Persian king Darius the Great in one panel, and his successor Xerxes I in the other. The site became known as Ganj Nameh (Tales of a Treasure) in the belief that the strange inscriptions described the location of a large treasure hidden during the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Rawlinson spent some time carefully copying these inscriptions, unaware that the real treasure they contained were clues to the decipherment of cuneiform, because they were trilingual inscriptions; like those at Persepolis and Bisitun, they had been carved in the three ancient languages of Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Rawlinson later recorded that the ‘first materials which I submitted to analysis were the sculptured tablets of Hamadán [Mount Elwand], carefully and accurately copied by myself upon the spot, and I afterwards found that I had thus, by a singular accident, selected the most favourable inscriptions of the class which existed in all Persia for resolving the difficulties of an unknown character’.²⁸

Four: The Cuneiform Conundrum

Before the decipherment of cuneiform, stories in the Bible and those of Greek and Roman writers were the only written record of the ancient history of the Middle East. Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, is an explanation of the origins of heaven and earth, the very name Genesis being derived from the ancient Greek word for ‘origins’. It relates that after the Flood, Noah, his wife, his sons Shem, Ham and Japeth and their wives were the only people in the world. God spoke to Noah and his sons: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth’.¹ Noah died at the ripe old age of 950, and his sons had numerous descendants. Nimrod, a great-grandson of Noah, was supposedly the initial ruler of Shinar and Assyria, which made up Mesopotamia, stretching from the Taurus mountains of Anatolia southwards to the Persian Gulf and encompassing much of modern Iraq. Shinar was the Hebrew name for Babylonia (southern Mesopotamia), while Assyria was the name given to northern Mesopotamia. The name Mesopotamia is itself an ancient Greek term, ‘between the rivers’, referring to the Tigris and Euphrates. Genesis records Nimrod as the founder of the first cities after the Flood, including Babel, Nineveh and Calah – better known today as Babylon, Nineveh and Nimrud.

As all the people of the world descended from Noah and his sons, only one language should have been spoken, and so the author of Genesis tried to explain that the confusion of many languages was yet another punishment from God. Of those people who had migrated to Shinar, Genesis records: ‘they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and bake them thoroughly.” And they used brick instead of stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top reaches to the heavens; and let us make a name for ourselves, so that we are not scattered over the face of the whole earth.” And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people speaking the same language. This is the beginning of what they will do and nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them all over the earth, and they left off building the city. That is why its name was Babel – because the LORD there confused the language of all the earth’.² This story refers to the building of the fabled city of Babylon that grew up alongside the Euphrates, 55 miles south of the later city of Baghdad. Although supposedly one of the first cities after the Flood, archaeological excavation has shown that Babylon was not one of Mesopotamia’s oldest cities, but that it only developed around 1800 BC and that there are many older cities along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.

The main natural resources of ancient Mesopotamia were clay, silt and mud, as well as bitumen, which seeped to the surface in many areas. Buildings were constructed primarily of bricks manufactured by mixing together mud, straw and water and shaped in wooden moulds, after which they were left to dry hard in the sun, and only rarely baked in a kiln. Mortar was unknown, but mud bricks were bonded together with mud and also bitumen. Bricks were entirely coated with bitumen as a protection against damp when it was necessary to waterproof the foundations of buildings, because such bricks rapidly revert to mud when wet. Even with normal wear and tear, mud bricks gradually turn to dust, so that collapsed buildings would form a layer of soil over which new buildings were constructed. With the accumulation of rubbish and decomposed bricks, mounds (called tells) were formed and have become a distinctive feature of the Mesopotamian landscape.

The Genesis story relates that at Babylon a mud-brick tower – the Tower of Babel – was constructed with the intention of reaching heaven, which incurred the displeasure of God. The story may have been inspired by Babylon’s immense ziggurat known as Etemenanki (‘Foundation of Heaven and Earth’). Like other ziggurats, Etemenanki was a solid stepped pyramid with a monumental exterior staircase and a temple on top. The reason for God’s displeasure is not given in Genesis, but instead of sending another flood, the punishment this time was to disperse the inhabitants of Babylon far and wide and to ‘confuse their language’,³ so that they spoke different languages and could no longer communicate and cooperate. Because the similar-sounding Hebrew word balal means ‘confuse’ (and therefore a confusion of languages, or babble), the Genesis writer believed that this was why the city was called Babel, but it was actually due to the much earlier name of Babilu, which means ‘gate of the god’. Later on, the ancient Greeks called the city Babylon. The origin of the city’s name had nothing to do with why many languages are spoken throughout the world, but referred to the impressive gates of this fortified city.

The lack of stone and the abundance of mud not only determined building methods in Mesopotamia, but also its very writing system. With no other suitable material for writing, the ubiquitous mud was used to make rectangular, square or occasionally oval tablets. From a ball of damp clay, tablets were flattened into a shape that fitted in the hand, though some could be far larger, and they generally had one convex and one flat side. Writing on the tablet was done with a special implement (stylus) when the clay was still damp, first on the flat side, then the convex side. Styli have not survived as they were made from perishable materials, primarily reeds that grew abundantly in the marshlands: the Babylonian word for a stylus was qan tuppi, ‘tablet-reed’. Writing was not normally done by incising or scoring lines with the stylus, but by making impressions in the damp clay of the tablet, and so it was easier to make straight rather than curved lines. Because one end of the reed stylus was cut at an angle, signs were made up of lines or strokes that had one end wider than the other, displaying a characteristic wedge or tapering shape. The system of writing is known today by the clumsy word ‘cuneiform’, which is literally ‘of wedge-shaped form’, from the Latin word cuneus, meaning wedge. Mistakes were erased by smoothing the clay surface with the stylus; after writing, tablets were left to dry hard in the sun, or occasionally fired in a kiln.

Cuneiform was not a language, but a script or writing system that was used to convey several different spoken languages. In Egypt, hieroglyphic writing was used only to write down the ancient Egyptian language, so hieroglyphs tend to be considered as both a writing system and the ancient language, but cuneiform is more like the later Roman script, which was first used at Rome to write down the Latin language. With modifications, this Roman script has continued to be a writing system for over two thousand years and is used today to write down numerous languages worldwide, such as English, German and Spanish.

Cuneiform is similar to the Roman script in that it too was used for a long period to write down different languages, evolving to suit each language and also evolving over time. For around three thousand years it was the writing system that recorded the many languages spoken across an extensive area, from Iraq to Syria, central Turkey, Palestine and south-west Iran. These languages included Sumerian, Akkadian, Urartian, Elamite and Old Persian. The last known use of cuneiform was in AD 75, on a clay tablet about astronomy found at Babylon. Because the system of cuneiform varied from language to language and changed over time, decipherers had a twofold problem: working out the particular writing system and translating the language in question. With the resulting tangle of multiple languages and varying versions of cuneiform script, decipherment could never be a single landmark achievement. The prize was not the knowledge of a single ancient civilization, but the knowledge of many ancient cultures, and the challenge was too much work for one person – too much for a single lifetime. Those attempting the decipherment of cuneiform had no concept of the enormous task ahead.

The very first writing evolved in Mesopotamia from the need of accountants and bureaucrats to keep a visual check of goods entering and leaving temples and palaces. Small clay tokens dating from 8000 BC appear to have been an early tally system and a precursor of writing. They have various geometric shapes, such as spheres, cones and discs, perhaps representing different commodities. In the mid-fourth millennium BC, tokens were sometimes placed inside hollow clay balls or envelopes and were sealed with cylinder seals.

Used in Mesopotamia for over three thousand years, cylinder seals were invented around 3600 BC as an aid to bureaucracy in the vast city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. These seals are small cylinders, usually made of imported stone and carved with intricate designs, especially scenes of everyday life. When rolled across damp clay, they left a continuous impression, and both seals and clay sealings have been found. As well as on clay balls, seals were used on clay tablets and on lumps of clay attached to cords securing door-bolts, bags, sacks, boxes, jars and other containers, as a deterrent against theft. The sealed clay balls may have accompanied deliveries of merchandise (acting as bills of lading), whose contents could be checked by breaking open the balls to reveal the tokens. Some balls have marks on the outside that seem to indicate the number and type of tokens they contained, but this information could also be recorded on flat clay tablets, and the earliest ones – termed numerical tablets – date from 3500 BC and had impressions of tokens and cylinder seals similar to those on the clay balls that they replaced.

The most primitive form of recognizable writing was a book-keeping system done on clay tablets, with simple signs for numbers and pictorial signs (pictographs) to represent what was being counted or listed, such as oxen or barley. At this stage, the wedge-shaped stylus producing distinctive ‘cuneiform’ writing had not come into use. Instead, signs were written with a stylus that had a circular end to make impressions representing numbers and a pointed end to draw linear pictorial signs, and this writing is termed ‘proto-cuneiform’. Tablets with a proto-cuneiform script date to 3300–2900 BC. Since signs were written on damp clay, scribes could only produce stylized sketches rather than the realistic images used in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Two wavy lines, for example, represented water, while the outline of a head of an ox represented an ox. Pictorial signs were also used as ideograms, to represent an associated idea. For example, a picture of a mouth might also mean ‘to speak’. About 1,200 signs are known, but many are not understood today. On the clay tablets, groups of proto-cuneiform signs were written relatively randomly within square or rectangular boxes. The boxes themselves were arranged in horizontal rows that were read from top to bottom and in a right to left direction.

The amount of information that could be expressed by this sort of writing was severely limited – most proto-cuneiform tablets were concerned with book-keeping, although about 15 per cent of the surviving tablets are lists of words, such as the names of animals and cities, and were probably used in the training of scribes. As each pictograph or ideogram represented an entire word that could be understood universally, like those used today at airports, the language spoken by the people who made the pictographs is uncertain, but was probably Sumerian. In south-west Iran, once known as Elam, a script composed of numerical and other signs has been found on similarly early clay tablets dating to 3100–2700 BC. It seems to be more developed than simple picture signs, but remains poorly understood. It was originally labelled proto-Elamite on the assumption that it was an early form of the Elamite language that was written down a few hundred years later.

The next development was to write words using the sounds of syllables, a more sophisticated method that enables specific languages to be identified. The earliest language to have been written on clay tablets and the earliest known language in the world is Sumerian, dating from at least 2800 BC – or several centuries earlier if proto-cuneiform is accepted as Sumerian, and so earlier than Egyptian. Sumer was the southern part of Babylonia in the period 3000–2300 BC, and stretched from Nippur (south of Babylon) to the Persian Gulf. The Sumerians called their territory kiengir (‘homeland’), but later their Akkadian neighbours called it Shumeru, from which the modern name Sumer is derived. Sumerian is not related to any known family of languages, and it was possibly the only one of its family to have been written down, with the others dying out before writing was invented. Nothing is known about languages before Sumerian.

By 2600 BC major changes had taken place with the signs used to write Sumerian. They were now written as if turned 90 degrees to the left, so that the outline of a head of an ox was turned on its side and the two horizontal wavy lines representing water became vertical lines. They were also now written from left to right, not right to left. The other major change was that signs were no longer incised in the clay, but were impressed using a reed stylus with an angular end, forming the distinctive cuneiform (‘wedge-shaped’) signs. This was a more rapid way of writing, with the stylus being pushed into the damp clay rather than used to incise lines. Because of this change, signs became much more stylized, so that the sign for an ox was composed of a few impressed lines, barely resembling the original abstract outline of the head of the ox.

These cuneiform signs could still be used as pictographs, so that the stylized sign for a mouth meant ‘mouth’ (ka in Sumerian), and they could still be used as ideograms, so that the sign for a mouth also meant ‘tooth’ or ‘word’ (zú and inim in Sumerian). Many Sumerian words had only one syllable, such as ud, ‘day’, and sometimes even a single vowel, such as a, ‘water’. The signs for these words began to be used phonetically to spell out syllables of different words, regardless of the original meaning of the sign, such as the sign for barley, pronounced she, being used where the syllable she was required. In English an example would be a picture of a ring used to spell the ‘ring’ sound values of ‘bring’, ‘ringleader’ and ‘daring’. As words could now be spelled with syllables, there was no longer a need to have a separate sign for every Sumerian word, and so the number of signs dropped to around six hundred. This was still a very complicated system when compared with modern alphabets of around twenty-five or twenty-six letters, and so knowledge of writing was restricted to specially trained scribes, with the rest of the population remaining illiterate.

On the early Sumerian tablets, the cuneiform signs were grouped randomly in boxes, which were arranged in horizontal rows that were read from the top of the tablet to the bottom, but each box was now read from left to right, not right to left. With the increased use of signs for syllables, the written language became more structured, and grammatical elements developed. More complex words could be expressed, and because word order became important, signs began to be written in a single horizontal line, from left to right. Even so, there was no punctuation, nor any spaces between words.

Because Sumerian cuneiform signs started off as pictographs that were subsequently used as ideograms and syllables as well, almost every sign acquired several different functions. Many signs (termed polyphones) had several alternative sounds. For example, the sign is du, meaning ‘leg’, but the same sign can have other associated meanings with different pronunciations, such as gub, ‘to stand’, gin, ‘to go’, and túm, ‘to bring’. To get around this problem, the correct reading could be emphasized by adding another cuneiform sign, called a phonetic complement, comprising the final consonant and a vowel (usually a). This sign was not pronounced, but indicated what word was meant. For example, when this particular sign was to be read as gin, a sign for na was added, which cuneiform scholars write as gin(na) or ginna.

Several Sumerian signs were pronounced the same way (like flour and flower in English). These signs are termed homophones – having the same sound. For example, there were ten different signs for the word or syllable pronounced tum. In modern transcriptions the particular word meant is shown by the addition of accents and numbers (diacritic signs). For example, several different signs were pronounced gu. The one meaning ‘ox’ is written in transcriptions as gu₄. Scribes also added signs called determinatives (or classifying signs) before or sometimes after a word to indicate the category to which a word belonged, so that its meaning was clarified. The sign ki, for example, indicated that the adjacent word was a place-name and dingir the name of a god. These determinative signs were not pronounced, but were present merely to show the meaning of the words.

Sumerian ceased to be an everyday spoken language by about 2000 BC, but scribes continued to copy out texts and word lists, often with Akkadian translations, because Sumerian became a prestigious and scholarly dead language, like Latin in the Middle Ages. Akkadian, the oldest known Semitic language, belonging to the same family of languages as Hebrew and Arabic, had become the everyday spoken language. The term Semitic was coined in the eighteenth century because the speakers of these languages were believed to be descendants of Noah’s son Shem or Sem. Originally used alongside Sumerian, Akkadian was first written down from around 2500 BC. Although a Semitic language, the cuneiform writing system for Akkadian was based on Sumerian, despite the two languages being vastly different. Early cuneiform decipherment did not tackle Sumerian, as its existence was not initially recognized. Akkadian (‘the tongue of Akkad’, lishanum akkaditum) takes its name from Akkad (or Agade), which was founded as the capital city of the new empire of Akkad around 2300 BC by King Sargon, after he united several independent city-states in northern Babylonia and Sumer. The city of Akkad has not yet been discovered, but it probably lay north of Babylon.

Most Akkadian words had more than one syllable, and the cuneiform signs used to spell out words phonetically were either single vowels such as a, consonant-vowels such as tu, vowel-consonants such as an or consonant-vowel-consonants such as nim – never single consonants. Sumerian signs were frequently adopted as syllables or to represent entire Akkadian words. For example, the Sumerian sign an, meant ‘sky’ or ‘heaven’, and this same sign was adopted for Akkadian, but in that language was pronounced as shamu. The same Sumerian sign could mean a god, dingir, which was also adopted in Akkadian, but pronounced ilu. Signs taken from Sumerian are now called Sumerograms. Cuneiform scholars today write Sumerian words in lower-case Roman script, Akkadian words borrowed from Sumerian in UPPER-CASE Roman script and Akkadian words in italics in an attempt to lessen the confusion.

As in Sumerian, a few Akkadian signs were used as determinatives and placed before or after words to clarify the type of word (such as a place, woman, god), and these signs were not pronounced. Phonetic complements functioned in a similar way to those of Sumerian cuneiform, but were not so widely used.

By 2000 BC about six hundred Akkadian signs were used, but most signs had two or more values or readings, representing a syllable, an entire word or a determinative. Some signs (the polyphones) had more than one phonetic value or syllable, such as the sign , which can represent the syllables ur, lig or tash, and several different signs (the homophones) shared the same sound, such as which all represent the sound ur. As with Sumerian, scholars today show a sign’s value by a system of accents and numbers: the most common homophone in a group has no notation, the second an acute accent over the vowel, the third a grave accent, and the fourth and following have numbers, as in ur, úr, ùr, ur₄ and ur₅, called ur-one, ur-two, ur-three, ur-four, ur-five and so on. They are all pronounced in the same way.

Sumerian had a great influence on the written form of Akkadian, such as the verb occurring at the end of the sentence, which does not happen in other Semitic languages. However, verbs in Akkadian were not constructed like those of Sumerian (which had a fixed root word to which prefixes or suffixes were added). Instead, they had a root of three consonants (triliterals), which changed internally according to the meaning, mainly with the addition of different vowels. This is similar to English: the verb ‘to write’ can have various forms, such as written, writes and wrote – but w, r and t remain constant. Many Akkadian nouns ended in ‘m’, such as sharrum (king), but this ending was dropped towards the end of Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian, so that the word became sharru. There were no spaces between words, but there was occasional punctuation, such as an upright wedge to indicate the beginning of a sentence. The writing was read from left to right, and larger clay tablets could be divided into columns, like a modern newspaper, which were also read from left to right. On the reverse of tablets, though, the order of the columns could be left to right or right to left. Horizontal lines often separated each line of cuneiform writing.

There were three main Akkadian dialects, known today as Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian, and all used slightly different cuneiform scripts. In reality they were so similar that the terms tend to be interchangeable, and today they are studied as a single language. As with any other language though, Akkadian changed over the centuries. The Old Akkadian dialect dates to 2500–2000 BC, and under King Sargon it replaced Sumerian as the official language of administration. Only a century after its foundation, the Akkadian Empire collapsed, and for the next few centuries southern Mesopotamia experienced incursions from neighbouring tribes and was ruled by dynasties from cities such as Ur and Babylon, even though the kings still described themselves as rulers of the lands of Sumer and Akkad.

From 2000 BC it is possible to distinguish between the dialects of southern Mesopotamia (Babylonia) and northern Mesopotamia (Assyria). Babylonia incorporated what was formerly Sumer and stretched from the Persian Gulf northwards to the present city of Baghdad. Babylonian, the dialect of this region, is usually subdivided into Old Babylonian (2000–1600 BC), Middle Babylonian (1600–1000 BC), Neo-Babylonian (1000–600 BC) and Late Babylonian (600 BC to AD 75), while the term Standard Babylonian is used for the version of Old Babylonian that was preserved after 1500 BC by scribes in Babylonia and Assyria. From 1400 BC cuneiform, especially Babylonian, became the international language, the lingua franca, of diplomatic relations and trade over a vast area from Asia Minor to Egypt. Literacy rates within the population were still low, as the written language remained difficult.

The Assyrian dialect of the Akkadian language was contemporary with Babylonian, but was spoken in northern Mesopotamia. This region, known as Assyria (after the town of Ashur or Assur), stretched from what is now Baghdad northwards to the Anatolian mountains. Its main towns were Ashur, Nineveh, Nimrud, Khorsabad and Arbela, and at first Assyria was a collection of independent city-states. It became a powerful military state, expanding its territories and even invading Babylonia and sacking Babylon in 1235 BC. After 1100 BC Assyria went into decline, but from 930 BC the Neo-Assyrian Empire emerged as the dominant force in the region, conquering and annexing territory as far as Israel, Judah and Egypt. Many cuneiform inscriptions from this period have been found in vast library archives of clay tablets. In 612 BC the empire collapsed when Nineveh fell to the Babylonians and Medes.

The Assyrian dialect is usually subdivided into Old Assyrian (2000–1500 BC), Middle Assyrian (1500–1000 BC) and Neo-Assyrian (1000–600 BC). From the eighth century BC, Aramaic – the Semitic language of the Aramaeans, a nomadic tribe from the Syrian desert – became widespread as a spoken language, gradually replacing languages such as Akkadian. Scribes of cuneiform and Aramaic are depicted in sculptured reliefs working side by side at this time. The Aramaic writing system, based on the Phoenician alphabet, was much more simple and could be written with pen and ink on materials such as parchment and papyrus. It soon began to be adopted in place of cuneiform, and Aramaic became the international language of diplomacy and administration, while Akkadian became a literary and scholarly language.

From the sixth century BC Persia (modern-day Iran) began to expand its already immense empire westwards, first into areas like Elam and Babylonia where cuneiform was used and later as far as Egypt and Greece. Elamite, a non-Semitic language not closely related to any other, is first seen around 2300 BC and became an official language of the Persian Empire. It is known mainly from hundreds of clay tablets found at Susa, the city that became the summer capital of Darius the Great, and also at his new capital Persepolis, as well as on monumental inscriptions such as at Bisitun. Not content with adopting Babylonian and Elamite cuneiform, Darius also invented a system of cuneiform for writing down his own language of Old Persian, which had never before been written down. This was the first time in antiquity that a complete writing system had been invented, rather than gradually evolved. Old Persian cuneiform began to be used from early 520 BC in the inscription at Bisitun, and Darius and his successor Xerxes had many of their achievements recorded in other trilingual inscriptions in Elamite, Babylonian and the newly invented Old Persian cuneiform.

Loosely based on the signs used for Sumerian and Akkadian, Old Persian cuneiform was a far simpler system, since it followed the alphabetical principles of Aramaic. There were thirty-six signs in all – signs for the three vowels a, i and u, twenty-two signs for consonants usually linked to the vowel a, four linked to the vowel i and seven to the vowel u. Two simple signs were used as word dividers, which was to prove a valuable aid to decipherment, and single signs represented the words king, land, earth, god and Ahuramazda, as well as numerals. Unlike other types of cuneiform, the invented Old Persian cuneiform is rarely found on clay tablets, but normally as inscriptions on rock faces, metal plaques, vases, stone buildings and stone monuments. Old Persian cuneiform was in use for less than two centuries, having been abandoned by the time the Macedonian Greek conqueror Alexander the Great defeated Darius III in 333 BC, overran the Persian Empire and sacked Persepolis.

After Alexander the Great, the Persian Empire came under Hellenistic Greek rule, until it was conquered a century later by the Parthians, nomads from central Asia, around 238 BC. The Parthians and their empire survived for more than four centuries, before being overthrown in AD 224 by the Sasanians under their first king Ardashir. It was the son of Ardashir, King Shapur I, who built the city of Bishapur that Rawlinson visited in 1834 while staying at Shiraz. The Sasanian Empire also lasted over four centuries until the Islamic conquest of Persia in AD 651.

Just before his trip to Bishapur, Rawlinson had visited the ruins of Persepolis and seen for the first time trilingual cuneiform inscriptions carved in the three scripts of Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite, but at this stage he had no idea of their significance. The obsession of the Persian kings for inscriptions carved in three languages on rock faces and buildings ensured that those inscriptions remained visible to early European travellers, whereas most inscriptions in Mesopotamia were hidden from view, awaiting discovery in archaeological excavations. Because Europeans had greater contact with Persia at an earlier date than with Mesopotamia, it was inevitable that attempts at deciphering cuneiform began here, most notably at the ruins of Persepolis. Old Persian became crucial in understanding all other cuneiform scripts, and when Rawlinson achieved his first breakthrough in the decipherment of cuneiform, it was Old Persian that was to provide the first clues.

Five: Discovering Darius

Over two centuries before Rawlinson arrived in Persia, European courts had been attempting to establish trading links with Shah Abbas I, and while on a mission to the Persian court on behalf of Philip III of Spain and Portugal, Antonio de Gouvea visited Persepolis in 1602. He found the writing of the inscriptions very strange: ‘there is no one who can understand it, because the characters are neither Persian, Arabic, Armenian, nor Hebrew, the languages now in use in the district.’¹ Back at the Spanish court, Antonio de Gouvea met Don Garcia Silva Figueroa, who was himself inspired to visit the site in 1618 when in Persia as ambassador. Don Garcia was the first person to identify the ruins as Persepolis, but was equally puzzled by the sight of the inscriptions: ‘The letters themselves are neither Chaldaean, nor Hebrew, nor Greeke nor Arabike, nor of any other Nation which was ever found of old, or at this day to be extant. They are all three cornered, but somewhat long, of the forme of a Pyramide, or such a little Obeliske as I have set in the margin.’²

Pietro della Valle, a traveller from Rome, became acquainted with Don Garcia at Isfahan, and when della Valle left the city towards the end of 1621, he spent two days at Persepolis and the neighbouring ruins. Like Don Garcia, he noted: ‘One cannot tell in what language or letters these inscriptions are written, because the characters are unknown.’³ He was unsure of the direction of writing, ‘whether the characters are written from right to left as is the Oriental custom, or the opposite, from left to right as with us’,⁴ but because of the way the signs were constructed, he correctly deduced from left to right. He copied five of the most common cuneiform signs, and even though publication of the account of his journey was delayed until 1658, these were still the first cuneiform signs ever to be published.

Dutch, English, French and German travellers and artists were in turn drawn to Persepolis, many publishing engravings of the inscriptions, although these were often inaccurate. Samuel Flower, an agent of the East India Company, copied several trilingual inscriptions, from which a random selection of twenty-three cuneiform signs from the three scripts, each one divided by a full-stop, was published in 1693. Scholars were misled into believing that this random selection represented a full inscription with punctuation, a confusion that lasted for over one hundred years. Thomas Hyde, a Professor of Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford, studied Flower’s so-called inscription and wrote in 1700 that the signs were purely decorative and could not represent writing, not least because they were all different and divided by full-stops. Although led astray by this composite inscription, he described the signs as ductuli pyramidales seu cuneiformes, so coining the term ‘cuneiform’.

The next significant advance was by Carsten Niebuhr, a Danish scholar and explorer who spent several days at Persepolis in 1765. When the account of his travels was published a few years later, his drawings of inscriptions at last provided reliable material for scholars to use in their attempts at decipherment. Niebuhr was the first to realize that the inscriptions comprised three different scripts and therefore probably three different languages. He misleadingly referred to each script as an alphabet, although only the Old Persian was an alphabet. Referring to the scripts as classes I, II and III, he thought that class I (recognized later as Old Persian) was more simple than the other two and had forty-two alphabetical signs (there are actually even fewer – thirty-six). He confirmed della Valle’s view that the writing was done from left to right, after observing that in two identical inscriptions the line endings were not in the same position. It did not seem to occur to Niebuhr that the three different scripts each reproduced the identical text.

Two decades later, in 1798, Oluf Gerhard Tychsen, a Professor of Oriental Languages at Rostock, published a paper wrongly alleging that the inscriptions at Persepolis were of Parthian date and claiming to make out the name of the first Parthian King, Arsaces (‘Aksak’), in a recurring group of signs. He did correctly identify one diagonal sign in the Old Persian script as a word divider, although he was incorrect to claim it could also signify the conjunction ‘and’.

That same year Frederik Münter, a Professor of Theology at Copenhagen, read two papers to the Royal Danish Society of Sciences that were published in 1800 (and translated into German in 1802). In his opinion the ruins and inscriptions could only belong to the Achaemenid kings, and among his many observations on the inscriptions he correctly concluded that the diagonal sign was only ever a word divider. He rejected Tychsen’s reading of the name Aksak and rightly suggested that it might be a Persian title, such as ‘king of kings’. However, he incorrectly suggested that the languages of the three scripts were Avestan (or Zend as it was then called), Pahlavi and Parsi.

The known languages of Persia are divided into Old Iranian (in use up to Alexander the Great’s conquest), Middle Iranian (used up to the Islamic conquest) and New Iranian. The Iranian language belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European languages, and around 1000 BC Iranian speakers spread from central Asia into Afghanistan and Persia (Iran). Old Iranian comprised two known languages, Old Persian and Avestan, and the former was the everyday speech of the Achaemenid kings and was probably the spoken language of south-west Persia. It is represented by a limited number of cuneiform inscriptions, as at Bisitun and Persepolis. At the same time, Avestan was spoken in north-east Persia and became the language used to compose the Avesta or Zend-Avesta, the holy texts of Zoroastrianism that became the state religion from the time of Cyrus the Great. The Avesta was originally handed down from one generation to another by word of mouth, but was written down for the first time in the Sasanian era, probably in the sixth century AD, long after cuneiform had gone out of use. The earliest surviving manuscripts date from the thirteenth century, just as most Latin texts from the Roman Empire survive only as medieval copies.

In 1771 Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron published the first translation, into French, of the Zend-Avesta. Because Avestan was similar to Old Persian, knowledge of this language was to prove invaluable as it enabled decipherers to work out the vocabulary of Old Persian. Münter at Copenhagen tried to compare the frequency of cuneiform signs in the Old Persian inscriptions with the frequency of letters in Avestan texts, and although his method did not succeed, it led him to suggest correctly that the other two scripts in the trilingual inscriptions from Persepolis were translations of the first.

In July 1802, Rafaello Fiorillo, secretary of the Imperial Library at Göttingen in Germany, was out walking with the twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher Georg Friedrich Grotefend, a man ‘possessed of an extraordinary memory and excellent health, which allowed him to study from the earliest morning until late at night, without stint or relaxation … although he was considered by persons not in his intimacy, to be of a cold and reserved character, wholly occupied with his recondite studies, and uninterested in anything beyond them, this learned man was really full of feeling, and endowed with an almost child-like simplicity, which endeared him to all those who were of the circle of his friends.’⁵ Fiorillo asked if it could ever be possible to understand cuneiform inscriptions, when both the alphabet and the language were absolutely unknown. Rising to the challenge, Grotefend chose two trilingual inscriptions copied by Niebuhr at Persepolis that looked very similar, examining in each the most simple of the three scripts (the Old Persian). Just a few years earlier, Silvestre de Sacy, an Oriental scholar in Paris, had worked out the meaning of Sasanian (Middle Persian) inscriptions from Naqsh-i Rustam near Persepolis, using the aid of identical inscriptions in ancient Greek. Because they contained the names and titles of kings, Grotefend thought that his cuneiform inscriptions from Persepolis might be similar, but perhaps dating to the time of Xerxes. From these suppositions, he thought that the inscriptions would include the formula ‘Xerxes, great king, king of kings, son of Darius, great king, king of kings, son of Hystaspes’.

Using this method, Grotefend successfully identified the groups of signs for Xerxes, Darius and Hystaspes and also the group of signs for ‘king’, but did not work out all the individual cuneiform signs correctly. Using versions of the names derived from ancient Greek, Hebrew and Avestan, he thought that the cuneiform signs for Darius represented d-a-r-h-e-u-sh (darheush), although in fact they spell da-a-ra-ya-va-u-sha (darayavaush). The cuneiform signs for Xerxes were identified by him as kh-sh-h-e-r-sh-e (khshhershe), but they are actually xa-sha-ya-a-ra-sha-a (xashayarasha).

The group of signs that Grotefend believed meant ‘king’ gave him kh-sh-e-h-?-?-h, when looking at identical signs within darheush and khshhershe. From the Avesta, he knew that khsheio was a royal title, so he deduced that the missing signs were i and o, to give khshehioh, although the word is actually xa-sha-a-ya-tha-i-ya (xashayathaiya). By working out the values of the signs that he thought represented the name Hystaspes, and by filling in the gaps, Grotefend arrived at g-o-sh-t-a-s-p (goshtasp), although it is now spelled vi-i-sha-ta-a-sa-pa (vishatasapa).

From identifying these names, Grotefend next worked out part of the alphabet for Old Persian, not realizing that many signs represented syllables, not single alphabetical letters. Despite many errors, he had achieved the first steps in decipherment, and his remarkable results were announced to the Academy of Sciences at Göttingen in four papers from September 1802 to May 1803 and published in 1805 within a book by Arnold H. L. Heeren – Ideen über die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel, der vornehmsten Völker der alten Welt (Ideas on the politics, communication and trade of the first peoples of the ancient world).

Grotefend’s results were applauded in Paris by de Sacy, whose own pupil Saint-Martin tried to improve on the alphabet, but with minimal success. Just before his death in 1832, Saint-Martin was studying copies of the trilingual Elwand inscriptions, which were subsequently handed to Burnouf, who was working on Avestan and Sanskrit, two closely related ancient languages. Burnouf’s Commentaire sur le Yaçna was published from 1833 to 1835 – the Yasna was part of the Zend-Avesta, and this commentary far outstripped Duperron’s earlier translation of the Zend-Avesta. It was while Burnouf was preparing the Elwand inscriptions for publication that Rawlinson was carefully copying the very same inscriptions on his way from Tehran to Kermanshah in April 1835.

Towards the end of April, Rawlinson reached Kermanshah, where he would become well acquainted with the town and its people. Situated at an altitude of over 4,000 feet, on the edge of an extensive plain and at the foothills of a range of the Zagros mountains, Kermanshah controlled trade between the surrounding region and Baghdad to the south-west in Turkish territory. A fortified mud-brick wall, roughly circular in plan and with five gates, surrounded the town’s flat-roofed mud-brick houses, extensive covered bazaars, palace, baths, caravanserais and mosques, although imposing domes and minarets were noticeably lacking, in spite of Shi’ite Muslims being in the majority. Equally obvious was the sparse population, which had more than halved to around 12,000 after a recent plague epidemic. Five years later, in 1840, the adventurer Austen Henry Layard (a future collaborator with Rawlinson on cuneiform) travelled to Kermanshah and gave his initial impressions: ‘It stands in a fine, well-watered plain, surrounded by lofty serrated mountains towering one above the other, with high precipitous peaks, then still covered with snow. It is a place of considerable size, in the midst of gardens, vineyards, and orchards, amongst which are wide-spreading walnut trees and lofty poplars. An abundant supply of water descended from the mountains, divided into numerous canals, irrigated the lands, and rendered them bright with verdure. Altogether I was very favourably impressed with the appearance of the place from a distance. I thought it one of the prettiest and most flourishing towns I had seen in the East.’⁶

Finding himself in this mountainous region with many tantalizing inscriptions, Rawlinson was instantly lured to nearby Taq-i Bustan, with its Sasanian rock-cut reliefs and grottoes, several centuries later in date than those trilingual cuneiform inscriptions at the foot of Mount Elwand that he had recently copied. The Taq-i Bustan reliefs included one of King Khusro II, who was a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammed and ruled from AD 594 to 628. The king, seated on his favourite horse Shabdiz, is in full armour and helmet, holding a lance and looking very much like the knights of medieval Europe. Throughout Persia, sculptured reliefs of Fath Ali Shah and his court had been carved next to Sasanian reliefs, including one here at Taq-i Bustan, so continuing a long tradition.

What really gripped Rawlinson’s attention, though, was hearing about another trilingual cuneiform inscription, located at Bisitun, 20 miles from Kermanshah. Frustratingly, no sooner had he discovered the inscription than his work as a soldier demanded his total commitment. Within weeks of arriving he had gained Bahram Mirza’s trust to such an extent that it was laid down that Persian soldiers of all ranks would take orders from him, while he himself would only take orders from the prince. ‘The Prince’, he recorded, ‘took to me, was very kind and gave me the practical command of the Province’⁷ – including arms, equipment, stores, and the recruitment and training of the troops.

Having put cuneiform inscriptions out of his mind for now, Rawlinson’s first concern was the raising of troops from local Kurdish tribes. Wild in their ways of living and independent in their attitude, the Kurds only felt allegiance to their own tribe and resented being ruled by Persians. In his journal at this time, Rawlinson set out his rules for his own conduct, demonstrating his grasp of the fragility of the situation: ‘Create business for yourself. Lose no opportunity of making yourself useful, whatever may be the affair which may happen to present the chance. Grasp at everything, and never yield an inch. Above all, never stand upon trifles. Be careful of outward observances. Maintain a good establishment; keep good horses and showy ones; dress well; have good and handsome arms; in your conversation and intercourse with the natives, be sure to observe the customary etiquette.’⁸ In this way, by unceasing work and tactful persuasion, Rawlinson succeeded in recruiting and training three regiments.

In mid-August Bahram Mirza ordered Rawlinson to assist Suleiman Khan, the governor of Kurdistan to the north of Kermanshah. Suleiman was, Rawlinson thought, ‘a regular tyrant, but made great friends with him’.⁹ Rawlinson took control from the governor of raising and training a regiment of troops from among the Guran Kurds, a most unruly mountain tribe. About six weeks later he was recalled to Kermanshah by Bahram Mirza, and that same day the Guran Kurds mutinied, murdered Suleiman Khan and headed off westwards towards the frontier, with the intention of crossing into Turkish territory where they would be safe from Persian reprisals. News of the revolt compelled Bahram Mirza to send Rawlinson straight back to the mountains to try to quell the rebellion. He managed to rescue Suleiman Khan’s son Muhammed Wali Khan, proclaimed him governor and began rounding up the less disaffected troops. Hurrying towards the border, Rawlinson persuaded those who had not reached it to accept Muhammed as their new leader and reaffirm their oath of allegiance to the Shah. Inevitably, many mutineers escaped into Turkish territory, but in the space of a few days Rawlinson’s military skills and diplomacy had put down the rebellion and restored peace.

After ten days of ‘continual excitement and very hard work’¹⁰ Rawlinson was struck down by ‘bed fever’, probably malaria from which he had last suffered over a year previously at Tabriz, and was forced to complete the journey back to Kermanshah in a litter. After trying all types of remedy, he was getting no better, so ‘made them cut the fever by bleeding me till I fainted – rather severe treatment’.¹¹ Remaining extremely weak and unable to face the long trek to Tehran for treatment, he chose to be transported along the shorter and easier route westwards out of Persia to Baghdad, in what was then Turkish territory, where he could be cared for by a European doctor. He reached Baghdad on 29 November 1835 and placed himself in the hands of Dr John Ross, the thirty-year-old surgeon to the British Residency. Under Ross’s treatment Rawlinson recovered rapidly.

A whole month was spent on sick leave recuperating at Baghdad, but ever anxious not to be idle, Rawlinson set about learning Arabic and ‘made the acquaintance of Colonel Taylor and was initiated into Arabic lore’.¹² Colonel John Taylor, the East India Company Resident at Baghdad, was an antiquarian and ‘so good an Arabic scholar, that when the Cadi or the Mufti met with a difficult passage in some old manuscript and were not sure of the correct reading, they sent or went to him. He never left his house and was always to be found in his study poring over Arabic books. Unfortunately he never wrote anything.’¹³

At the end of December, Rawlinson was sufficiently recovered ‘in health and spirits’¹⁴ to ride from Baghdad to the Persian town of Zohab at the foot of the Zagros mountains, at that time ‘a mass of ruins, with scarcely 200 inhabited houses’¹⁵ because of constant wars between Persia and Turkey. Here he met up with Bahram Mirza early in the new year and stayed for six weeks, training the Guran regiment, ‘until he had brought his new corps into a state of perfection almost unknown in these regions’.¹⁶ All the while, Rawlinson wrote down his observations of the district and took delight in the scenery, such as at the source of the Holwan River, which ‘rises in the gorge of Rijáb, on the western face of Zagros, about 20 miles E. of the town of Zoháb. It bursts in a full stream from its source, and is swollen by many copious springs as it pursues its way for 8 miles down this romantic glen. The defile of Rijáb is one of the most beautiful spots that I have seen in the East; it is in general very narrow, scarcely 60 yards in width, closed in on either side by a line of tremendous precipices, and filled from one end to the other with gardens and orchards, through which the stream tears its foaming way with the most impetuous force until it emerges into the plain below.’¹⁷

In a mountain gorge north of Zohab, Rawlinson copied a small sculptured relief with a cuneiform inscription, noting that it was ‘divided into three compartments of four lines each, and written perpendicularly in the complicated Babylonian character, which I had never before seen, except upon bricks and cylinders’.¹⁸ He had in fact already seen Babylonian at Bisitun, but did not yet realize it was the same script used on baked clay objects such as bricks, because without careful study they appeared so different. Just south of Zohab, at a place called Sarpol-i Zohab, as well as ‘Gates of Asia’, he recorded a sculptured relief on another rock face: ‘It represents a figure in a short tunic and round cap, with a shield upon his left arm, and a club resting upon the ground in his right, who tramples with his left foot upon a prostrate enemy; a prisoner with his hands bound behind him, equal in stature to the victor, stands in front of him, and in the background are four naked figures kneeling in a suppliant posture, and of a less size, to represent the followers of the captive monarch; the platform upon which this group is disposed is supported on the heads and hands of a row of pigmy figures, in the same manner as we see at the royal tombs of Persepolis. The face of the tablet has been much injured by the oozing of water from the rock, but the execution is good, and evidently of the same age as the sculptures of Bísutún and Persepolis.’¹⁹

This remarkable monument that Rawlinson had discovered was just over 100 miles due west of Bisitun, but he misinterpreted the sculpture, because the prisoner with the same stature as the victor did not have bound hands and was in fact the warrior goddess Ishtar, the most important female deity in Mesopotamia. She is shown offering King Anubanini the royal diadem, while he stands on a prisoner, with other captives shown around him, all of a smaller size. The relief dates to about 2000 BC, one thousand five hundred years earlier than that at Bisitun, but it must have been copied by Darius the Great, as he is shown at Bisitun in virtually identical pose, with the goddess Ishtar transformed into Ahuramazda.

Bahram Mirza next ordered Rawlinson to take the regiment on an expedition southwards through the Zagros mountains into Luristan and Khuzistan (the area in south-west Persia that was once ancient Elam) to suppress increasing trouble with the powerful and fiercely independent Bakhtiari mountain tribe. Rawlinson knew that the area ‘had seldom, if ever, before been trodden by the foot of an European’,²⁰ and recognizing this as an opportunity for pioneering exploration, he kept copious notes of everything of geographical and historical interest on the journey.

The expedition set off on 14 February 1836, with Rawlinson leading 3,000 Guran troops and their artillery southwards through the mountains. They marched between 20 and 40 miles a day, and Rawlinson met and talked with the chiefs of various local tribes through whose territory they passed. He often left his men to march to their overnight camp while he went ahead on horseback to explore the antiquities of the region, which were mostly Sasanian, ranging from ruined cities, temples, bridges and fortifications to small rock-cut inscriptions. Four days on he explained: ‘I halted to-day at Chárdawer, to enable the troops to come up and rest, after their very fatiguing march. I was in some apprehension at first; for there was blood between the Gúráns and the followers of Jemshíd Beg, the latter having joined the Kalhur tribe in their last foray on the Gúrán lands, and having lost several men in the skirmish which ensued. “Had they slain, however, a hundred of my men,” said Jemshíd Beg, “they are your sacrifice; the Gúrán having come here under your shadow, they are all my guests;” and he insisted, accordingly, in furnishing the regiment with supplies, as a part of my own entertainment. Neither could I prevail on him to accept of any remuneration.’²¹

The next day they marched 15 miles to the camp of another leader, Ahmed Khán, whose family, Rawlinson recorded, ‘are notorious for their intolerant spirit; and I should recommend any European traveller visiting the province of Pushti-kúh, in order to examine its remarkable antiquities, to appear in the meanest guise, and live entirely among the wandering I’liyát, who are mostly ‘Alí Iláhís, and are equally ignorant and indifferent on all matters of religion.’²² Rawlinson added: ‘In my own case, of course, I had nothing to apprehend, as I was marching at the head of a regiment, and the rulers of the province were anxious to propitiate the favour of the prince of Kirmánsháh, in whose service I was known to be; but I saw enough on this journey, and upon subsequent occasions, of the extreme jealousy and intolerance of the Wáli’s family, to feel assured that the attempt of an European to explore the country in an open and undisguised character, with any less efficient support, would be attended with the greatest danger.’²³

On 4 March they reached Dizful at the foot of the mountains, the chief city of the province of Khuzistan and with, Rawlinson reckoned, about 20,000 inhabitants. After five days camped here, he rode over 20 miles south-westwards to the ancient city of Susa (or Shush), on the edge of the great alluvial plain of Mesopotamia. Although it had been the summer capital of Darius the Great, it had been founded as far back as 4000 BC and became the principal city of Elam. ‘At the tenth mile from Dizfúl,’ Rawlinson wrote, ‘the river makes an abrupt turn to the S.E., and the road then leaves it, and stretches across the plain to the great mound of Sús, which is, from this point, distinctly visible on the horizon. As I approached the ruins, I was particularly struck with the extraordinary height of this mound, which is indeed so great as to overpower all the other ruins in the vicinity.’²⁴ Rawlinson described his first discovery: ‘Upon the slope of the western face of the mound is a slab with a cuneiform inscription of thirty-three lines in length engraved on it, and in the complicated character of the third column of the Persepolitan tablets.’²⁵ What he had found was an inscription in the Elamite script, and he was told that the slab was ‘part of an obelisk, which existed not many years ago, erect upon the summit of the mound, and the broken fragments of the other parts of it are seen in the plain below’.²⁶

At Susa he had hoped to be able to find and record an inscribed stone nearly 2 feet high, apparently written in cuneiform on two sides and Egyptian hieroglyphs on one face, that previous travellers had been prevented from removing. He felt that such a bilingual inscription would be an asset in decipherment, as hieroglyphs had been deciphered thirteen years previously by Champollion, but he was bitterly disappointed: ‘I visited at this spot the pretended tomb of the Prophet Daniel; but the famous black stone, with the bilingual inscription, cuneiform and hieroglyphic, which formerly existed here, and by means of which I trusted to verify or disprove the attempts which have been made by St. Martin and others to decipher the arrow-headed character, no longer remains. It was blown to shivers a short time ago by a fanatical Arab in hopes of discovering a treasure; and thus perished all the fond hopes that archaeologists have built upon this precious relic.’²⁷ Though this was a setback, Rawlinson found the place idyllic: ‘The ruins of Sús and the surrounding country are celebrated for their beautiful herbage: it was difficult to ride along the Shápúr [river] for the luxuriant grass that clothed its banks; and all around, the plain was covered with a carpet of the richest verdure. The climate too, at this season, was singularly cool and pleasant, and I never remember to have passed a more delightful evening than in my little tent upon the summit of the great mound of Sús – alone, contemplating the wrecks of time that were strewed around me, and indulging in the dreams of by-gone ages.’²⁸

In mid-March they continued their trek and came to the banks of the Kuran River, where the town of Shuster was visible on the other side, its population drastically reduced after the devastation of the plague four years earlier. That same year the bridge across the river had been swept away by floods, ‘and, not having been repaired when I was there,’ Rawlinson noted, ‘we were obliged to bring the troops and guns across the river upon rafts, or kalaks, as they are called, supported on inflated skins. We pitched our camp along the pebbly beach, in the bed of the river; a most unsafe position, as a sudden rise of the waters would have swept it away bodily; but there was positively no other ground available.’²⁹

A week later they began a five-day march towards the principal fortress of the Bakhtiari tribe, and after a halt of two days, ‘I accompanied the Prince a distance of 3 farsakhs [about eleven miles], to Khári-Shutur-zár, where he received the submission of the Bakhtiyárí chief, against whom our expedition was directed’.³⁰ The leader was Mohammed Taki Khan, and he held such power that he could ‘at any time, bring into the field a well-armed force of 10,000 or 12,000 men’.³¹ Of the Bakhtiari tribe, Rawlinson observed that their ‘language is a dialect of the Kurdish, but still differing in many respects, and more particularly in their method of pronunciation, from any of the other modifications of that tongue which are spoken by the different tribes extending along the range of Zagros. I believe them to be individually brave, but of a cruel and savage character; they pursue their blood feuds with the most inveterate and exterminating spirit, and they consider no oath nor obligation in any way binding, when it interferes with their thirst of revenge; indeed the dreadful stories of domestic tragedy that are related, in which whole families have fallen by each others’ hands … are enough to freeze the blood with horror … Altogether they may be considered the most wild and barbarous of all the inhabitants of Persia; but nevertheless, I have passed some pleasant days with their chiefs, and derived much curious information from them.’³²

Returning to Shuster, Rawlinson wrote to his brother George of his disappointment at the lack of military action: ‘I have marched to this place (Shuster) in command of a force of three thousand men, intending to attack and plunder the country of a rebellious mountain chief; but now that we are near his fort he shows the white feather, and wants to come to terms.’³³ He acknowledged to his brother that the time nevertheless passed pleasantly, because he could indulge two of his passions – shooting game and visiting antiquities: ‘I am in a country abounding both with game and antiquities, so that, with my gun in hand, I perambulate the vicinity of Shuster, and fill at the same time my bag with partridges and my pocket-book with memoranda.’³⁴

It had been nearly nine years since Rawlinson had left England, and at times he felt isolated and missed the close relationship with his family, as he confided gloomily in the long letter to George: ‘The only evil is the difficulty of communicating with any other civilised place from this said province of Khuzistan; it is nine months since I heard from England, and three since I heard from either Teheran or Baghdad, so that I am completely isolated and utterly ignorant of what is going on in any of the other regions of the globe. News from England I am particularly anxious for.’³⁵ Moreover, friendships with other soldiers were proving to be ephemeral: ‘India has now ceased to be of any interest to me. I have few correspondents there, and each letter that I receive tells me a fresh tale of the worthlessness of worldly friendships. C—, who was wont to call himself my particular friend and chum, has never once written to me since he returned to India; and all my other quondam cronies have equally fallen off. But “out of sight, out of mind” is an old proverb, and I have no right, therefore, to complain of any particular grievance in my case.’³⁶

Rawlinson wrote to members of his family constantly, but whether or not they received his letters seemed a matter of chance. He explained to his brother how his latest letter would, if it survived, make its way to England: ‘From Shuster my letter is to be conveyed to Bussorah [Basra], from thence to Baghdad by another courier, then to Constantinople, and then put in the Vienna post-bag, so that, if the document reaches you safe and sound after all this chopping and changing, you must consider that Mercury [messenger of the Roman gods] has an especial favour for you.’³⁷ All Rawlinson wanted to do now was to return to England on leave once he had served ten years with the East India Company, intending to immerse himself in study at Oxford and Cambridge for three years: ‘Next year [1837], however, when my ten years expire, I shall certainly come home on furlough, unless in the interim some kind angel slips me into a caldron, like Medea’s, and wipes off the corrosion of nine glowing summers. So look out for a nice cheap lodging at Oxford, where (and at Cambridge) I think I shall pass most of my three years for the sake of consulting the classical and Oriental works which are there alone procurable, and a reference to which is absolutely necessary before I can prepare for publication my papers on the comparative geography of the countries which I am now visiting.’³⁸ His longing to return home came to nothing, as he became too immersed in affairs in Persia.

Six weeks were spent in the vicinity of Shuster and Dizful, but in mid-May Rawlinson left the regiment and returned to Kermanshah using a shorter, more difficult route through the mountains of Luristan, accompanied by only a few other soldiers on horseback, without the burden of baggage mules. At one point they passed a ‘very lofty range, called Sar Kushtí, where the Lurs suppose the ark of Noah to have rested after the Flood’.³⁹ After eleven days, dogged by attacks of fever, they reached Bisitun, from where it was a short ride back to Kermanshah.

For the next few weeks Rawlinson applied himself to his cuneiform studies, looking first at the Elwand inscriptions, but he soon realized that, with only these short inscriptions to work on, he was unlikely to make much progress. He therefore made the decision to try to copy the trilingual inscription at Bisitun.

Six: Bewitched by Bisitun

The imposing appearance of Bisitun greatly impressed Rawlinson, who considered it ‘a very remarkable natural object on the high road between Ecbatana and Babylon … The rock, or, as it is usually called by the Arab geographers, the mountain of Behistun, is not an isolated hill, as has sometimes been imagined. It is merely the terminal point of a long, narrow range which bounds the plain of Kermanshah to the eastward. This range is rocky and abrupt throughout, but at the extremity it rises in height, and becomes a sheer precipice.’¹ It is, in fact, the end of a ridge of peaks of the Zagros mountain range, where the limestone rock rises dramatically to a height of 1,700 feet above the plain, with the inscription of Darius the Great carved at a height of over 200 feet. The monument appears small in relation to the mountain, yet it is over 25 feet tall and 70 feet wide, and the panel of relief sculptures alone is nearly 18 feet wide and 10 feet high.

The massive monument was made as an extensive inscription surrounding relief sculptures of Darius and his defeated prisoners. Although the inscription was trilingual (written in three scripts and three languages) it was not originally designed as such. The inscriptions Rawlinson had already seen at Persepolis were intended to be trilingual from the outset, as was the Rosetta Stone in Egypt with its three different scripts (although technically bilingual, with just two languages), whereas the Bisitun monument evolved gradually. The monument did not overlook the plain, but was carved on the south-facing wall of a cleft in the mountain. A natural pathway originally led to the spot chosen by Darius, and once the rock surface was cut back and dressed smooth with iron chisels, the work of carving and engraving could begin.

At first, Darius intended the relief sculpture as the centrepiece, with inscriptions placed symmetrically round the figures. For the inscriptions, the rock face was lightly engraved with guidelines about 1½ inches (possibly two fingers’ width) apart. The sculptured panel was started early in 520 BC, and four columns of Elamite cuneiform inscription, a total of 323 lines, were added to the right. Because Rawlinson did not know the origins of this type of cuneiform, he used the term ‘Median’, after the Medes who once inhabited this area, as well as ‘Scythic’, thinking it may have originated with the Scythic tribe of the Russian steppes. ‘Susian’ replaced these terms, after the city of Susa that Rawlinson had recently visited. Finally, ‘Elamite’ was introduced after the earliest known name for the region, and that term is still used today.

In 519 BC, only months after the carving of the relief sculpture and Elamite inscription, a Babylonian inscription was added to the left, on an overhanging rock face. It was carved in a single column nearly 14 feet high and consisted of 112 lines of cuneiform, some of which are themselves over 13 feet long: the engraver clearly misjudged this task, as it should have been split into two columns. Later that same year the Old Persian inscription was added, in four columns of cuneiform, totalling 378 lines, which were engraved immediately below the relief sculpture, although the fourth column extended beneath the Elamite inscription, perhaps where the engraver misjudged his calculations in laying out the text. Although this was a translation of the Elamite text, minor changes and omissions were made, and an additional paragraph was incorporated towards the end, which related how the Old Persian cuneiform was a new form of writing, that this was the first time it had ever been used, and how copies and translations of the Bisitun text were being circulated throughout the Persian Empire. No room was available to add this extra paragraph to the main body of the Elamite inscription, but instead it appeared as a detached inscription above the relief sculptures. It was never added to the Babylonian, even though there was room.

Another figure of a defeated rebel, Skunkha, was added to the relief sculptures in 518 BC, necessitating the obliteration of part of the first column of the Elamite text. Incredibly, Darius ordered a copy of the entire Elamite inscription to be meticulously carved to the left of the Old Persian inscription, below the Babylonian, this time as three columns totalling 260 lines. At the same time a short fifth column giving an account of his new military victories was added to the end of the Old Persian, and the rock surface with the first Elamite inscription was smoothed so that it was barely visible.

Once all the inscriptions were finished, the monument was made as inaccessible as possible, including quarrying away the mountain path, to reduce the risk of vandalism. From the plain below, the inscriptions were too far away to be read, and through succeeding generations the meaning of the monument was lost. In ancient Greek times it became known as Bagistanon, ‘a place of the gods’, which gave rise to its Persian name of Bisitun (or Bisotun or Behistun), meaning literally ‘without columns’.

Early European travellers noticed the site, but did not understand it. Over a decade before Rawlinson arrived at Kermanshah, the artist and traveller Robert Ker Porter made the first recorded ascent, though seemingly not to the actual ledge below the inscriptions: ‘I could not resist the impulse to examine it nearer … To approach it at all, was a business of difficulty and danger; however, after much scrambling and climbing, I at last got pretty far up the rock, and finding a ledge, placed myself on it as firmly as I could.’² He was initially interested in the relief sculptures, not the inscriptions beneath, commenting: ‘but still I was farther from the object of all this peril, than I had hoped; yet my eyes being tolerably long-sighted, and my glass [telescope] more so, I managed to copy the whole sculpture.’³ Porter’s drawing was reasonably accurate, and he also made notes about the inscriptions beneath the sculptures: ‘the excavation is continued to a considerable extent, containing eight deep closely written columns [the Elamite and Old Persian] in the same character. From so much labour having been exerted on this part of the work, it excites more regret that so little progress has yet been made towards deciphering the character; and most devoutly must we hope that the indefatigable scholars now engaged in the study of these apparently oldest letters in the world may at last succeed in bringing them to an intelligible language. In that case what a treasure-house of historical knowledge would be unfolded here.’⁴

To copy the inscriptions at Bisitun would be, Porter believed, an enormous undertaking: ‘to transcribe the whole of the tablets, could I have drawn myself up sufficiently high on the rock to be within sight of them, would have occupied me more than a month. At no time can it ever be attempted without great personal risk; yet I do not doubt that some bracket on the surface might be found, to admit a tolerably secure seat for some future traveller, who has ardour and time, to accomplish so desirable a purpose.’⁵

In the early summer of 1836, Rawlinson used every spare minute to make repeated climbs up to the narrow ledge below the inscriptions and copy the initial lines of the first column of the Old Persian. He had deduced that there were three different types of cuneiform, as on the Elwand inscriptions, and he chose to start with the Old Persian script that appeared the most simple. Nobody had ever before managed to climb right up to these inscriptions, let alone record them, and even four years later the artist Eugène Flandin found the task virtually impossible. He and an architect, Pascal Coste, had been instructed by the French government to copy all the ancient monuments and inscriptions of Persia, and in July 1840 Flandin went on his own to Bisitun. He managed to climb to the ledge, but once there he found it impossible to move. His description of the ascent and descent is in stark contrast to Rawlinson’s understated record of the climb, and highlights Rawlinson’s nerve and mountaineering skills: ‘Mount Bi-Sutoun rises up in a pyramidal shape, black and savage,’ began Flandin. ‘It is one of the highest summits of the chain. The bas-relief, set in a reflex angle of the mountain … is only seen with great difficulty from below. In order to draw it, it is necessary to get close up by climbing some of the blocks that litter the foot of the mountain, which can be done up to a certain height. There then remains quite a great height still, so that it is necessary to use a telescope. The steep rock slope below this sculpture makes access almost impossible, so aiding its preservation … I wanted to try to get to the inscriptions that I had only been able to see from the foot of the mountain … I folded up my tent in the evening and I left for Bi-Sutoun [from Taq-i Bustan] … and crossed the lonely plain, and, keeping straight ahead, I went alongside the foot of the mountains. The day had been very stormy. The summits of Mount Bi-Sutoun were covered with great reddish clouds … The thunder rumbled across their thick layers … the flashes of lightning were recurring like prolonged echoes.’⁶

The moon then rose, dispersing the clouds and, Flandin wrote, ‘its silver light, spread over the mountain, changed the savage and sad colours that the leaden clouds had given to the rocks of Bi-Sutoun into fantastic and strange effects. I had returned to Bi-Sutoun with the intention of copying the inscriptions. I was hoping to succeed by using two ladders that I had brought from Kermanshah and was counting on putting the two together. By placing them as high as possible on the rocks, I was hoping to reach a little ledge that was at the level of the engraved tablets. But a vain hope … What to do? It was absolutely impossible without a specially constructed scaffolding, and positioning it would have encountered great obstacles. Besides … I had no wood, no ropes, and the region had no workman who could put it together.’⁷

Nevertheless, Flandin was determined to reach the inscriptions. ‘I wanted to make an attempt’, he explained, ‘to try to climb the polished and perpendicular rocks by the aid of some fissures that afforded a means of support. I left my shoes, so as not to slip, I hung on by my hands and feet to all the rough patches that I was able to seize hold of. In this way I climbed the rock with difficulty, stopping after each burst in order to prepare for a new exertion, and fearing, with every movement, that I would be hurtled to the bottom. I don’t know how long it took to get to my goal, but it seemed to me to be a long time, and I was fearing I would not succeed when I felt under my hand the edge of the ledge. Not before time, because my tired, grazed fingers had no more strength to haul me up … I had bloody feet and hands. At last I was on the projecting rock, below the inscriptions that I could clearly see. I took a quick breath, after which I examined the engraved tablets. What sorrow I had, after going to so much trouble, on realizing that it was impossible to take a copy. This impossibility resulted from the height that they were still at, as well as the narrowness of the ledge on which I found myself forced against the rock, without being able to move back a single inch. I had therefore climbed the mountain for nothing, and the reward for my troubles was that I could only state simply that the inscriptions are all cuneiform, engraved in seven columns, each containing 99 lines, and that above the figures, there are several more little groups of similar characters.’⁸

Flandin might have been even more despondent if he had known that Rawlinson had already recorded all this information – and much more besides. ‘But that wasn’t all,’ Flandin complained, ‘the most difficult thing was to return back down. I was at a height of 25 metres, and I could not think of any way of climbing down other than backwards, taking hold of and gripping the rock with my fingernails, as I had done in climbing up: this was really like the gymnastics of a lizard. I was therefore very happy to reach the bottom, but wounded, cut by the sharp angles of stones, completely torn and bloody.’⁹

Several years later, in 1850, Rawlinson recorded that the task of climbing this precipice was not especially challenging: ‘Notwithstanding that a French antiquarian commission in Persia described it a few years back to be impossible to copy the Behistun inscriptions, I certainly do not consider it any great feat in climbing to ascend to the spot where the inscriptions occur. When I was living in Kermanshah fifteen years ago, and was somewhat more active than I am at present, I used frequently to scale the rock three or four times a day without the aid of a rope or ladder: without any assistance, in fact, whatever.’¹⁰ With the age-old rivalry between the French and English, Rawlinson was doubtless playing down the daunting task, but the very fact that he had the skill and stamina to repeat such a climb, day after day, speaks for itself.

By mid-summer 1836, Rawlinson had sufficient cuneiform copied to be able to compare the Elwand and Bisitun inscriptions. Although he had not yet seen Grotefend’s publication, he later realized that he followed the same method of analysis of working out values of cuneiform signs, because he deduced that the Persian equivalents of the names Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes would be present in the inscription: ‘It would be fatiguing to detail the gradual progress which I made … The collation of the two first paragraphs of the great Behistun Inscription with the tablets of Elwend supplied me, in addition to the names of Hystaspes, Darius, and Xerxes, with the native forms of Arsames, Ariaramnes, Teispes, Achaemenes, and Persia, and thus enabled me to construct an alphabet which assigned the same determinate values to eighteen characters that I still retain after three years of further investigation.’¹¹

He wrote to his sister Maria in early July of his ambitions and progress: ‘My antiquarian studies go on quietly and smoothly, and despite the taunt which you may remember once expressing of the presumption of an ignoramus like myself attempting to decypher inscriptions which had baffled for centuries the most learned men in Europe, I have made very considerable progress in ascertaining the relative value of the characters.’¹² Since his stay in Baghdad a few months earlier, he no longer felt so isolated: ‘Now that I am assisted by the erudition of my neighbour Colonel Taylor of Baghdad, the best scholar living probably in the ancient languages of the East, I aspire to do for the cuneiform alphabet what Champollion has done for the hieroglyphics – when you hear the archaeologists of Europe enquire who this Rawlinson is who has shed so extraordinary a light over ancient history both sacred and profane, you will probably feel a thrill of greater pleasure than in acknowledging yourself the sister of the madcap … My character is one of restless, insatiable ambition – in whatever sphere I am thrown my whole spirit is absorbed in an eager struggle for the first place – hitherto the instability of youth has defeated all my ends, but now that advancing years are shedding their quietizing influence over my mind, I trust to be able to concentrate my energies as to proceed steadily and surely to the goal … I am now therefore compelled to rest upon my oars until the arrival of the works I have commissioned from England opens a new field to my enquiry or I can steal a fortnight’s leave to gallop to Baghdad and cull fresh honey from the treasures of Col. Taylor’s library.’¹³

His studies were brought to an abrupt halt in the late summer when he was ordered to march his regiment of Guran Kurds to Tehran to join Muhammed Shah’s forces, who were ready to subjugate unruly tribes in the north-east. He left Kermanshah in August, and at the Shah’s camp near Tehran he was allowed to retain command of the Gurans: ‘I paraded the new Regiment before the Shah to his extreme delight as it was composed of good fighting Kurds – who had never before been at the Royal head Quarters.’¹⁴ The army moved on to the frontier with Afghanistan, but it was discovered that the Shah’s real intention was to besiege the Afghan city of Herat once again – his earlier siege having broken up after the death of Fath Ali Shah. An outbreak of cholera provided the excuse for the British detachment to withdraw immediately.

Rawlinson made his way to Tehran where he spent a few days, until ordered to rejoin Bahram Mirza who was camped near Isfahan. Shortly afterwards they returned to Kermanshah, reaching the town in late November, and the following month his sergeant, George Page, was married with Rawlinson’s consent to an Armenian woman by the name of Anna. Because his troops were sent back to their homes for the winter, Rawlinson was now able to concentrate on his cuneiform studies. With access to a library at Tehran he had managed to become acquainted for the first time with the research of Grotefend and Saint-Martin and was fairly dismissive of their work. ‘I found the Cuneiform alphabets and translations which had been adopted in Germany and France,’ he noted, ‘but far from deriving any assistance from either of these sources, I could not doubt that my own knowledge of the character, verified by its application to many names which had not come under the observation of Grotefend and Saint Martin, was much in advance of their respective, and in some measure conflicting, systems of interpretation.’¹⁵

Unfortunately, rather than announce his own results on Old Persian, Rawlinson admitted he did not feel sufficiently confident to do so: ‘As there were many letters, however, regarding which I was still in doubt, and as I had made very little progress in the language of the inscriptions, I deferred the announcement of my discoveries, until I was in a better condition to turn them to account.’¹⁶ So far, he had worked out the values of eighteen signs, using proper names such as Darius, but had not managed to translate anything. The decipherment of cuneiform was a twofold process: transliteration and translation. First of all, it was necessary to work out what the signs meant – did they represent a single alphabetical letter, a syllable or a whole word? Once this was established, they were converted or transliterated to a Roman alphabet, and the resulting foreign words could be translated, but for this a knowledge of related languages, dead and living, was essential. The process is the same as, for example, the ancient Greek being transliterated to pente and then translated as ‘five’.

By now, Rawlinson knew enough about the problems of cuneiform decipherment to realize that what was hindering progress was the lack of a long inscription; the obvious solution was to copy as much as possible of the nearby Bisitun monument. Early in 1837 he began to make daily visits there from Kermanshah to gather more lines of the Old Persian inscription. He was unable to copy every line, because parts were severely eroded or inaccessible, but while perched on the narrow ledge on the cliff face he did succeed in copying the entire first column, the opening paragraph of the second, ten paragraphs of the third column, and four separate inscriptions accompanying the relief sculptures – in all, over two hundred lines of Old Persian cuneiform. At this stage, Rawlinson may have used a telescope to help copy the upper parts of this 12-foot-high inscription, as he does not mention ladders.

This work was brought to a halt again because Bahram Mirza, under whom Rawlinson had been serving for nearly two years, fell out of favour with his brother the Shah and was recalled to Tehran, to be replaced in February by a Georgian eunuch called Manuchar Khan. Problems immediately arose from the appointment of this new governor, who was hated and feared for his cruelty. In March, Rawlinson was ordered by the Persian government at Tehran to prepare five regiments, each with over a thousand men, in readiness for service, and so he wrote to Manuchar Khan for assistance and support in recruiting, drilling, clothing and equipping troops. Receiving only evasive replies and being pressed by the Prime Minister, he complained directly to Tehran, sending copies of his correspondence. Manuchar Khan was reprimanded, and Rawlinson was ordered by the Shah himself to despatch two regiments to the capital when ready.

Although Rawlinson appeared to be hard-working and professional, he held a harsher view of himself, as seen in his private journal entry written at Kermanshah on 11 April, his twenty-seventh birthday. ‘Let me probe my soul to the quick,’ he began. ‘What am I and what am I likely to become? In character, unsteady, indolent but ambitious – in faith – a direct infidel – in feelings callous as a stone – in principle like my neighbours, neither too good nor too bad – with some talent and more reputation for it – culpably wasteful and extravagant and incapable of forming and adhering to any fixed purpose on a single subject.’¹⁷ It is noticeable, though, that in assessing his prospects, his army career was not mentioned, being evidently of far lesser importance to him than his studies. ‘I am now engaged in a circle of study so vested with Oriental literature and archaeology, but I suspect I am too volatile to enable me to distinguish myself in a faith which of all others requires clever and diligent attention … I have no fixed aim for myself, but I write and read with a sort of instinctive longing to do something to attract the attention of the world.’¹⁸ Far removed from the eyes of his superiors, Rawlinson noted in this journal entry that a female companion (certainly a local woman) ‘enlivens my solitude, and I have never yet even put it to myself whether such a connection is criminal or not’.¹⁹

In mid-May Rawlinson left Kermanshah for the hills to assemble troops from the Guran inhabitants, but only a few days later was ordered by Manuchar Khan to engage in military action on the Turkish border near Zohab, as Persian merchants had been attacked by marauding tribes. With 1,500 cavalry and foot soldiers, he headed into a difficult situation, and after some exchange of fire and loss of life, Rawlinson was forced to remain there for three weeks to attempt to resolve the problem diplomatically. Impressing on Manuchar Khan that the British government did not allow him to fight Turkish subjects, he was instructed to return to Kermanshah, and for the last two weeks of June he prepared one new regiment for departure to Tehran. He repeatedly warned Manuchar Khan that the troops should be paid, but to no avail, and it was no surprise when they deserted and returned to their homes in the hills and mountains. The tribal chiefs were induced by Manuchar Khan to send back the recruits, and Sergeant Page was ordered to accompany them to Tehran two weeks later, with the expectation of appealing to the Shah for settlement of their arrears of pay. On arriving at the capital, the Shah had already left for his campaign, so once again the troops mutinied and returned to their homes.

Rawlinson had remained in Kermanshah to collect together the second regiment, but warned Manuchar Khan that these troops were disaffected because they had been badly treated when serving with the Shah in north-east Persia the year before. At a critical moment, Rawlinson went down with an attack of malaria, and the troops took a solemn oath not to march to Tehran, and then deserted. He was sent to bring them back, but once aware of their oath, he realized it was an impossible situation. On 1 September he received an order from the Shah to join the royal camp immediately, but for Rawlinson, now obsessed with cuneiform, the first priority was ‘spending my last week at Bisitun completing my copy of the Inscriptions’.²⁰

Seven: Royal Societies

On his arrival at Tehran, Rawlinson learned that Muhammed Shah had already left with his army for the planned expedition to the north-east. Because the British were alarmed that the Shah was being urged by the Russians to resume their attack on Herat, just over the border in Afghanistan, the British Envoy at Tehran, John McNeill, had prevented any of the British detachment from accompanying the Shah. Known as the ‘Gateway to Afghanistan’, Herat was also a gateway to India, and there was fear that its capture would enable the Russians to expand their influence throughout western Afghanistan and threaten British interests in neighbouring India.

In the eighteenth century, the Afghan Empire extended into parts of modern-day Iran, Pakistan and India – including Kashmir, Punjab, Baluchistan and Sind. Ruled by the Sadozai dynasty, this powerful empire controlled trade routes between Persia, India, Turkestan and central Asia, but by the early nineteenth century the empire had shrunk and fragmented through civil war into several independent regions. When Muhammed Shah was planning to capture Herat, that city was still under the Sadozai ruler Shah Kamran, while Muhammedzai rulers had seized control elsewhere, with Dost Mohammed Khan at Kabul and three half-brothers (the ‘Dil’ brothers) at Kandahar. At the same time that Rawlinson was ordered to the royal camp by the Shah of Persia, Lord Auckland, the Governor-General of India, had sent a mission to Kabul under Captain Alexander Burnes in an attempt to persuade Dost Mohammed to act in the British interest. A few years older than Rawlinson, Burnes was similar in many ways, having entered the East India Company army as a cadet at Bombay at the age of sixteen, with an enthusiasm and mastery of Hindustani, Persian and Arabic that enabled his career to progress rapidly. With the British involved with both Persia and Afghanistan, a complex situation was developing.

As Russian influence in Persian affairs was suspected, McNeill found it useful to allow Rawlinson to catch up with the Shah, as originally directed, and so he rode night and day on virtually unserviceable post-horses. After a week, on 8 October 1837, Rawlinson stumbled across the first evidence of a Russian connection with the Shah of Persia and with Dost Mohammed at Kabul: ‘Our whole party were pretty well knocked up; and in the dark, between sleeping and waking, we managed to lose the road. As morning dawned, we found ourselves wandering about on the broken plain … and shortly afterwards we perceived that we were close to another party of horsemen … I was not anxious to accost these strangers, but on cantering past them, I saw, to my astonishment, men in Cossack dresses … I thought it my duty, therefore, to try and unravel the mystery. Following the party, I tracked them for some distance along the high road, and then found that they had turned off to a gorge in the hills. There at length I came upon the group seated at breakfast by the side of a clear, sparkling rivulet … I addressed him [the officer] in French – the general language of communication between Europeans in the East – but he shook his head … All I could find out was, that he was a bona fide Russian officer, carrying presents from the Emperor [Tsar Nicholas I] to Mohammed Shah.’¹

That evening Rawlinson met up with the Shah in his new camp close to the Afghan border. Rawlinson was completely exonerated for the dispute with Manuchar Khan, and the Shah appointed him to the post of Custodian of the Arsenal at Tehran, with responsibility for training new recruits. On mentioning that the Russian officer was bringing him presents, the Shah exclaimed: ‘Bringing presents to me! Why, I have nothing to do with him; he is sent direct from the Emperor to Dost Muhammed of Cabul, and I am merely asked to help him on his journey.’² Two days later, the Russians turned up at the camp, and the officer Rawlinson had met on the road was introduced as Captain Vitkievitch, who now managed to converse in fluent French. In order to warn McNeill of the ominous mission of the Russians to Kabul, which would prove an even greater threat to India than the capture of Herat, Rawlinson returned to Tehran a few days later in what became a famous epic ride of 750 miles accomplished in 150 consecutive hours. His discoveries would precipitate the first Anglo-Afghan War.

At the end of the year Vitkievitch reached Kabul only to find that Burnes had for the last few weeks been in talks with Dost Mohammed. Three years earlier the Sikh army of the Maharajah Ranjit Singh had captured the city of Peshawar, incorporating it into his Punjab Empire. He now threatened to march up the Khyber Pass and take Kabul, so Dost Mohammed wanted the support of the British to regain Peshawar and also to prevent his half-brothers at Kandahar entering into an alliance with the Shah of Persia, who had begun to besiege Herat in November and was promising them that city in return for their support. Because Vitkievitch was also offering Dost Mohammed financial aid to regain Peshawar, Burnes advised the British government that they should do everything possible to assist Dost Mohammed in Afghanistan in order to keep the Russians at bay, while McNeill in Tehran largely supported these views, believing that a united Afghanistan would be better security against Persia and Russia.

Newly promoted to the rank of Major, Rawlinson was now involved with duties at the Arsenal at Tehran, but the task was not running smoothly. When recalled from Kermanshah by the Shah, Rawlinson had sent a copy of the order to his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Benjamin Shee, who had replaced Lindesay-Bethune the year before. On Rawlinson’s return to Tehran from the royal camp in late October, he found a letter from Shee asking for an explanation of his activities in Kermanshah over the last few months. In the ensuing exchange of correspondence, Shee accused Rawlinson of wrong-doing and disobedience, and objected especially to his appointment at the Arsenal. Rawlinson was furious, and on 10 January 1838 Shee informed him that ‘the whole of this correspondence will form the subject of my next Report to India’.³ It must have been very satisfying to receive notification from Shee on 16 February that: ‘I have the honor to send you a Royal Firman transmitted to me by the Military Secretary of Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy at the Court of Persia – appointing you to the superintendence of the Arsenal and to drill recruits in Tahran.’⁴

Rawlinson’s duties were nevertheless not onerous, leaving him much time for studying. His first task was to compose a formal account of his Zohab to Susa expedition, which was published by the Royal Geographical Society at London in their journal for 1839. He also began to look at cuneiform again. Although he had copies of far more inscriptions than any other researcher, he had no access to the most recent research: ‘I was still under the impression that Cuneiform discovery in Europe was in the same imperfect state in which it had been left at the period of Saint Martin’s decease [in 1832].’⁵ Without full knowledge of what other scholars had subsequently done, Rawlinson was working in a vacuum, but he did succeed in translating several paragraphs of the Bisitun inscription. His method of working was to transcribe the Old Persian signs into Roman characters, and then translate this version into English.

On 1 January 1838, at the age of twenty-seven, Rawlinson sent the translation of the first two paragraphs of Bisitun to the Royal Asiatic Society in London, with an accompanying letter in which he explained: ‘I avail myself of the kindness of my friend Mr McNeill [the Envoy] in giving me a note of introduction to you to open a correspondence on the subject of some very interesting researches in which I am now engaged in this country and the results of which I am anxious to communicate to the world thro the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. On my arrival in Persia about four years ago, I applied myself with diligence to the study of the history, geography, literature and antiquities of the country. The latter field of research as being the least cultivated I found possessed of the most interest, and at an early stage of my enquiry, I could not of course but recognise the great importance of the Arrow headed inscriptions, the most ancient historical records that we possess in Persia … If you consider the subject of sufficient interest to be laid before the Society in its present incomplete state, I shall have much pleasure, when I receive your answer, in forwarding a statement of my researches as far as at the time they may extend. I anticipate the most extraordinary results, as far as the elucidation of ancient history is concerned from the interpretation of these inscriptions.’⁶

Rawlinson also explained in his letter that he had seen the results of Grotefend and Saint-Martin, but that much of the work of these two scholars was flawed, and that out of forty Old Persian cuneiform signs, he had discovered the meaning of around thirty and was also analysing the language, using clues from Zend and Sanskrit. He went on to describe how the inscription at Bisitun related the eastern victories of Darius and said that he was working on its most simple script. For now, he sent the society a transcription and translation of the opening two paragraphs (the titles and genealogy of Darius the Great), with a promise to send much more if they were interested.

The long letter was received in London in March. While other scholars in Europe were unknown to Rawlinson, he himself was unknown in England. The reply to him in early April by Major-General John Briggs, Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, demonstrated the genuine interest and enthusiasm of the society and a willingness to encourage and guide this young scholar ‘removed from the information which European libraries and scholars might afford you if on the spot’.⁷ Briggs first of all emphasized ‘that the Society is extremely happy to learn from you that there is a prospect of obtaining the contents of the cuneiform tablets … and it will thankfully receive and publish anything new which you may have the goodness to send on the subject’.⁸ Briggs went on to say that he had written to Dr Julius Mohl of Paris, an Oriental scholar who had been acquainted with Saint-Martin, entreating him to contact Eugène Burnouf, ‘one of the most profound Oriental scholars in Europe, and I believe the last who has occupied himself in translating the cuneiform character. He has succeeded in making out (according to his own alphabet, and from his thorough acquaintance with the Sanscrit and Zend languages) two inscriptions, one procured at Murghab, near Hamadan [Elwand], and the other at Van … His alphabet differs from that of Professor Grotefend and M. St. Martin, and, as you have both these, I believe, I now send that of Burnouf, showing the differences between it and those of his predecessors in the same study.’⁹

There was a genuine sense of excitement as word about Rawlinson’s achievements spread through the academic community, and a few days later his translation was exhibited to the Société Asiatique in Paris. His work was perceived to be so pioneering that, on 21 April, the Royal Asiatic Society informed him that he had been elected an honorary Corresponding Member, and the Société Asiatique did the same soon after. Mohl and Burnouf also sent copies of additional relevant publications to London for the Royal Asiatic Society to forward to Rawlinson.

At a meeting in London in May, the Royal Asiatic Society recorded: ‘Among other subjects of congratulation the Council cannot refrain from noticing the discovery made by our countryman, Major RAWLINSON, (at present in the army of the King of Persia) of vast tablets existing in various parts of that country, covered with cuneiform inscriptions, some of which contain a thousand lines each. The Society is aware of the efforts which have been made by some of the most learned Orientalists in Europe to decipher these inscriptions – efforts in which they have only partially succeeded hitherto, but which, through the energy of Major Rawlinson, and the aid of which he will be able to avail himself in the published Transactions of Messrs. Grotefend, St. Martin, Klaproth, Müller, Rask, Bellino, and Eugene Burnouf, may, it is hoped, be crowned with success.’¹⁰

Their report continued with the significance of Rawlinson’s discoveries: ‘A remarkable feature in the translation of a portion of one of these inscriptions, sent to the Society by Major Rawlinson, is the fact that the genealogy of a race of kings found on a tablet (which records, as he informs us, the conquests of Darius Hystaspes), corresponds very closely with the list of the same line of monarchs given in the seventh chapter of the second book of Herodotus. It is not, therefore, too much to hope that at no distant period, the mysteries of these inscriptions may be developed, and it seems probable these interesting monuments may throw additional light on the ancient history of Persia, beyond what has been transmitted to us by Greek authors.’¹¹

Scholars were especially willing to extend every assistance to Rawlinson, because of the prospect of verifying Herodotus and increasing their knowledge of ancient Persia. They had no idea that the decipherment of cuneiform would also lead to momentous revelations about virtually unknown civilizations in Assyria and Babylonia. The society announced that Rawlinson had been urged ‘to devote himself, in the first place, to obtain copies of all the cuneiform inscriptions which are procurable in Persia, and to send one set for deposit in this Society’.¹² A long relationship with the society developed, with Rawlinson frequently communicating his latest results by letter.

That summer, on 28 June 1838, the coronation of Queen Victoria took place in London, while in Tehran, Rawlinson received Burnouf’s report on the Elwand inscriptions, Mémoire sur deux Inscriptions Cuneiformes trouvés près d’Hamadan, that had been published two years earlier. He was disappointed to discover that he was not the first to copy and study this inscription and that Burnouf had pre-empted his own work. In the report, Burnouf discussed the work of other scholars on Old Persian cuneiform and reproduced the alphabet that Saint-Martin had worked out, commenting: ‘M. Saint-Martin assured me more than once that he believed his system of decipherment beyond criticism, at least in its general results. According to him, what still needed to be made clear were both the language in which these inscriptions was written … and the two other systems of writing to which he had given the names Median and Assyrian.’¹³ Nevertheless, Burnouf suggested a new alphabet of his own, thirty letters in all with three uncertain ones.

Rawlinson’s own work did not completely coincide with Burnouf’s, and he disputed several points: ‘The memoir of M. Burnouf on the Inscriptions of Hamadán [Elwand] … showed me that I had been anticipated in the announcement of many of the improvements that I had made on the system of M. Saint Martin, but I still found several essential points of difference between the Paris alphabet and that which I had formed from the writing at Behistun, and my observations on a few of these points of difference I at once submitted to M. Burnouf.’¹⁴ On 30 July Rawlinson wrote again to the Royal Asiatic Society, enclosing a long letter to Burnouf in Paris, which gave his own Old Persian alphabet and extensive copies of the cuneiform inscription at Bisitun. He explained to the Royal Asiatic Society that he was waiting to receive Burnouf’s report on the Yasna ‘before I forward you my copy and attempted translation of the great Bisitoon inscription. I have still thought it advisable to lose no time in putting myself in communication with that gentleman with a view to defining the exact points of coincidence and variance between our respective alphabets of the Cuneiform character. I have therefore written him a letter upon the subject which I forward to your address, and as it is possible that discussions may hereafter arise regarding the priority of claim to the determination of certain characters, perhaps you will kindly allow the letter to be copied and preserved among the records of your society.’¹⁵ Rawlinson explained that once he had received the Yasna and tested various points, ‘I trust to be able to bring my remarks on the Bisitoon Inscription to a state that will enable me to send off a considerable portion of the copy and translation by the next courier’.¹⁶

In fact, Burnouf’s Commentaire sur le Yaçna arrived that same day, and later Rawlinson wrote that ‘I there, for the first time, found the language of the Zend Avesta critically analyzed, and its orthographic and grammatical structure clearly and scientifically developed’.¹⁷ While he concentrated on Avestan (what he called Zend), Rawlinson learned much more about the language of Old Persian, appreciating that Avestan would give clues about vocabulary and grammatical structure. He began to progress beyond Burnouf’s achievements and seriously confronted Old Persian as a language, not just as a cuneiform script.

A few months earlier McNeill had gone to the Shah’s camp outside Herat in Afghanistan in an effort to persuade him to lift the siege and, Rawlinson noted, ‘left the confidential direction of the Legative affairs in my hands’.¹⁸ Having failed in his mission, McNeill returned to Tehran in June and subsequently led the British detachment to Tabriz near the Turkish frontier, with a view to quitting Persia. At the same time Lord Auckland sent a force from India, which occupied the strategically important island of Karak in the Persian Gulf and was threatening to invade the Persian mainland. The siege at Herat dragged on, with the Persian army making little progress, but when news of the British threat reached Herat in mid-August, the Shah was so alarmed that he abandoned the ten-month siege in early September. No good reason remained for the British to intervene in Afghanistan, especially as any real threat from Russia had now evaporated under British pressure. The Russians recalled their agent Vitkievitch, officially reprimanding him, and Rawlinson recorded that ‘not having accomplished all that had been expected of him, [he] was disavowed on his return to St Petersburg, and blew his brains out’.¹⁹

Although the problem had been resolved, Lord Auckland was intent on interfering in Afghanistan. Earlier in the year he had ignored the advice of Burnes to support Dost Mohammed at Kabul, but instead followed the advice of William Macnaghten, who was Chief Secretary of the Calcutta government. Support was guaranteed for the exiled Sadozai ruler of Afghanistan, Shah Shuja, and a treaty was signed between Shah Shuja, the Sikh leader Ranjit Singh and the British, with Shah Shuja agreeing to cede all territories that were once held by Afghanistan but were now occupied by the Sikhs, including Peshawar. At the summer capital of Simla in northern India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, Lord Auckland issued on 1 October 1838 what was in effect a declaration of war on the states of Kabul and Kandahar. It became known as the Simla Manifesto and was an attempt to justify an invasion of Afghanistan.

While based at Tabriz, Rawlinson received permission to undertake an expedition to explore north-west Persia that he had planned, but first of all he sent a letter to the Royal Asiatic Society apologizing for not sending the Bisitun inscription, but the troubled state of Persia made it too difficult. On 16 October he left the camp, and his journey over the next few weeks took him south and south-east of Tabriz, constantly compiling notes on the antiquities, villages, tribes and countryside. This time he was on his own, without the backing of an army of a few thousand men – a hazardous undertaking in which he relied on local guides. After two days he stopped at a village near Lake Urmia, where ‘Melik Kásim Mírzá, a son of the late Sháh of Persia … has built himself a palace in the European style near the village … To great intelligence and enterprise he unites a singular taste for the habits of European life, and the cultivation of many useful arts which belong to European civilization.’²⁰

The following day was spent with the prince, ‘giving him such information and assistance as I was able in his various objects of pursuit. His acquaintance with European languages is extensive. Of French he is a perfect master; and in English and Russian he converses with much fluency. His habits of domestic life are also entirely European: he wears European clothes, breakfasts and dines in the European style; and, as far as regards himself, has adopted our manners, to the minutest point of observance; and this singular transition – a change which a person accustomed to the contrasts of European and Oriental life can alone appreciate – has arisen entirely from his own unbiased choice, and without his having had either means or inducement to effect it beyond his occasional intercourse with European society at Tabríz.’²¹ Rawlinson confessed that the village ‘presents a phenomenon in social life, which I should little have expected to meet with in Persia; and when I reflect that moral development can alone proceed from an improvement in the social condition, I fervently hope that the prince may have many imitators, and that a brighter day may thus be opening upon Persia.’²² Like many Victorians, Rawlinson believed that the adoption of European values could only bring about an improvement in the way of life.

The region south-west of Lake Urmia, near the Turkish border, had seen very few Europeans, and Rawlinson noted that its Kurdish tribesmen ‘are a remarkably fine, active, and athletic race, and are, perhaps, the most warlike of the many warlike clans who inhabit this part of Persia. From their exposed position, indeed, upon the immediate frontier of Turkish Kurdistán, they are constantly engaged in frays with the wild tribes who inhabit the neighbouring mountains; and I saw several of the chiefs who wore their shirts of mail day and night, and always kept their horses ready saddled, not knowing at what moment they might be called on to sally forth and repel a foray. Their common weapon is a spear, and they are loth to give it up; but finding that the mountain clans with whom they engage have almost universally adopted the use of fire-arms, they are beginning gradually to follow their example.’²³

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