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

Afterword and Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

List of Illustrations (#litres_trial_promo)

Recommended Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Map (#ulink_1c62e5e0-f72c-5712-a4a8-e0cad03fd5a5)

Empires: Key Events (#ulink_63548d51-df9b-5c32-bc72-61805a1e5eea)

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

Dates BC

Dates AD

Rawlinson’s Rock (#ulink_9e920bcb-6258-5291-bf95-e029a40e4e97)

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 (#ulink_4cc624d3-5fbd-562d-8d20-aa5277a132b5)

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’,

(#litres_trial_promo)having come to despise northern England ‘for its roughness, its coarseness, and its “savagery”’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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’,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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’.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In fact, with all the qualities of a young soldier.