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

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.