Countless caravans wended their way from the parched plains of
Mesopotamia eastwards over the Persian border, past Kermanshah,
winding along the road that skirts the range of hills rising to the
left, and so through Behistun, a mere collection of huts with a name
that is famous throughout all the seats of learning in the world.
Here the caravans halted while men and beasts slaked their thirst in
the pool, but few of the travellers troubled to look a second time
at the great stone of Behistun rising above the plain. Users of the
road were ever more interested in the spring than in the figures
sculptured in the rock.
The carvings were old—as old as the hills—and like the hills they
became part of the landscape. They were legendary, carved, so
people said, by the gods in the dim past. Age-old myths concerning
them were poured into the ear of the stranger who passed that way,
but those who used the road regularly, and those who dwelt in the
neighbourhood, took no more notice of the rock carvings of Behistun
than they took of the other features of the scenery. The most aged
man was as ignorant of the origin of the carvings as was the youngest
stripling.
There the figures stood for centuries, for thousands of years. The
traders drove their animals along the road to the sound of jingling
bells, quaffed the waters of the spring, and passed onward, much more
concerned about their merchandise than about the carvings on the
bluff.
Had the figures been more accessible, they would have vanished long
ago. Senseless wanderers would have taken pleasure in smashing them,
and rain and frost and sun would have completed the destruction. But
the figures were carved too high, and the rock below had been cut
away by the masons of old, leaving a perpendicular wall which could
only be scaled at considerable risk. Above them was the sheer cliff.
There was no way down to them, no easy way up to them. The escarpment
on which they were carved rose for 1700 feet, and they were graved
out of the living rock 300 feet above the ground.
Except for a few travellers’ tales, the carvings at Behistun were
unknown to the teeming multitudes dwelling in the great cities. Few
men would have thought of looking in this lonely spot in Persia for
the lost key to Babylon and Assyria. Yet here was the key for the
man who had the courage and determination to wrest it from the
mountains. Such a man came in the end, over two thousand four hundred
years after the ancient sculptors had carved the last figure and
removed the last scaffolding.
The discovery of the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the discovery
of the key to cuneiform writing, resemble each other in more ways
than one. It will be remembered that a soldier found the Rosetta
Stone, and that an Englishman was the first man to indicate the
manner of reading it. Rawlinson, whose genius solved the puzzle of
Persian cuneiform, was also a soldier and an Englishman. It seems
strange that science should be indebted to a doctor and a soldier for
lifting the curtains of the past, that scholars who had spent their
lives studying foreign languages should have to rely upon two men to
whom these things were just an absorbing hobby.
When Henry Rawlinson sailed for Bombay to enter the service of the
East India Company in 1827, he was only seventeen years old. Blessed
with an uncanny knack for learning languages, he found this ability
stood him in good stead upon his arrival in India. Where other men
were beaten by native dialects, he took to them as a duck takes to
water. Before he was twenty, he was one of the interpreters for the
army of the East India Company, and long before he was thirty he
could speak Persian like a native.
His remarkable abilities stamped him as a man who would go far, as
one destined to play many parts in the ever-changing East. For a time
he concentrated his energies on reorganizing the Persian army; at
other periods he was frequenting the courts of the Shah and the Amir
of Afghanistan, filling the intervals with hard fighting, a good deal
of administration, and the pleasure that lay nearest his heart—the
study of dialects.
The Orient cast a spell over him, and the legends of Persia
particularly appealed to his imagination. He was in the land where
history began. The past called to him. Little bits of burnt brick
with strange marks on them intrigued him. It was as though a robin
had hopped all over them while they were wet, and had left behind
impressions something like a bird leaves in the snow. He knew these
fragments were the old writings, though they were like no known
writings on earth, and at last he made up his mind to see if he could
find the key to the cuneiform characters.
In 1835 Rawlinson, then a young man of twenty-five, took up his
residence at Kermanshah, as commander of all the troops in the
province. Behistun was no more than 20 miles away, and something must
have told the soldier that here was the key to the riddle he sought.
So, when opportunity served, he jogged along the old road to the rock
of Behistun, and began to copy the inscription. He had no rope, no
ladder to assist him. All he had to rely upon were his own sure feet
and strong hands. A slip meant certain death, yet the risk sat so
lightly on his shoulders that he made his dangerous way up and down
the precipice three and four times a day.
There came a time when ladders were absolutely essential to secure
the copies he needed. So narrow was the ledge at the foot of the
sculptures that Rawlinson was forced to place his ladder almost
perpendicularly against the face of the rock. For long periods he
perched in a most precarious position at the top of the ladder and
glued himself to the rock. The least little movement outwards on his
part and the ladder would have overbalanced and plunged with him
to destruction. He knew it, yet he continued his work as calmly as
though he were at a desk instead of standing on a crazy ladder at the
edge of a precipice.
On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion he escaped death by a miracle.
He sought with his ladder to bridge a chasm in order to copy other
inscriptions, but the formation of the rock made it impossible to
place the ladder flat. Eventually, after some trouble, he arranged
the ladder with one side resting firmly on each opposing rocky ledge,
while the other side hung free immediately below.
Standing on the lower side, he took hold of the upper side of the
ladder with his hands and started to walk across. Suddenly, without
warning, the lower side of the ladder with all the rungs broke away
from the upper side and dropped into the dizzy chasm. Rawlinson, as
he fell, clung desperately to the top side of the ruined ladder. For
a brief moment he swung on the verge of a terrible death, then, hand
over hand, he made his way back to safety. In the end he managed to
copy the Persian and Median inscriptions, but the other inscription
in Babylonian on the outjutting rock defeated all his efforts to
reach it.
For three years he studied his inscriptions, and began to lay their
secrets bare. The first draft of his great work was written. Then
duty called him elsewhere, and the Afghan War put an end to his
studies, compelling him to lay his book aside.
It was 1844 before he was able to resume the work he was so anxious
to do. That year saw him appointed British Consul at Baghdad, and he
took up his residence in the city on the Tigris and his studies at
the same time. He was once more in the neighbourhood of Behistun,
and eventually he made his plans for procuring a copy of the
Babylonian inscription which had defeated him years before.
Riding along the old highway to Behistun, he carried with him this
time much rope and many sheets of thick paper. He studied the
well-known rock from below. There was the long line of figures carved
in the limestone, to their left the series of inscriptions cut in
column. A little above, on the slanting rock, was the inscription
he desired. Through a telescope he could make out the inscriptions
he had already copied, but he needed the wings of an eagle to lift
him to the other rock. He made his way round the top of the bluff,
studying it from all angles, and concluded that it was impossible for
him to obtain a copy of the last inscription.
He inquired among the Kurdish peasants for one who would climb up to
the rock and make a copy in the way he directed. He offered a good
reward, but the peasants shook their heads. They considered the feat
impossible. Rawlinson, paying no heed, pushed his inquiries further
afield, and at last came on a Kurdish boy who willingly undertook the
task.
The lad was lithe, agile, sure-footed as a chamois, and he climbed
up to the platform in front of the sculptures with little trouble.
Equipping himself with some ropes and pegs and a hammer, he gazed up
at his objective. The rock jutted outwards over the sheer precipice;
it seemed impossible for anything but a fly to crawl over its face.
For a little while the keen eyes of the lad sought for handholds and
footholds; then he squeezed himself into a crevice at the side of the
big rock and began to worm his way upward.
Rawlinson gazed on while the lad mounted a foot at a time. Often
the climber stopped while his fingers sought another hold, then he
progressed a little higher. But at last even he came to a stop; he
was unable to go on.
Reaching above his head, he drove one of the wooden pegs deep down
into the soil covering the rock. Attaching a rope to it, he tested
it, pulling this way and that, to make sure that the peg held firmly.
The onlookers watched with bated breath as the lad attached himself
to the end of the rope, as he tried to swing himself across to the
other side of the rock, clinging with hands and feet to the rocky
surface, with death yawning for him below. Failure met his gallant
attempt. Once more he tried, swinging over the rock face, with only
a rope between himself and Eternity. Ten, fifteen, twenty feet he
traversed, to find that further progress was impossible. Quickly
reaching out, he drove another peg deep down into the soil above his
head, as quickly attached a rope. The fixing of a seat to the ends of
the two ropes to form a cradle was not very difficult, and sitting
in this cradle the lad was able to go all over the rock, taking
impressions of the inscription under Rawlinson’s direction on sheets
of damp paper. In ten days the task was finished, and Rawlinson
possessed the first complete copy of the cuneiform inscriptions at
Behistun ever held in the hands of man.
The supreme task of deciphering these inscriptions occupied Rawlinson
on and off for many years. As already mentioned, the first draft of
his book on the inscriptions was finished before he left Kermanshah;
and when he came to the consulate at Baghdad he threw himself heart
and soul into making a complete revision of his draft to embody his
later studies and knowledge. Often in the intense heat he worked in
a summer-house at the bottom of the garden, a pet lion lying at his
feet, and a water-wheel from the river Tigris pouring water over the
roof of the summer-house to keep it cool.
There was the Greek script to assist Young and Champollion to
decipher the hieroglyphics of the Rosetta Stone, but there was no
known writing at all in the inscriptions at Behistun. There were
three inscriptions carved on the rock face, Persian, Babylonian and
Median cuneiform. The clue to them was lost. No living race wrote
in such a manner, and not a single man knew how to read the curious
wedge-shaped writing of the ancients.
Rawlinson therefore laboured under a much bigger handicap than that
imposed on Young and Champollion. But Rawlinson was one of those
men to whom a handicap means something to be surmounted. The bigger
the handicap, the greater the satisfaction in overcoming it. The
inscriptions at Behistun seemed to challenge him, to defy him to read
them, as from their lofty pinnacle they had challenged men for ages
past.
Rawlinson was the man in a million. The lure of the past and the
fascination of the East spurred him on to do the impossible. His
courage was as great as his knowledge of dialects was profound. It
was no hope of reward, of glory, that urged him to wrest the secret
from his sheets of paper impressions. It was the desire to pit his
brain against the baffling writing, to master it.
Grotefend years before had pointed the way, but Rawlinson was
ignorant of this fact. All the years that Rawlinson was writing and
studying at Baghdad, an Irish clergyman, Dr. Hincks, was engaged
on the same mighty task in a quiet rectory in Ireland, solving the
puzzle which Rawlinson had already solved. Other men were wrestling
with the same difficulties, but Rawlinson knew absolutely nothing
of them or their endeavours. He worked away incessantly, relying
upon himself alone. He studied the queer, wedge-shaped impressions
for months, noted their resemblances, found the characters that were
repeated, and little by little, a character at a time, he built up
that dead language, succeeded in reading the writing of the peoples
who inhabited Persia and the plains of Mesopotamia long before the
birth of Christ.
In 1846 his great book, giving his reading of the inscriptions at
Behistun, was published in London by the Royal Asiatic Society.
The scientific world was astounded. People thought such a thing
impossible. Many imagined that Rawlinson had invented some sort of
reading of his own for the cuneiform characters. They reasoned that
as there was no guide whatsoever, no man could ever read them.
They reasoned wrongly, as time was to prove. The unearthing in
Mesopotamia of a romantic cylinder of clay, all covered with
arrow-headed characters, brought the longed-for opportunity of
testing whether Rawlinson was right or wrong, whether he had indeed
solved the mystery.
Copies of the cylinder were given to four men who had learned to
read cuneiform writing, among them Rawlinson. Each was asked to make
a translation, and to submit it to the authorities of the British
Museum. The four translations were made, and the authorities sat down
and compared them.
Each translation told the same story of Tiglath-pileser, gave the
same names and dates! It was a wonderful triumph for Rawlinson, for
it proved beyond all doubt that he had indeed solved the mystery of
the dead writing of Persia and Babylon.
Rawlinson himself attributed his triumph to his familiarity with
the local Persian dialects; it was his intimate knowledge of the
languages spoken by the peasants and tribes of Persia that enabled
him to get to the root of many of the words which so sorely puzzled
him. By the time he managed to obtain his copy of the Babylonian
inscription through the aid of the little Kurdish boy, he had already
wrested the secret from the Persian inscription, and his book had
been published a year.
He found the clue to cuneiform in the name of two kings, just as
Young found his first clue in the name of Ptolemy. Before he bent his
energies on deciphering the Behistun inscriptions, he had closely
studied two other inscriptions which were identical but for two
words. Rawlinson, puzzling over these words, at length concluded they
were the names of two kings, that one king was the father and the
other the son. He reasoned correctly, and thus obtained a clue to the
inscriptions at Behistun, the deciphering of which ranks as one of
the greatest achievements of the human brain.
[Illustration:
_By courtesy of the British Museum_
A RARE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ROCK SCULPTURES AT BEHISTUN, SHOWING DARIUS
THE GREAT RECEIVING CAPTIVES OF WAR]
Over five hundred years before the birth of Christ, Darius, King of
Persia, caused an account of his campaigns to be engraved on the rock
in Persian, Babylonian and Median, so that all men who passed that
way might read of the deeds of the great king. A full-length portrait
of the monarch was carved in stone for posterity to gaze on his
features, and to add to his glory he was shown receiving some of the
prisoners captured in his campaigns.
The remarkable skill shown by the Persian king in selecting the site
is proved by the fact that the figures still exist, in spite of the
storms beating on them for two thousand four hundred years. Darius
was not ignorant of human nature. He knew full well the tendency of
man to destroy. To defeat this tendency he had the rock cut away
sheer to the foot of the cliff, while to preserve his inscription
from the ravages of time he caused it all to be brushed with a sort
of yellow varnish, a varnish of such unique quality that some of it
protects the stone to this very day.
We know much, can do many things. We fly in the air, tunnel the
mountains, travel beneath the sea. Yet there is still a little that
is hidden from us; and one thing of which we remain ignorant is the
secret of that old Persian varnish, which will endure frost and hail
and rain and shine for twenty-four centuries.