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
Before the decipherment of cuneiform, stories