Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon. Lesley Adkins

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