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