The last writers of Sumerian were among the last writers of cuneiform: an ever-dwindling community of scholars attached to the great temples at Babylon and Uruk in the last centuries BCE. Long laments in the Emesal register of Sumerian played an important role in their rituals. But after their demise the very existence of Sumerian was forgotten for nearly two thousand years. When in the early nineteenth century European adventurers, historians, and philologists became interested in the ancient Middle East, their focus was on Egypt, Persia, Assyria, and Babylon. Relying on biblical and Classical authors as their guides, it never crossed their minds that the remains of another civilization might lie undetected under the soil.
The Rosetta stone of cuneiform writing is the Bisutun, or Behistun, inscription, an enormous trilingual rock relief carved inaccessibly high up a mountainside in modern Iran near the border with Iraq. The first serious attempt to examine it was made in 1835 by a British diplomat, Henry Rawlinson, who was in Persia as military adviser to the governor of Kurdistan. He managed to climb the cliffs several times in order to make a papier-mache copy of the then unintelligible cuneiform. Within two weeks, and with the help of work that the German scholar Georg Friedrich Grotefend had done on inscriptions from the Persian capital Persepolis, Rawlinson was able to establish that one of the three inscriptions used a 42-letter cuneiform alphabet and started with a description of the Persian king Darius which was almost identical to that given by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus in his Histories. Within three years, after a return to the monument and using his knowledge of Middle and Modern Persian, Rawlinson had deciphered 200 lines of the Old Persian alphabetic inscription—an account of Darius’ rise to power—and presented his work to the Royal Asiatic Society in London and the Societe Asiatique in Paris.
The translation caused a sensation, as it confirmed one of the most unbelievable and romantic stories told by Herodotus. However, there was still much to be done: the other two inscriptions remained undeciphered. In 1844 Rawlinson and three colleagues again climbed the cliffs at Bisutun, now making a complete papier-mache mould. Using this copy, and working on the assumption that all three inscriptions told essentially the same story, Nils Westergaard and Edwin Norris managed to decipher the second. Its script used 131 characters and the language, Elamite, turned out to be an isolate, related to no other known. But the third version of the inscription, which was by far the most complex, remained a mystery. Further evidence was needed—and it wasn’t long in coming.
In the early 1840s rival French and British teams, led by Emile Botta and Henry Layard, had started to dig at the ancient Assyrian capitals of Khorsabad (ancient Dur-Sarrukin), Nimrud (Kalhu), and Nineveh in the north of Iraq. They were finding large numbers of stone inscriptions and clay tablets in the same script as the third Behistun inscription, which they naturally named Assyrian. Decipherment became an international enterprise to which many scholars contributed. It was recognized that Assyrian must be a Semitic language, somehow related to Hebrew and Arabic. Assyrian cuneiform was essentially composed of syllables, but logograms (signs representing whole words) could replace syllabic spellings in otherwise identical texts. But there was still much public scepticism about the success of decipherment, so in 1857 Henry Fox Talbot persuaded the Royal Asiatic Society to hold a competition in which he, Rawlinson, Edward Hincks, and Jules Oppert were each given a copy of the same Assyrian royal inscription to translate independently. When their translations were compared they were virtually identical, and the decipherment of Assyrian could officially be considered essentially complete.
This is where the standard stories of decipherment end; and indeed the continuing study of Akkadian (Assyrian together with its southern neighbour Babylonian) has been relatively unproblematic. But it was a different story for the Sumerian language, whose existence Rawlinson, Fox Talbot, and their contemporaries were only just beginning to discern.
World History
