Cuneiform and the Bible, Lesley Adkins
In the early nineteenth century, the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion embarked on deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, because he was fascinated by the origins of the world and thought he might gain access to texts that were far older than the Bible. In this he was successful, and the full story is told in my book The Keys of Egypt, including his dramatic breakthrough in 1822, followed by his tragically early death a decade later. Had he lived, it is curious to think that he would certainly have followed with interest and energy the last great linguistic challenge – the decipherment of cuneiform – and would have entered into correspondence with the man who did the most for decipherment: Henry Creswicke Rawlinson. I have recently turned my attention to Rawlinson’s story, published as Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon, a story that is full of adventure, linguistic challenges and the discovery of civilizations that were to prove the veracity of Old Testament stories.
Letter sent by the high priest Lu’enna to the king of Lagash (maybe Urukagina), informing him of his son’s death in combat. Terracotta, c. 2400 BC, found in Telloh (ancient Girsu). [http://en.wikipedia.org]
Rawlinson was born in 1810 at Chadlington in Oxfordshire, England, and so was twenty years younger than Champollion. At school, he proved himself very able at Latin and ancient Greek, but decided that he did not want to go to university, but preferred to enter the army. At the age of seventeen he went to India as a military cadet in the East India Company, but his interest in languages did not flag, and he began to learn Hindustani, Marathi and Persian. He was so proficient at Persian that he was sent with a military mission to Persia, nowadays called Iran, where he came face to face with cuneiform inscriptions, initially at the ancient city of Persepolis, but later on he discovered inscriptions carved on rock faces. Many of them were trilingual – written in three languages. The most crucial inscription was on the face of a mountain at Bisitun in western Persia, close to the border with modern-day Iraq, which was an enormous monument carved on the orders of Darius the Great. It was regarded as inaccessible, because the path to it had been quarried away after the inscription was finished. Nobody had reckoned on Rawlinson, though, who by chance was posted to the remote town of Kermanshah, just twenty miles away. Rawlinson had not only become obsessed with cuneiform, he was also an excellent and daring mountaineer.
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In November 1872, George Smith was working at the British Museum in a second-floor room overlooking the bare plane trees in Russell Square. On a long table were pieces of clay tablets, among the hundreds of thousands that archaeologists had shipped back to London from Nineveh, in present-day Iraq, a quarter-century before. Many of the fragments bore cuneiform hieroglyphs, and over the years scholars had managed to reassemble parts of some tablets, deciphering for the first time these records of daily life in Assyria of the 7th and 8th centuries B.C.—references to oxen, slaves, casks of wine, petitions to kings, contracts, treaties, prayers and omens. 