In the 1850s, cuneiform was just a series of baffling scratches on clay, waiting to spill the secrets of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia

By Joshua Hammer

Contributing writer

On a late-summer day in 1856, a letter carrier stepped from a mail coach in front of a three-story townhouse in Mayfair, in central London. Crossing the threshold, the courier handed a wax-sealed envelope to a clerk. The missive was addressed to Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, one of Europe’s leading research institutions.

The postman had no way of knowing that the envelope would help rewrite the story of civilization’s origins and ignite a contest for international renown. At stake: the immortality conferred on those who make a once-in-a-century intellectual breakthrough. Three men—driven by bound-less curiosity, a love of risk, and the distinctive demons of aspiration and ambition—were most responsible for making the contest possible.

One, Austen Henry Layard, was the son of an English colonial civil servant. At age 22, he had fled the drudgery of clerkship in his uncle’s law office for a life of adventure on the backroads of the Ottoman Empire. Bandits robbed him three times and once left him to wander half-naked and barefoot through the desert. He joined a rebellious mountain tribe in Persia and spied in the Balkans for the British ambassador in Constantinople. At last he reached the mounds of Mesopotamia, where he transformed himself into one of the most celebrated archaeologists of the age.

Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, living in the shadow of an accomplished older brother, decided early that he would carve his own identity in exile. As a 23-year-old military officer of the East India Company, he found himself in Persia. There he demonstrated a flair for languages, a skill at scaling heights in search of millennia-old inscriptions and a powerful yearning, he confided to his sister, to do something to attract the world’s attention. In his early 30s, he deciphered the writing of the ancient Persian Empire. The achievement brought Rawlinson his first taste of fame, and more dead languages were waiting to be understood.

Finally, there was Edward Hincks, a country parson in a remote corner of Ireland. Brilliant but tormented by paralyzing anxiety and the specter of financial ruin, Hincks was hungry for peer recognition of his linguistic gifts. Huddled at his rectory desk, he had translated obscure texts written in Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Hebrew. Eventually he set his sights on the most tantalizing prize of them all.

By 1856, the paths of these three men had converged in a sometimes friendly, often combustible pas de trois. Now, with Layard watching from a judicious distance, Hincks and Rawlinson were about to become the prime contestants in a challenge to determine, once and for all, whether the oldest writing system in the world could be deciphered. However esoteric this might sound, the question was the subject of intense public debate in capitals on both sides of the Atlantic. For mid-19th-century Britons, proving that this elusive script could be understood meant pulling back the curtain on a distant, vanished, yet hauntingly familiar world, one that had given birth to humanity’s modern mind.

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Until the 1840s, few Europeans knew anything about the great civilizations that began their rise along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers around 2000 B.C. Assyria and its vassal state (and sometime rival) Babylon had dominated the Near East and beyond. Classical writers described Assyria, which reached its zenith around 700 B.C., as the first true empire; Herodotus wrote that Babylon “surpasses in splendor any city in the known world.” But in the late seventh century B.C. a coalition of enemies destroyed Assyria, and Babylon was neglected, ransacked and left to die out 500 years later. “Today the greatest world city of antiquity is a mound of desert earth,” one theologian wrote. By the mid-1800s, these societies had been almost entirely forgotten. At the British Museum, the world’s pre-eminent repository of antiquities—many seized without the permission of the nations on whose soil they were found—the relics of Assyria and Babylon, including writings inscribed on clay bricks and stone, filled a single three-square-foot cabinet.

But excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum had inspired a new science: investigating antiquity by digging objects out of the earth. And Layard was one of its most spectacularly successful practitioners. Enduring lethal epidemics, stultifying heat, vermin-infested camps and the hostility of Ottoman authorities, he made a series of discoveries beginning in the mid-1840s in what is now northern Iraq: 2,500-year-old Assyrian palaces paneled with exquisite alabaster bas-reliefs and guarded by stone gods and monsters. In vivid detail, the friezes depicted corpse-covered battlefields, battering-ram-wielding soldiers breaking down city ramparts, archers in stallion-drawn chariots, bedraggled captives, vassals bearing tributes, kings attended by eunuchs, and royal lion hunts in the bush. Unreadable inscriptions swirled around the carvings. Layard and his protégé, a Christian Arab from Mosul named Hormuzd Rassam, also unearthed thousands of inscribed clay tablets in the royal library of the Assyrian king Sennacherib at Nineveh. Layard, Rassam and other researchers guessed that the tablets were filled with information about astronomy, medicine, religion, politics, laws and everyday life in the Assyrian Empire.

The rediscovery of this lost civilization seized the public’s imagination. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the Crystal Palace in south London in 1854 to gaze at the “Nineveh Court,” a fanciful reinvention of the royal palace, with lotus gardens, multicolored bas-reliefs and blue-headed bull capitals perched atop Doric columns. Newspapers chronicled the arrival in England of giant winged lions and other stone colossi that testified to Assyria’s artistic mastery and rich mythology. Today, whisking away priceless cultural objects violates every standard of archaeology—international law largely prohibits it—but at the time, such rules and norms weren’t in place, and people were thrilled to see the relics. “The monuments [Layard] has sent home from the plains of Assyria … excited a livelier interest than anything else I saw in the museum,” wrote an American visitor in Mississippi’s Natchez Courier. “There they are, disinterred from the oblivion of ages, the last survivors, the sole historic monuments of Nineveh, her kings, and her people, and her glory!”

For the first time, too, the museum-going and reading public could examine large samples of the vanished civilization’s writing system, a script that predated Egyptian hieroglyphs by centuries. Assyrian and Babylonian scribes had ingeniously used the thick stem of a reed that grows in the wetlands of the Middle East, the Arundo donax, and split these stalks to create a trapezoidal tip. Then they pressed signs into damp clay and fired the inscribed tablets in a kiln, making them almost indestructible. Over time, scribes also carved the characters into copper and stone.

Cuneiform—the term derives from the Latin cuneus, or wedge, referring to the characters’ distinctive shape—lacked the artfulness of hieroglyphs. The contemporary science writer Edward Dolnick has said that the signs looked like “what you might get if a flock of birds with obsessive-compulsive disorder took a walk across wet clay.” But the writing system had taken over the ancient world. It employed both phonetic characters and logograms, or pictorial symbols meant to represent a whole word, and could be used to write different languages. From Mesopotamia, cuneiform had traveled east around 2000 B.C. to the Kingdom of Elam, on the plains of Persia. A few centuries later, the Kingdom of Urartu—southeast of the Black Sea and dominated by the biblical Mount Ararat (where Noah’s ark was said to come to rest after the flood)—adopted the system for its own language, as did the Hittite Empire in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) that reached its zenith during the mid-14th century B.C. A simplified form took hold in Ugarit, a prosperous city-state on the Mediterranean coast, in present-day Syria. Finally, it was embraced by the Persian-speaking Achaemenid Empire, which, under Kings Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, ruled Central Asia and parts of Africa and Europe from the sixth century to the fourth century B.C.

The wedge-based script endured for some 2,500 years. But papyrus gradually supplanted clay, new scripts made cuneiform obsolete, and the 15 languages that used it died out. (The last datable cuneiform tablet, found in the early 1900s in southern Mesopotamia, is an astronomical almanac predicting the appearances of stars, planets and other heavenly bodies, inscribed around A.D. 75.) By the second century A.D., knowledge of the phonetic values and meaning of the characters had faded away.

European travelers first encountered cuneiform in the early 17th century. In the 1760s, examining hundreds of cuneiform inscriptions in the ancient Persian city of Persepolis, a young German named Carsten Niebuhr deduced that the inscriptions were written in three languages, although he couldn’t interpret what any said. All three inscriptions used wedges, but the characters were different. One language, which would soon come to be recognized as Old Persian, used just 42 phonetic characters and pictographs. Another, later identified as Elamite, had about 130 signs. The third, and most complex, with about 700 signs, would become known as Akkadian, named after a city-state that flourished in southern Mesopotamia between around 2300 and 2100 B.C., and used by the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Niebuhr was convinced that each set of trilingual texts said the same thing, but he didn’t go any further than that. He considered himself a geographer, a scientist and an artist, not a decipherer. 

In the 1820s, the Englishman Thomas Young and his rival, the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, solved the riddle of the hieroglyphs by using the Greek text on the trilingual Rosetta Stone as a launching point for deciphering Egyptian pictographs. Scholars could now read the love poetry and funerary texts of the ancient Egyptians, study the military campaigns of the pharaohs, and learn how the dwellers along the Nile treated toothaches, performed surgeries and measured time. But even the most adept philologists could see that cuneiform presented bigger challenges than hieroglyphs. Egyptian logograms often looked like the objects they were meant to stand for: an eagle, a duck, a beetle, a pyramid. Or they conveyed an idea through an illustration that, in at least a vague way, related to their meaning. A teetering diagonal wall, for instance, represented “falling.” A lute-like musical instrument was meant to symbolize “joy” or “pleasure.” Akkadian, which was an entirely abstract script, provided no such clues to signs’ meanings. 

Now in the 1850s, following Layard’s finds, the public clamored for linguists to unravel the mysteries of cuneiform, too. Religious believers were thrilled by the possibility that the royal annals of Babylon and of Assyria’s capitals at Nineveh and Nimrud might corroborate tales from the Old Testament. The Hebrew prophets, for example, had described how Assyria had deported ten Israelite tribes from Samaria in 721 B.C. and its siege of Jerusalem 20 years later. These accounts were not corroborated by other surviving records, however, and at a time when atheists, agnostics and other post-Enlightenment skeptics were casting doubt on Scripture, the writing could turn out to prove the veracity of the word of God. 

And cuneiform dangled the possibility of peering back even further in time. New excavations along the Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia had turned up tablets written in cuneiform that appeared to predate the finds at Nineveh by nearly 2,000 years, originating around 2500 B.C. The characters were familiar, but the language seemed different. If this far more ancient script were deciphered, it would offer insights into the cradle of civilization, which would come to be known as Sumer. In this flat, fertile zone, humans established the first permanent communities, developed agriculture, scratched out pictures of objects that became writing and slowly organized themselves into complex hierarchical societies that remain recognizable today. Could it truly be possible to read records preserved from this distant time?

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By the 1850s, both Rawlinson and Hincks, after years of stumbling into linguistic dead ends, claimed to be making great progress understanding the “arrowhead script.” Hincks had taken the first great strides in deciphering Akkadian cuneiform in 1846, by searching for the names of ancient Persian kings in the parallel inscriptions that Niebuhr had found in Persepolis. He believed the names would have been pronounced approximately the same way in Old Persian and Akkadian. Hincks, Rawlinson and other linguists had separately deciphered Old Persian, so he lined it up with the Akkadian signs, just as Thomas Young had matched ancient Greek letters with hieroglyphs. Hincks had obtained the approximate phonetic value of more than 100 Akkadian characters this way. The same year, Hincks also noticed that the seven-character phonetic spelling of the word “king” in Old Persian became a single character when it was written in Akkadian. This gave him, he believed, his first Akkadian logogram—though it would take him several years before he figured out how to pronounce the word. Well before Rawlinson, Hincks grasped that Akkadian writing, like hieroglyphs, consisted of both phonetic symbols and logograms. Hincks had also been way ahead of Rawlinson in recognizing that Akkadian was a Semitic language and was closely related to Hebrew, another language in which Hincks was fluent.

By the early 1850s, Rawlinson had largely caught up with Hincks. Scholars, literary journals and the public marveled at both men’s supposed insights. But even as the rivalry between the decipherers grew more intense, they agreed on one thing: The writing of Babylon and Assyria was bewilderingly complex. Its most striking characteristic was what was called polyphony: Many characters, they maintained, could be read in six, seven, even eight different ways. Skeptics accused Hincks and Rawlinson of perpetrating a hoax to cover up their befuddlement: If this claim were true, one critic pointed out, then the eight-character name that Hincks claimed meant “Nebuchadnezzar,” the Babylonian king who had captured Jerusalem around 586 B.C., could be read in no fewer than 393,216 ways. Given such confusion, it was widely feared that the writing would never be cracked. 

But in 1854, a unique opportunity presented itself. Layard’s protégé, Rassam, had discovered a relic buried beneath a temple in what was believed to be the oldest Assyrian capital, Ashur, in the semi-desert 40 miles south of Mosul. The octagonal column, known as a “prism,” was inscribed with 800 lines of tiny cuneiform characters. It was believed to date to 1100 B.C.—a time when war was raging between the Greeks and Trojans and the prophet Samuel led the Israelites to victory against the Philistines. The cylinder was sent to the British Museum. (It is still on display there.) Rawlinson, who had close ties to the museum, was working on an official translation, and the institution planned to publish it as soon as it was done.

As he proceeded, a wealthy inventor with a passion for intellectual puzzles burst onto the scene. William Henry Fox Talbot had made his name two decades earlier by devising a method for fixing images from life onto chemically treated, light-sensitive paper. The breakthrough had earned him a nickname, “the father of photography,” which he shared with the Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Talbot had lately devoted himself to a new enthusiasm: Assyro-Babylonian decipherment. 

Talbot dispatched a letter—the letter that would change everything—to London’s Royal Asiatic Society, offering to send in his own translation and have a panel of judges compare his work with Rawlinson’s. If the versions turned out to be identical—or even close—“it must indicate that they have Truth for their basis,” he wrote. After a negotiation with Rawlinson and the British Museum, Talbot received a lithograph copy of the inscriptions in January 1857 and got to work.

On March 21, two dozen members of the society converged on 5 New Burlington Street for their regular Saturday conclave, filing through the spacious interior, checking their topcoats and hats, and making their way to a ground-floor gallery. Sitting in the room was another man, a guest: a 31-year-old classicist and adventurer named Julius Oppert. Born in Hamburg, Oppert was a descendant of Samuel Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish banker. After he was denied a position at German universities because of institutional antisemitism, Oppert had joined a three-year French archaeological expedition in Babylon and northern Mesopotamia. Now, his star was on the rise, and he asked if he could undertake a translation as well. “By affording three independent versions of the same document,” he argued, an agreement among the decipherers could be even more persuasive.

But what about Hincks? The churchman had a fraught relationship with Rawlinson, which was marked by accusations of stolen credit, public disputes and a private snub by the British Museum that had cost Hincks part of his livelihood. Edwin Norris, the society’s secretary, was determined to give Hincks his due, and he recommended that the society dispatch lithographs of the texts to the reclusive pastor at his rectory in Killyleagh, south of Belfast.

Norris proposed a two-month deadline for all the submissions. At that point, a six-man panel of judges, including some of the most renowned historians and linguists in England, would compare the four translations. Norris fixed a meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society for Wednesday, May 20, when the four sealed packets would be opened before witnesses and the “literary inquest” could take place.

For Rawlinson, Talbot, Oppert and Hincks, this was no ordinary race to the finish line. To convince the public that their translations weren’t hoaxes, they all had to be right in their interpretations. Each still hoped to be the most right, but they knew their competitors couldn’t be far behind. The stakes were huge: They could immortalize their names in the field of linguistic archaeology, unlocking the secrets of the world’s first great civilizations. Or they could humiliate themselves before their peers, their government and a global public. 

The game was on.

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The 3,000-year-old enigmatic prism that the esteemed linguists would now attempt, independently, to transliterate and translate was about the height of a bowling pin. Rawlinson, who had gotten the jump on everyone else while ensconced as the British ambassador in Baghdad in the mid-1850s, claimed that its 800 lines of Akkadian-language cuneiform script contained the annals of Tiglath-Pileser I, who had expanded the Assyrian Empire to Syria and the Mediterranean Sea around 1100 B.C. He also maintained that they chronicled the king’s military campaigns, building projects, temple consecrations, hunting expeditions and tributes paid by vassals from far-flung corners of the empire. All were described with tiny characters pressed together on a 16-inch-high fired-clay column held together by gum-water and chalk. Now the three other participants in the challenge would either back up his initial claims—or show them to be pure hogwash.

Over the next three weeks, Norris assembled his panel of judges. None considered himself an expert in Semitic tongues, but that didn’t matter. Their job was to compare the four participants’ English translations, note similarities and discrepancies, and confirm that “the versions sent in were made independently, the seals of the translators having been broken in their presence.” 

Norris wrote that he had confidence in the decipherers and expected the four versions would closely resemble one another. Yet whether Oppert’s and Hincks’ translations were any good seemed almost—to this corner of the British establishment—of little importance. Oppert’s participation stemmed from the fact that he’d happened to be a guest of the society in March, when Talbot’s challenge was announced. As for Hincks, he was an outsider brought in at the last minute. In fact, the lithographed copy of the cylinder finally arrived at Hincks’ rectory only on April 26, inexplicably after more than a month of preparation by the British Museum. By then, the parson had just 18 days to submit his translation to the society. “I will translate as much as I can,” he wrote to Talbot, “but the time allowed is so short that I shall probably not go through much more than half of the inscription.” 

Embroiled in a bitter rivalry with Rawlinson, Hincks was all but certain that the diplomat—a proud, territorial and sometimes ruthless figure—had sabotaged him by delaying the delivery of the inscription to Ireland. The parson already accused Rawlinson of trying to steal credit for his scholarly insights. The pattern dated to 1849, when Hincks first recognized “compound logograms” in Akkadian—the juxtaposition of two logographic characters to make an entirely new word. (For instance, “son” plus “woman” made “daughter.”) Hincks had also spotted “syllabaries”—tablets made for aspiring scribes that listed logograms with their phonetic values—in a trove of inscriptions that Layard brought to Killyleagh in 1852. But Rawlinson insisted that he had found compound logograms before Hincks—and that he had discovered syllabaries, too, while poring through clay tablets in the library of Sennacherib at Nineveh.

Then there was the period in 1853 and 1854 when Hincks had spent several fruitful months at the British Museum, inching closer, it appeared, to escaping from the obscurity of a rector’s life in rural Ireland. Ensconced in a workroom in the museum’s bowels, Hincks had labored hours at a stretch over the museum’s prizes, filling notebooks with an outpouring of translations and annotations. But when his one-year employment agreement ended on June 6, 1854, the trustees delivered dismaying news: They were not renewing his contract. Had Rawlinson, Hincks wondered, played a role in his ouster?

There was also the matter of his two black spiral notebooks, which, in his hasty exit, he had left behind in his workroom. They contained “a mass of information which is (I flatter myself—indeed I have no doubt) of very great value,” he told Layard, who had become a confidant. He feared they would fall into Rawlinson’s hands. “I have no doubt,” he wrote to Layard, “that he will be allowed free access to all that the museum possesses. I am thus disheartened.”

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On Wednesday, May 20, 1857, the judges gathered at the Royal Asiatic Society’s townhouse on New Burlington Street. The eminences filed into the ground-floor ballroom, filled with mementos collected during members’ Asian travels. Indian javelins, daggers from Yemen and a samurai sword hung on the walls. A large cabinet held Chinese amulets designed to ward off demons and bring good fortune. There were kits for smoking opium, Sanskrit scrolls, the skin of a 13-foot boa constrictor and a giant coconut from the South Seas. A brass globe of the zodiac, crafted by the chief astronomer of Mosul in A.D. 1275, displayed 48 constellations. An Egyptian mummy had once been on exhibit, dissected by a physician for fellow members, until complaints about the “unpleasant smell” had obliged him to donate the 3,000-year-old corpse to the King’s College Museum.

The chairman of the committee, Henry Hart Milman, unsealed the envelopes in front of his colleagues. Another judge attested that “the four translations had been made by them in different and distant places,” and that the four men had not had “any communication with each other.” H.H. Wilson, the society’s president, noted that Hincks had completed only 28 of the 54 sections in the abbreviated time he’d been given. Oppert, working at French government expense in London, had finished just 21. “[Only] those of Mr. Fox Talbot and Sir Henry Rawlinson are entire,” Wilson added.

Then the panel began to read and compare the translations.

The results initially looked less than promising. Each translator had struggled with unfamiliar vocabulary and a multiplicity of potential character readings. The decipherers disagreed over the names of wild animals, cities, countries and vassal kings. In one account of a royal hunt, Rawlinson identified the prey as “wild buffaloes.” Hincks called them “wild elephants.” Talbot, at a loss, used the Akkadian word amsi (elephant). Oppert didn’t answer at all. What Rawlinson called “300 fugitive heretics,” Hincks referred to as “300 fugitive female slaves.” Many Akkadian logograms simply confounded them.

Yet as the judges dove deeper into the translations, they were struck by the extent to which the four decipherers did agree with one another. In one paragraph, the participants named 39 countries “in the same manner exactly,” the judges noted. Later in the annals, the four translated an account of one of Tiglath- Pileser I’s military campaigns with striking similarity: 

Rawlinson: “Then I went on to the country of Comukha, which was disobedient and withheld the tribute and offerings due to Ashur my lord.”

Hincks: “At that time I went to a disaffected part of Qummukh, which had withheld the tribute by weight and tale belonging to Ashur, my lord.”

Talbot: “I then advanced against Kummikhi, a land of the unbelievers who had refused to pay taxes and tribute unto Ashur, my lord.”

Oppert: “In these days I went to the people of Dummukh, the enemy who owed tributes and gifts to the god Assur, my lord.”

The judges also critiqued the work of each decipherer. Oppert produced a translation with tortured English prose and wide divergences from the others. (“It is to be regretted,” the panel wrote, “that Dr. Oppert did not translate into French, in which language his version would have been more clear and precise.”) The judges looked favorably on Talbot, who had taken an interest in Assyriology only a few years earlier. But they bestowed their highest accolades on Hincks and Rawlinson, “who are understood to have prosecuted the study for the longest time and with the greatest assiduity.” Their submissions displayed “the closest coincidence,” and in hundreds of cases the two had arrived at the same conclusions.

The panel’s verdict was unanimous. The results were “remarkable,” the judges declared. “There was a strong correspondence in the meaning assigned, and occasionally a curious identity of expression as to particular words.” When Norris made the verdict public in early June, British literary journals, newspapers and magazines endorsed the judgment and celebrated the achievement as one of the most significant scholarly breakthroughs of the 19th century. Paul Haupt, a leading scholar of ancient writing at Johns Hopkins University, later declared the result “a complete triumph for the Assyriologists.” The Athenaeum, a magazine with perhaps 10,000 highly educated and influential readers, declared that the test “has been now carried out in a manner which … ought to set the question definitively at rest.” Chambers’s Journal, a popular weekly magazine of literature, science and the arts with more than 80,000 readers, concluded that cuneiform, with its “arrow-headed character, so inexplicable but a few years past, is … an unraveled mystery.”

The scholars’ success at deciphering Akkadian enabled them to begin translating Sumerian, a completely unrelated language that used the same cuneiform symbols. The thousands of inscriptions excavated in southern Mesopotamia contained insights into Sumerian culture, customs, daily life and literature. More than 1,000 years older than the Akkadian inscriptions from Nineveh, they laid out the entire Sumerian cosmology, beginning with Enki, the god of water and wisdom. Scholars also found land-acquisition and marriage contracts, including a list of witnesses who had rolled their seals over the margin of the clay envelope. A tablet from ancient Uruk described the 12 signs of the Zodiac. There were books filled with proverbs, and one prism from 1740 B.C. showed eight mathematical problems, including quadratic equations used to determine the dimensions of a rectangle. And there were also narrative poems about the creation of man. In the simplest one, the god Enki fashions a human being out of clay and binds “upon it the image of the gods.”

Perhaps the most momentous discovery came in the early 1870s, when George Smith, a 32-year-old self-taught Akkadian scholar from a working-class London family, was perusing the collection at the British Museum during a lunch break from his job at a printing press. He came across a 6-inch-by-5-inch tablet from Nineveh that told a story of a king named Uta-napshti. Informed by a deity that a flood will sweep over the world, the king builds a large boat and climbs inside it. Later, the boat comes to rest on a mountain, which is followed, Smith wrote, “by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no resting place and returning.” The fragment of the “Great Flood” tablet Smith translated was a copy of an original text that came to be known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was probably written a few hundred years before the story of Noah in Genesis, which most scholars think dates to around 1400 B.C. One of the foundational myths of Western civilization, Smith found, had originated on the Mesopotamian flood plain. 

Smith would have little time to bask in his global celebrity. In 1876, the British Museum dispatched him on his third expedition to Nineveh. On the journey home, he fell ill with dysentery and died in Aleppo; he was 36 years old.

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The bad feelings between Hincks and Rawlinson didn’t fade after the Royal Asiatic Society challenge. In late spring 1857, Hincks received confirmation from Talbot of what he’d long suspected: Rawlinson’s friends at the British Museum had been conspiring against him all along. Back in June 1854, the day after the museum terminated its contract with him,
Henry Ellis, its principal librarian, wrote to Rawlinson in Baghdad to invite him to inspect Hincks’ black notebooks and offering to send him copies. Later that year, William Sandys Wright Vaux, a curator of antiquities, sent Rawlinson a 12-page excerpt—translations, notes about Hincks’ methodology and commentaries on the texts. It is not known what use, if any, Rawlinson made of the material, but sharing Hincks’ notebooks with his archrival—and without his permission—was a shocking breach of trust.

The notebooks themselves languished on Vaux’s desk until late 1857, when the trustees placed them in the British Museum’s Manuscripts Department, finally making them accessible to the public. Hincks, plagued by jaundice and other maladies as he aged, kept working until his last hours. He was sorting through ideas about the acceleration of the moon’s rate of revolution, and had just sent an article about an ancient lunar eclipse to a journal in Berlin, when he died suddenly at home in 1866 at age 74. His death merited just a few short notices in the British press, several of which talked about his thwarted ambitions. 

For decades afterward, Rawlinson was almost universally regarded as the genius who deciphered both Old Persian and Akkadian cuneiform. The war hero, diplomat and aristocrat enjoyed the support of the British establishment, from the British Museum’s board of trustees to Assyriologists at its elite universities. When he died in 1895 at age 84 he received a hero’s sendoff at a packed memorial service at St. George’s Church in Mayfair’s Hanover Square. One scholar coined the phrase “the Rawlinson Method” to describe the decipherment process, omitting any mention of Hincks. A leading Assyriologist at the University of Chicago had pronounced Rawlinson the “Father of Assyriology,” saying that Rawlinson “was the first to make the discovery of an inscription of any length and importance,” and, dubiously, “the first to translate an Assyrian inscription.” 

In recent years, though, growing numbers of Assyriologists have challenged that view. “It is Hincks, and he nearly alone, who made it possible to read, once again, the memorials of the world’s first civilization,” Peter T. Daniels, a past president of the International Linguistic Association and an expert in ancient writing systems, said in a 1992 lecture on the bicentennial of the Irish clergyman’s birth. Irving Finkel, a philologist and Assyriologist at the British Museum, calls Rawlinson “a bully” who stomped over Hincks and tried to deny him credit for his accomplishments.

The debate over who was first has sometimes distracted from the grandeur of what the British Assyriologist A.H. Sayce called “the archaeological romance of the 19th century.” In 1905, Sayce ranked the cracking of cuneiform above even Champollion’s and Young’s decipherment of hieroglyphs. “The very names of the Assyrian kings and of the gods they worshipped had been lost and forgotten; and the characters themselves were but conventional groups of wedges, not pictures of objects and ideas like the hieroglyphics of Egypt,” he wrote. Thanks to Rawlinson and Hincks, and to a lesser extent Oppert and Talbot, “the ancient East has risen, as it were, from the dead, with its politics and its wars, its law and its trade, its art, its industries, and its science.” Sayce ended with an homage to a German high school teacher and amateur decipherer who, in 1802, looked at Aramaic-related inscriptions at the Persian necropolis of Naqsh-e Rustam, and surmised that they could be used to translate, word for word, Old Persian texts at nearby Persepolis. “And this revelation of a new world, this resurrection of a dead past,” Sayce wrote, “has started from a successful guess.” 

Adapted from The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer to be published by Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission. Copyright © 2025 by Joshua Hammer.