Transcript

3.13.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated March April
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twenty twenty five. As a reminder, RADIOI is a reading
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service intended for people who are blind or have other
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disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material. Please
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join me now for the first article, which is Part
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two of the mystery of the world's oldest writing system,
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remained unsolved until four competitive scholars raced to decipher it.
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By Joshua Hammer. In Part one, we learned that in
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the eighteen fifties, Hunia form was a mysterious script from
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ancient Mesopotamia waiting to be deciphered. The main scholars involved
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were Austin Henry Layard, Henry Creswick Rawlinson, and Edward Hinks,
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each driven by curiosity and ambition with diverse backgrounds inexperience.
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In Part one we also learned a great deal about
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the significance of Kidneyiform, the writing system used by ancient
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civilizations like Assyria and Babylon, was crucial for understanding early
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human history and verifying biblical accounts. The complexity of Cuneiform,
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with many characters having multiple meanings, made deciphering difficult, leading
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to skepticism about its feasibility. In eighteen fifty four, a
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prism from Asher with eight hundred lines of Cuneiform offered
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a unique opportunity for scholars to test their deciphering skills.
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William Henry Fox Talbot proposed a challenge to compare translations
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of the prism, involving Rawlinson, Hincks, and Julius Obert. The
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translations aimed to prove the accuracy of their deciphering, potentially
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immortalizing the scholars and unlocking ancient secrets. Hanks faced delays
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and rivalry with Rawlinson, receiving the PRISM's lithograph late and
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having limited time to complete his translation. That's where we
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pick up Part two. Embroiled in a bitter rivalry with Rawlinson,
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Hanks was all but certain that the diplomat, a proud
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territorial and sometimes ruthless figure, had sabotaged him by delaying
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the delivery of the inscription to Ireland, where he lived.
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The parson already accused Rollinson of trying to steal credit
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for his scholarly insights. The pattern dated to eighteen forty nine,
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when Hanks first recognized compound lagograms in Acadian the juxtaposition
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of two logographic characters to make an entirely new word,
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for instance, son plus woman made daughter. Hanks had also
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spotted syllaberries, tablets made for aspiring scribes that listed logograms
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with the phonetic values in a trove of inscriptions that
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Layard brought to Killile in eighteen fifty two, but Rolinson
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insisted that he had found compound logograms before Hinks, and
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that he had discovered syllaberries too, while pouring through clay
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tablets in the library of Senakireb at Nineveh. Then there
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was the period in eighteen fifty three and eighteen fifty
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four when Hinks had spent several fruitful months at the
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British Museum, inching closer it appeared to escaping from the
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obscurity of a rector's life in rural Ireland. Ensconstin a
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work room in the museum's bowels, Hinks had labored hours
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at a stretch over the museum's prizes, filling note books
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with an outpouring of translations and annotations. But when his
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one year employment agreement ended on June sixth, eighteen fifty four,
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the trustees delivered dismaying news they were not renewing his contract.
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Had Rawlinson, hinks, wondered, played a role in his ouster.
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There was also the matter of his two black spiral
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note books, which in his hasty exit, he had left
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behind in his work room. They contained a mass of
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information which is I flatter myself. Indeed, I have no
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doubt of very great value, he told Layard, who had
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become a confidant. He feared they would fall into Rawlinson's hands.
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I have no doubt, he wrote to Layard, that he
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will be allowed free access to all that the museum possesses.
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I am thus disheartened. On Wednesday, May twentieth, eighteen fifty seven,
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the judges gathered at the Royal Asiatic Society's town house
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on New Burlington Street. The eminences filed into the ground
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floor ball room, filled with mementos collected during members Asian travels,
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Indian javelins, daggers from Yemen, and a samurai's sword hung
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on the walls. A large cabinet held Chinese amulets designed
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to ward off demons and bring good fortune. There were
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kits for smoking opium, Sanskrit scrolls, the skin of a
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thirteen foot boa constrictor and a giant cocoanut from the
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South Seas. A brass globe of the zodiac crafted by
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the chief astronomer of Mosul in a d twelve seventy five,
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displayed forty eight constellations. An Egyptian mummy had once been
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on exhibit dissected by a physician for fellow members, until
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complaints about the unpleasant smell had obliged him to donate
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to three thousand year old corps to the King's College Museum.
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The chairman of the committee, Henry hart Milman, unsealed the
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envelopes in front of his colleagues. Another judge attested that
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the four translations had been made by them in different
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and distant places, and that the four men had not
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had any communication with each other. H. H. Wilson, the
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Society's president, noted that Hanks had completed only twenty eight
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of the fifty four sections in the abbreviated time he
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had been given oppert working at French government expense in London,
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had finished just twenty one. Only those of mister Fox
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Talbot and Sir Henry Rawlinson our entire. Wilson added the
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results initially looked less than promising. Each translator had struggled
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with unfamiliar vocabulary and a multiplicity of potential character readings.
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The decipherers had disagreed over the names of wild animals, cities, countries,
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and vassal kings. In one account of a royal hunt,
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Rawlinson identified the prey as wild buffaloes. Hanks called them
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wild elephants. Talbot, at a loss, used the Accadian word
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amsey or elephant. Oppert didn't answer at all what Rolinson
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called three hundred fugitive heretics. Hanks referred to as three
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hundred fugitive female slaves. Many Accadian logograms simply confounded them.
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Yet as the judges dove deeper into the translations, they
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were struck by the extent to which the four decipherers
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did agree with one another. In one paragraph, the participants
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named thirty nine countries in the same manner exactly the
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judges noted later in the annals, the four translated an
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account of one of Tilglith Pelliser's the First's military campaigns
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with striking similarity. Rolinson, then I went on to the
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country of Comuca, which was disobedient and withheld the tribute
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and offerings due to Asher my Lord Hanks. At that time,
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I went to a disaffected part of Kmuch, which had
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withheld the tribute by weight and tail, belonging to Asher
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my Lord Talbot. I then advanced against Kumukie, a land
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of the unbelievers, who had refused to pay taxes and
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tribute unto Asher my Lord Obert. In these days I
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went to the people of Dummuk, the enemy, who owed
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tributes and gifts to the god Asser my Lord. The
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judges also critiqued the work of each decipherer. Opert produced
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a translation with tortured English prose and wide divergences from
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the others. It is to be regretted. The panel wrote
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that doctor Apert did not translate into French, in which
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language his version would have been more clear and precise.
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The judges looked favorably on Talbot, who had taken an
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interest in assyriology only a few years earlier, but they
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bestowed their highest accolades on Hinks and Rawlinson, who are
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understood to have prosecuted the study for the longest time
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and with the greatest assiduity. Their submissions displayed the closest coincidence,
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and in hundreds of cases the two had arrived at
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the same conclusions. The panel's verdict was unanimous. The results
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were remarkable. The judges declared there was a strong correspondence
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in the meaning assigned and occasionally a curious identity of
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expression as to particular words. When Norris made the verdict
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public in early June, British literary journals, newspapers and magazines
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endorsed the judgment and celebrated the achievement as one of
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the most significant scholarly breakthroughs of the nineteenth century. Paul Houped,
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a leading scholar of ancient writing at Johns Hopkins University,
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later declared the result a complete triumph for the assyriologists.
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The Athenaeum, a magazine with perhaps ten thousand highly educated
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and influential readers, declared that the test has been now
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carried out in a manner which ought to set the
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question definitively. At Rest Chambers Journal, a popular weekly magazine
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of literature, science, and the arts with more than eighty
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thousand readers, concluded that Cuneiform, with its arrow headed character
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so inexplicable but a few years past, is an unraveled mystery.
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The scholar's success at deciphering Acadian enabled them to begin
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translating Sumerian, a completely unrelated language that used the same
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cuneiform symbols. The thousands of inscriptions excavated in southern Mesopotamia
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contained insights into Sumerian culture, customs, daily life, and literature.
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More than one thousand years older than the Acadian inscriptions
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from Nineveh, they laid out the entire Sumerian cosmology, beginning
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with Enki, the god of water and wisdom. Scholars also
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found land quisicians and marriage contracts, including a list of
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witnesses who had rolled their seals over the margin of
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the clay envelope. A tablet from ancient Uruk described the
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twelve signs of the zodiac. There were books filled with proverbs,
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and one prism from seventeen forty b c. Showed eight
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mathematical problems, including quadratic equations used to determine the dimensions
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of a rectangle, and there were also narrative poems about
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the creation of man. In the simplest one, the god
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Inky fashions a human being out of clay and binds
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upon it the image of the gods. Perhaps the momentous
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discovery came in the early eighteen seventies, when George Smith,
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a thirty two year old self taught Acadian scholar from
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a working class London family, was perusing the collection at
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the British Museum during a lunch break from his job
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at a printing press. He came across a six inch
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by five five inch tablet from Nineveh that told a
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story of a king named Uttenopsti. Informed by a deity
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that a flood will sweep over the world, the king
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builds a large boat and climbs inside it. Later, the
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boat comes to rest on a mountain, which is followed,
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Smith wrote by the account of the sending forth of
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the dove, and its finding no resting place, and returning
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the fragment of the Great Flood. Tablet Smith translated was
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a copy of an original text that came to be
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known as the Epoch of Gilgamesh. It was probably written
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a few hundred years before the story of Noah and Genesis,
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which most scholars think dates to around fourteen hundred b C.
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One of the foundational myths of Western civilization. Smith found
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had originated on the Mesopotamian flood plain. Smith would have
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little time to bask in his global celebrity. In eighteen
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seventy six, the British Museum despatched him on his third
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expedition to Nineveh. On the journey home, he fell ill
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with dysentery and died in Aleppo. He was thirty six
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years old. The bad feelings between Hanks and Rolinson didn't
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fade after the Royal Asiatic Society Challenge. In late spring
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eighteen fifty seven, Hinks received confirmation from Talbot of what
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he'd long suspected. Rolinson's friends at the British Museum had
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been conspiring against him all along. Back in June eighteen
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fifty four, the day after the Museum terminated its contract
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with him, Henry Ellis, its principal librarian, wrote to Rolinson
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in Baghdad to invite him to inspect Hanks's Black notebooks,
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and offering to send him copies. Later that year, William
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Sandy's write Vokes, a curator of Antiquities, sent Rolinson a
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twelve page excerpt translations, notes about Hank's methodology, and commentaries
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on the texts. It's not known what use, if any,
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Rollinson made of the material, but sharing Hinks's note books
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with his arch rival and without his permission, was a
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shocking breach of trust. The note books themselves languished on
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Volkes's desk until late eighteen fifty seven, when the trustees
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placed them in the British Museum's Manuscript's department, finally making
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them accessible to the public. Hinks, plagued by jaundice and
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other maladies as he aged, kept working until his last hours.
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He was sorting through ideas about the acceleration of the
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moon's rate of revolution, and had just sent an article
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about an ancient lunar eclipse to a journal in Berlin
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when he died suddenly at home in eighteen sixty six
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at age seventy four. His death merited just a few
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short notices in the British press, several of which talked
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about his thwarted ambitions. For decades after word, Rawlinson was
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almost universally regarded as the genius who deciphered both Old
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Persian and Accadian Cuneiform. The war hero, diplomat and aristocrat
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enjoyed the support of the British establishment, from the British
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Museum's board of trustees to assyriologists at its elite universities.
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When he died in eighteen ninety five at age eighty four,
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he received a hero's sendoff at a packed memorial service
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at Saint George's Church in Mayfair's Hanover Square. One scholar
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coined the phrase the Rawlinson method to describe the decipherment
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process omitting any mention of Hinks. A leading a syriologist
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at the University of Chicago had pronounced Rolinson the father
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of the Syriology, saying that Rolinson was the first to
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make the discovery of an inscription of any length and importance,
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and dubiously the first to translate an Assyrian. In recent years,
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though growing numbers of Assyriologists have challenged that view, it
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is Hanks, and he nearly alone, who made it possible
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to read once again the memorials of the world's first civilization,
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Peter T. Daniels, a past president of the International Linguistic
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Association and an expert in ancient writing systems, said in
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a nineteen ninety two lecture on the bicentennial of the
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Irish Clergyman's birth. Irving Finkel, a philologist and assyriologist at
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the British Museum, calls Rolinson a bully who stomped over
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Hanks and tried to deny him credit for his accomplishments.
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The debate over who was first has sometimes distracted from
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the grandeur of what the British assyriologist A. H. Saycey
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called the archaeological romance of the nineteenth century in nineteen
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o five. If Saci ranked the cracking of cuniform above
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even Champollion's and Young's decipherment of hieroglyphs, the very names
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of the Assyrian kings and of the gods they worshiped
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had been lost and forgotten, and the characters themselves were
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but conventional groups of wedges, not pictures of objects and ideas,
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like the hieroglyphs of Egypt. He wrote, thanks to Rolinson
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and Hanks, and to a lesser extent Oppert and Talbot,
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the ancient East has risen, as it were from the dead,
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with its politics and its wars, its law and its trade,
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its arts, its industries, and its science. Says ended with
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an homage to a German high school teacher, an amateur
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decipherer who in eighteen o two looked at Aramaic related
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inscriptions at the Persian necropolis of Nakshi Rostam and surmised
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that they could be used to translate word for word
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Old Persian texts at nearby Persepolis. And this revelation of
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a new world, this resurrection of a dead past, Sacy wrote,
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has started from a successful guess next, how one of
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history's most famous and beloved movies was almost forgotten. Citizen
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Kane was a Titanic achievement in film, but failed to
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be recognized as such until years later by John Semley.
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When Citizen Kane premiered on May first, nineteen forty one,
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it wasn't at some historic Hollywood theater or even at
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one of New York's fancy movie houses. Instead, the film,
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destined to become the most admired of all time, opened
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more modestly at a former vaudeville hall on Broadway. All
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glitzier plans had been scuttled by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hurst,
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who believed correct that the film was a thinly veiled
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indictment of him. Hurst banned his many newspapers from even
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mentioning orson Wells's filmmaking debut, and in many accounts, the
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magnate had offered a handsome bounty worth more than the
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film's budget to purchase the negatives simply for the pleasure
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of destroying it. Wells later said a Hurst minion had
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tried unsuccessfully to frame Wells by sending a fourteen year
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old girl to his hotel room. It was a full
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lawn campaign to derail the career of the twenty five
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year old filmmaker before it had begun. Thanks to Hurst's boycott,
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Citizen Kane was a box office flop, losing the studio
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RKO at least one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a
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bit more than three million dollars to day. Even though
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many early reviewers were gobsmacked, the critic Bosley Crowther, writing
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in The New York Times, praised the outsize ambitions of writer,
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direct doctor, producer Star Wells, celebrating the young attour for
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his brash style, which showed more verve and inspired ingenuity
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than any of the elder craftsmen have exhibited in years.
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Equal parts bootstrap fable think Horatio Alger and tragedy think
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Doctor Faustus, the movie tells the story of Charles Foster Kane,
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who rises from a modest Colorado boarding house to the
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highest echelonce of American power as a cockshore media magnate
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whose meaty fingers could tip the scale of world power,
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and whose cryptic last words before dying Rosebud provides the
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mystery that drives the film. Yet Wells's startlingly new approach
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to visual storytelling elevated the rags to riches template into
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high tragedy and uncomfortable satire. Bucking convention at every turn,
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Wells skipped around chronology freely, using inventive dissolves and edits
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to move the viewer back and forth in time. The
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small touches were ground breaking. One famous shot in the
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first minutes of the film, showing reflections in a smashed
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snow globe, anticipates the film's grand themes of ambition and
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legacy and the cracked mirror of memory. Wells attributed these
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innovations to his own ignorance as a first time filmmaker
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entering Hollywood from a career in theater and radio. It's
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only when you know something about a profession, he told
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an interviewer, that you're timid or careful. After its unhappy
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opening in the United States, the film receded until a
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detailed nineteen forty seven essay by the French critic Andrea Basin,
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who went on to co found The iconic French film
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magazine Cahiers du Cinema hailed Citizen Kane as a revolution
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in film language. French critics and filmmakers championed the film,
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and Americans gave it another chance. It was released for
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a second time in the States in nineteen fifty six
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to a broader and more appreciative audience. By nineteen sixty two,
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a survey of around seventy esteemed movie critics hailed it
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as the greatest movie ever made. It is also one
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of the most influential. In particular, wells endless capacity for experimentation,
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combined with his bull headed persona, was a central inspiration
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for the new Hollywood directors of the nineteen seventies. The
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one key element we learned from Wells was the power
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of ambition. The director Martin Scorsese said once he is
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responsible for inspiring more people to be film directors than
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any one else in the history of cinema. In a
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tragic turn, Hurst's hatred manager to do lasting damage to
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Wells professionally, the brilliant filmmaker and star found himself having
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to battle with studios for artistic control, often struggling to
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fund projects for the rest of his life and never
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once made again a movie that turned a prophet in
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his lifetime. Wells once joked of his career began at
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the top and have been working my way down ever since.
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The long shadow of Hurst's curse has only deepened the
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sense of mystique around wells most famous and in some
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ways most enigmatic movie. One could argue that Wells has
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triumphed against Hurst in the battle of legacies. So the
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Hurst estate seemed to admit in twenty fifteen when it
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finally screened Citizen Kane at the Magnate's famously garish castle
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in San Simeon, California. Regardless, the film's scandalous backstory remains
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an essential component of its all American greatness. In her
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nineteen seventy one book length New Yorker essay about the
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film's production, critic Pauline Cale contended that Hurst ultimately became
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the victim of his own style of journalism. That is
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to say, Wells had matched Hurst in his capacity for sensationalism,
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crafting a brilliant feature film that doubled as its own
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sort of yellow journalism. In this way, Citizen Kane was
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not only a high water mark for the American cinema
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circ in nineteen forty one. It also anticipated reality television,
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the celebrity flogging of TMZ, plus other arguably more execrable
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trends in American entertainment and public life. It is a
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towering artistic achievement shot through with the inky grease of
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tabloid sleeves. Finally accompanying this article, Orson Wells all black
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version of Macbeth excited theatregoer's nationwide wide by Brandon Tensley.
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On the night of April fourteenth, nineteen thirty six, traffic
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on Seventh Avenue near one hundred thirty first Street in
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New York City's Harlem neighborhood was at a virtual standstill.
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The roads jammed for ten blocks, the sort of throngs
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you'd expect for a generational prize fight, all of them
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hoping to get a ticket to the most sensational show
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in town. A curious adaptation of Macbeth, directed by a
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dramaturgical wounderkint named Orson Wells, under the aegis of the
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Federal Theatre Project, a new deal program designed to help
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support the arts. It was an era of artistic and
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political daring led by the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance,
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and Wells, then just twenty and already a respected interpreter
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of Shakespeare, was debuting one of the boldest productions in
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the history of American theatre. Wells adapted Shakespeare's text himself,
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significantly revising details, moving the setting from Scotland to Haiti,
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and featuring an all black cast in his staging, Wells
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also swapped medieval witchcraft for voodoo rituals, hence the production's
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nickname Voodoo Macbeth. Black audiences initially feared that in the
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hands of a white director, the production might make a
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mockery of black cultural practices. Such concerns evaporated on that
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buzzy April night in nineteen thirty six at the Lafayette Theater.
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By all metrics, Voodoo Macbeth was a smash, as critics
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fond over the performances, the eye popping costuming, and the
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voodoo drumming. As one reviewer wrote of a particularly hypnotic
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moment in the drumming, if it doesn't make you feel
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the creeps, you are unimaginative. Indeed, a sparkle always came
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to Wells's eyes whenever he thought back on the production.
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By all odds, my great success in my life was
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that play, he recalled in a nineteen eighty two BBC interview.
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Everybody who was anybody in the black or white world
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was there, and when the play ended, there were so
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many curtain calls that finally they left the curtain open
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and the audience came up on the stage to congratulate
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the actors. Debuting amid Jim Crow, Voodoo Macbeth not only
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provided critical work to black New Yorkers amid the Great Depression.
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One hundred and fifty cast members were involved, but also
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elevated black actors in New York and beyond. After finishing
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its sold out ten week run at the Lafayette, the
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production toured cities from Dallas to Indianapolis to Syracuse. At
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a time of deep racial prejudice, Welles's Voodoo Macbeth granted
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Black Americans some semblance of equality, and on the stage,
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it allowed them to bewitch the world. This concludes readings
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from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader has been
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Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and have a great day.