Transcript

3.6.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
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day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated March
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April twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is
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a reading service intended for people who are blind or
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have other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
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Please join me now for the first part of the article,
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titled The Mystery of the World's Oldest writing System, remained
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unsolved until four competitive scholars raced to decipher it. By
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Joshua Hammer. On a late summer day in eighteen fifty six,
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a letter carrier stepped from a mail coach in front
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of a three story town house in Mayfair in central London.
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Crossing the threshold, the courier handed a wax sealed envelope
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to a clerk. The missive was addressed to Edwin Norris,
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the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain
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and Ireland, one of Europe's leading research institutions. The postman
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had no way of knowing that the envelope would help
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rewrite the story of civilization's origins and ignite a contest
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for international renown. At stake, the immortality conferred on those
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who make a once in a century intellectual breakthrough. Three men,
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driven by boundless curiosity, a love of risk, and the
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distinctive demons of aspiration and ambition, were most responsible for
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making the contest possible. One Austin Henry Layard was the
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son of an English colonial civil servant. At age twenty two,
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he had fled the drudgery of clerkship in his uncle's
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law office for a life of adventure on the back
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roads of the Ottoman Empire. Bandits robbed him three times
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and once left him to wander half naked and barefoot
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through the desert. He joined a rebellious mountain tribe in
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Persia and spied in the Balkans for the British ambassador
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in Constantinople. At last he reached the Mounds of Mesopotamia,
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where he transformed himself into one of the most celebrated
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archaeologists of the age. Henry Creswick Rawlinson, living in the
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shadow of an accomplished older brother, decided early that he
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would carve his own identity in exile. As a twenty
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three year old military officer of the East India Company,
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he found himself in Persia. There he demonstrated a flare
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for languages, a skill at scaling heights in search of
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millennia old inscriptions, and a powerful yearning. He confided to
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his sister to do something to attract the world's attention.
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In his early thirties, he deciphered the writing of the
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ancient Persian Empire. The achievement brought Rawlinson his first taste
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of fame, and more dead languages were waiting to be understood. Finally,
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there was Edward Hinks, a country parson in a remote
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corner of Ireland. Brilliant but tormented by paralyzing anxiety and
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the specter of financial ruin. Hinks was hungry for pere
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recognition of his linguistic gifts. Huddled at his rectory desk,
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he had translated obscure texts written in Egyptian hieroglyphs and
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ancient Hebrew. Eventually he set his sights on the most
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tantalizing prize of them all. By eighteen fifty six, the
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paths of these three men had converged in a sometimes friendly,
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often combustible pas detois. Now with layered watching from a
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judicious distance, Hanks and Rawlinson were about to become the
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prime contestants in a challenge to determine once and for
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all whether the oldest writing system in the world could
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be deciphered. However esoteric this might sound, the question was
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the subject of intense public debate in capitals on both
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sides of the Atlantic for mid nineteenth century Britons. Proving
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that this elusive script could be understood meant pulling back
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the curtain on a distant, vanished, yet hauntingly familiar world,
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one that had given birth to humanity's modern mind. Until
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the eighteen forties, few Europeans knew anything about the great
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civilizations that began their rise along the Tigris and Euphrates
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rivers around two thousand b C. Assyria and its vassal
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state and sometimes arrival Babylon, had dominated the Near East
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and beyond. Classical writers described Assyria, which reached its zenith
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around seven hundred BC, as the first true empire. Herodotus
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wrote that Babylon surpasses in splendor any city in the
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known world. But in the late seventh century, a coalition
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of enemies destroyed Assyria, and Babylon was neglected, ransacked, and
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left to die out. Five hundred years later to day,
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the greatest world city of antiquity is a mound of
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desert earth. One theologian wrote, by the mid eighteen hundreds,
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these societies had been almost entirely forgotten. At the British Museum,
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the world's pre eminent repository of antiquities, many seized without
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the permission of the nations on whose soil they were found.
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The relics of Assyria and Babylon, including writings inscribed on clay,
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bricks and stone, filled a single three square foot cabinet,
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But excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum had inspired a new
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science investigating antiquity by digging objects out of the earth
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and layered. Was one of its most spectacularly successful practitioners.
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Enduring lethal epidemics, stultifying heat, vermin infested camps, and the
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hostility of Ottoman authorities, he made a series of discoveries,
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beginning in the mid eighteen forties in what is now
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northern Iraq, twenty five hundred year old Assyrian palaces, paneled
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with exquisite alabaster bass reliefs and guarded by stone gods
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and monsters. In vivid detail, the friezes depicted corpse covered
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battle fields, battering ran wielding soldiers, breaking down city ramparts,
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archers and stallion drawn chariots, the draggled captives, vassals bearing tributes,
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kings attended by eunuchs, and royal lion hunts in the bush,
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Unreadable inscriptions swirled around the carvings. Layard and his protege,
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a Christian Arab from Mosul named hormuzd Wassam, also unearthed
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thousands of in described clay tablets in the royal library
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of the Assyrian king Senacareb at Nineveh. Layered Rossam and
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other researchers guessed that the tablets were filled with information
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about astronomy, medicine, religion, politics, laws, and every day life
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in the Assyrian Empire. The rediscovery of this lost civilization
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seized the public's imagination. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked
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to the Crystal Palace in South London in eighteen fifty
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four to gaze at the Nineveh Court, a fanciful reinvention
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of the Royal Palace with lotus gardens, multi colored bass reliefs,
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and blue headed bull capitals perched atop doric columns. Newspapers
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chronicled the arrival in England of giant winged lions and
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other stone colossi that testified to Assyrious artistic mastery and
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rich mythology. Today, whisking away priceless cultural objects violates every
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standard of archaeology. International law largely prohibits it, but at
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the time such rules and norms weren't in place, and
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people were thrilled to see the relics. The monuments layered
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has sent home from the plains of Assyria excited a
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livelier interest than anything else I saw in the museum,
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wrote an American visitor in Mississippi's Natchez Courier. There they
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are disinterred from the oblivion of Asias, the last survivors,
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the sole historic monuments of Nineveh, her kings and her people,
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and her glory. For the first time too, the museum
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going and reading public could examine large samples of the
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vanished civilization's writing system, a script that pre dated Egyptian
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hieroglyphs by centuries. Assyrian and Babylonian scribes had ingeniously used
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the thick stem of a reed that grows in the
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wetlands of the Middle East, the Arundo donacs, and split
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these stalks to create a trapezoidal tip. Then they pressed
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signs into damp clay and fired the inscribed tablets in
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a kiln, making them almost indestructible over time. Scribes also
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carved the characters into copper and stone. Cuneiform, the term
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derives from the Latin cuneus or wedge, referring to the
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character's distinctive shape, lacked the artfulness of hieroglyphs. The contemporary
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science writer Edward Dolnik has said that the signs looked
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like what you might get if a flock of birds
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with obsessive compulsive disorder took a walk across wet clay.
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But the writing system had taken over the ancient world.
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It employed both phonetic characters and lagograms, or pictorial symbols,
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meant to represent a whole word and could be used
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to write different languages. From Mesopotamia, uniiform had traveled east
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around two thousand BC to the kingdom of Ilam on
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the plains of Persia. A few centuries later, the kingdom
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of Urartu, southeast of the Black Sea and dominated by
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the biblical Mount Ararat, where Noah's ark was said to
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come to rest after the flood, adopted the system for
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its own language, as did the Hittite Empire in Anatolia
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present day Turkey that reached its zenith during the mid
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fourteenth century BC. A simplified form took hold and ugarit
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a prosperous city state on the Mediterranean coast and present
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day Syria. Finally, it was embraced by the Persian speaking
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Achemenid Empire, which under king Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, ruled
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Central Asia and parts of Africa and Europe from the
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sixth century to the fourth century BC. The wedge based
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script endured for some twenty five hundred years, but papyrus
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gradually supplanted clay. New scripts made cuneiform obsolete, and the
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fifteen languages that used it died out. The last datable
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cuneiform tablet found in the early nineteen hundreds in southern Mesopotamia,
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as an astronomical almanac predicting the appearances of stars, planets,
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and other heavenly bodies, inscribed around AD seventy five. By
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the second century AD, knowledge of the phonetic values and
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meaning of the characters had faded away. European travelers first
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encountered cuneiform in the early seventeenth century. In the seventeen sixties,
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Exis Dixamining hundreds of cuneiform inscriptions in the ancient Persian
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city of Persepolis, a young German named Karstan Nebor deduced
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that the inscriptions were written in three languages, although he
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couldn't interpret what annie said. All three inscriptions used wedges,
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but the characters were different. One language, which would soon
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come to be recognized as Old Persian, used just forty
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two phonetic characters and pictographs. Another later identified as Elamite,
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had about one hundred thirty signs. The third and most complex,
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with about seven hundred signs, would become known as Akkadian,
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named after a city state that flourished in southern Mesopotamia
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between twenty three hundred and twenty one hundred b c.
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And used by the Assyrians and the Babylonians. Nebor was
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convinced that each set of tri lingual texts said the
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same thing, but he didn't any further than that. He
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considered himself a geographer, a scientist, and an artist, not
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a decipherer. In eighteen twenties, the Englishman Thomas Young and
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his rival, the Frenchman Jean Francois Champaullion, solved the riddle
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of the hieroglyphs. By using the Greek text on the
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trilingual Rosetta stone as a launching point for deciphering Egyptian pictographs,
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scholars could now read the love, poetry and funerary texts
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of the ancient Egyptians, study the military campaigns of the pharaohs,
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and learn how the dwellers along the Nile treated toothichs,
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performed surgeries and measured time. But even the most adept
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philologists could see that cuneiform presented bigger challenges than hieroglyphs.
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Egyptian lagograms often looked like the objects they were met
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to stand for an eagle, a duck, a beadle, a pyramid,
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or they conveyed an idea through an illustration that in
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at least a vague way related to their meaning. A
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teetering diagonal wall, for instance, represented falling a lute like
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musical instrument, was meant to symbolize joy or pleasure. A Kadian,
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which was an entirely abstract script, provided no such clues
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to signs meanings. Now, in the eighteen fifties, following Layard's fines,
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the public clamored for linguists to unravel the mysteries of
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the Cuneiform too. Religious believers were thrilled by the possibility
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that the Royal annals of Babylon and of Assyria's capitals
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at Nineveh and Nimrud might corroborate tales from the Old Testament.
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The Hebrew Prophets, for example, had described how Assyria had
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deported ten Israelite tribes from Samaria in seven one BC
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and its siege of Jerusalem twenty years later. These accounts
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were not corroborated by other surviving records. However, and at
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a time when atheists, agnostics, and other post Enlightenment skeptics
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were casting doubt on scripture, the writing could turn out
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to prove the veracity of the Word of God, and
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Cuneiform dangled the possibility of peering back even further in time.
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New excavations along the Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia had turned
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up tablets written in Cuneiform that appeared to pre date
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the finds at Nineveh by nearly two thousand years, originating
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around twenty five hundred BC. The characters were familiar, but
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the language seemed different. If this far more ancient script
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were deciphered, it would offer insights into the cradle of civilization,
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which would soon come to be known as Summer. In
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this flat fertile zone, humans established the first permanent communities,
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developed agriculture, scratched out pictures of objects that became writing,
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and slowly organized themselves into complex hierarchical societies that remain
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recognizable today. Could it truly be possible to read records
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preserved from this distant time? By the eighteen fifties, both
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Rawlinson and Hinks, after years of stumbling into linguistic dead ends,
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claimed to be making great progress understanding the Arrowhead script.
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Hinks had taken the first great strides in deciphering Acadian
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Cuneiform in eighteen forty six by searching for the names
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of ancient Persian kings in the parallel inscriptions that Neiber
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had found in Persepolis. He believed the names would have
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been pronounced approximately the same way in Old Persian and Akkadian. Hinks, Rawlinson,
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and other linguists had separately deciphered Old Persian, so he
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lined it up with the Acadian signs, just as Thomas
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Young had matched ancient Greek letters with hieroglyphs. Hinks had
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obtained the approximate phonetic value of more than one hundred
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Acadian characters this way. The same year, Hinks also noticed
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that the seven character phonetic spelling of the word king
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in Old Persian became a single character when it was
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written in Akadian. This gave him he believed his first
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Akadian logogram, though it would take him several years before
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he figured out how to pronounce the word. Well before Rolinson,
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Hinks grasped that Acadian writing, like hieroglyphs, consisted of both
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phonetic symbols and logograms. Hinks had also been way ahead
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of Rawlinson in recognizing that Accadian was a Semitic language
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and was closely related to Hebrew, another language in which
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Hinks was fluent. By the early eighteen fifties, Rolinson had
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largely caught up with Hinks. Scholars, literary journals, and the
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public marveled at both men's supposed insights. But even as
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the rivalry between the decipherers grew more intense, they agreed
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on one thing. The writing of Babylon and Assyria was
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bewilderingly complex. Its most striking characteristic was what was called polyphony.
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Many characters, they maintained, could be read in sixty seven,
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even eight different ways. Skeptics accused Hinks and Rawlinson of
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perpetrating a hoax to cover up their befuddlement. If this
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claim were true, one critic pointed out, then the eight
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character named that Hinks claimed met Nebukanezar, the Babylonian king
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who had captured Jerusalem around five eighty six b C,
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could be read in no fewer than three hundred ninety
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three thousand, two hundred sixteen ways. Given such confusion, it
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was widely feared that the writing would never be cracked.
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But in eighteen fifty four, a unique opportunity presented itself.
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Layard's protege Ressam had discovered a relic buried beneath a
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temple in what was believed to be the oldest Assyrian capital, Ashur,
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in the semi desert, forty miles south of Musul. The
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octagonal column, known as a prism, was inscribed with eight
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hundred lines of tiny cuneiform characters. It was believed to
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date to eleven hundred BC, a time when war was
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raging between the Greeks and Trojans, and the prophet Samuel
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led the Israelites to victory against the Philistines. The cylinder
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was sent to the British Museum. It is still on
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display there. Rawlinson, who had close ties to the museum,
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was working on an official translation, and the institution planned
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to publish it as soon as it was done. As
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he proceeded, a wealthy inventor with a passion for intellectual
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puzzles burst onto the scene. William Henry Fox Talbot had
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made his name two decades earlier by devising a method
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for fixing images from life on to chemically treated light
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sensitive paper. The breakthrough had earned him a nickname the
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Father of Photography, which he shared with the Frenchman Luis
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Jacques Monde de Guerre. Talbot had lately devoted himself to
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a new enthusiasm, a Syro Babylonian decipherment. Talbot dispatched a letter,
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the Letter that would change everything to London's work Royal
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Asiatic Society, offering to send in his own translation and
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have a panel of judges compare his work with Rawlinson's.
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If the versions turned out to be identical or even close,
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it must indicate that they have truth for their basis,
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he wrote. After a negotiation with Rolinson in the British Museum,
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Talbot received a lithograph copy of the inscriptions in January
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eighteen fifty seven and got to work. On March twenty first,
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two dozen members of the Society converged on five New
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Burlington Street for their regular Saturday conclave, filing through the
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spacious interior, checking their top coats and hats, and making
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their way to a ground floor gallery. Sitting in the
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room was another man, a guest, a thirty one year
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old classicist and adventurer named Julius Oppert. Born in Hamburg.
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Opert was a descendant of Samuel Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish banker.
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After he was denied a position at German universities because
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of institutional anti Semitism, Appert had joined a three year
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French archaeological expedition in Babylon and northern Mesopotamia. Now his
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star was on the rise, and he asked if he
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could undertake a translation as well. By affording three independent
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versions of the same document, he argued, an agreement among
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the decipherers could be even more persuasive. But what about Hinks?
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The Churchman had a fraught relationship with Rawlinson, which was
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marked by accusations of stolen credit public disputes and a
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private stub by the British Museum that had cost Hanks
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part of his livelihood. Edwin Norris, the society's secretary, was
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determined to give Hinks his due, and he recommended that
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the society dispatch lithographs of the texts to their reclusive
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pastor at its rectory in Killiley, south of Belfast. Norris
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proposed a two month deadline for all the submissions. At
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that point, a six man panel of judges, including some
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of the most renowned historians and linguists in England, would
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compare the four translations. Norris fixed a meeting of the
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Royal Asiatic Society for Wednesday, May twentieth, when the four
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sealed packets would be opened before witnesses and the literary
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inquest could take place. For Rawlinson, Talbot, Oppert and Hinks,
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this was no ordinary race to the finish line to
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convince the public that their translations weren't hoaxes. They all
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had to be right in their interpretations. Each still hoped
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to be the most right, but they knew their competitors
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couldn't be far behind. The stakes were huge. They could
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immortalize their new names in the field of linguistic archaeology,
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unlocking the secrets of the world's first great civilizations, or
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they could humiliate themselves before their peers, their government, and
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a global public. The game was on the three thousand
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year old enigmatic prism that the esteemed linguists would now
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attempt independently to transliterate and translate was about the height
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of a bowling pin. Rolinson, who had gotten the jump
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on everyone else, while ensconced as the British ambassador in
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Baghdad in the mid eighteen fifties, claimed that its eight
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hundred lines of Akkadian language uniform script contained the annals
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of Tiglath Peliser, the first who had expanded the Assyrian
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Empire to Syria and the Mediterranean Sea around eleven hundred BC.
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He also maintained that they chronicled the king's military campaigns,
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built holding projects, temple consecrations, hunting expeditions, and tributes paid
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by vassals from far flung corners of the empire. All
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were described with tiny characters pressed together on a sixteen
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inch high fired clay column held together by gum, water
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and chalk. Now, the three other participants in the challenge
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would either back up his initial claims or show them
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to be pure hogwash. Over the next three weeks, Norris
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assembled his panel of judges. None considered himself an expert
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in Semitic tongues, but that didn't matter. Their job was
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to compare the four participants English translations, note similarities and discrepancies,
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and confirmed that the versions sent in were made independently,
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the seals of the translators having been broken in their presence.
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Norris wrote that he had confidence in the decipherers and
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expected the four versions would closely resemble one another. Yet
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whether Opert's and hinks translations or any good, seemed, almost
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to this corner of the British establishment, of little importance.
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Appert's participation stemmed from the fact that he'd happened to
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be a guest of the Society in March when Talbot's
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challenge was announced. As for Hinks, he was an outsider
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brought in at the last minute. In fact, the lithographed
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copy of the cylinder finally arrived at Hinks's rectory only
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on April twenty sixth inexplicably, after more than a month
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of preparation by the British Museum. By then, the Parson
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had just eighteen days to submit his translation to the Society.
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I will translate as much as I can, he wrote
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to Talbot, but the time aloud is so short that
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I shall probably not go through much more than half
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of the inscription. Embroiled in a bitter rivalry with Rawlinson,
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Hinks 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. The parson already
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accused Rollinson of trying to steal credit for his scholarly insights.
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The pattern dated to eighteen forty nine, when Hinks first
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recognized compound lagograms in Accadian, the juxtaposition of two logographic
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characters to make an entirely new word, for instance, son
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plus woman made daughter. Hinks had also spotted syllaberries, tablets
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made for aspiring scribes that listed lagograms with their phonetic values,
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in a trove of inscriptions that Layard brought to Killilee
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in eighteen fifty two. But Rolinson insisted that he had
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found compound lagograms before Hinks, and that he had discovered
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syllaberries too. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for
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to day, your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you
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for listening, and have a great day.