CHAPTER IX
Countlesscaravans wended their way from the parched plains of Mesopotamia eastwards over the Persian border, past Kermanshah, winding along the road that skirts the range of hills rising to the left, and so through Behistun, a mere collection of huts with a name that is famous throughout all the seats of learning in the world. Here the caravans halted while men and beasts slaked their thirst in the pool, but few of the travellers troubled to look a second time at the great stone of Behistun rising above the plain. Users of the road were ever more interested in the spring than in the figures sculptured in the rock.
The carvings were old—as old as the hills—and like the hills they became part of the landscape. They were legendary, carved, so people said, by the gods in the dim past. Age-old myths concerning them were poured into the ear of the stranger who passed that way, but those who used the road regularly, and those who dwelt in the neighbourhood, took no more notice of the rock carvings ofBehistun than they took of the other features of the scenery. The most aged man was as ignorant of the origin of the carvings as was the youngest stripling.
There the figures stood for centuries, for thousands of years. The traders drove their animals along the road to the sound of jingling bells, quaffed the waters of the spring, and passed onward, much more concerned about their merchandise than about the carvings on the bluff.
Had the figures been more accessible, they would have vanished long ago. Senseless wanderers would have taken pleasure in smashing them, and rain and frost and sun would have completed the destruction. But the figures were carved too high, and the rock below had been cut away by the masons of old, leaving a perpendicular wall which could only be scaled at considerable risk. Above them was the sheer cliff. There was no way down to them, no easy way up to them. The escarpment on which they were carved rose for 1700 feet, and they were graved out of the living rock 300 feet above the ground.
Except for a few travellers’ tales, the carvings at Behistun were unknown to the teeming multitudes dwelling in the great cities. Few men would have thought of looking in this lonely spot in Persia for the lost key to Babylon and Assyria. Yet here was the key for the man who had the courage anddetermination to wrest it from the mountains. Such a man came in the end, over two thousand four hundred years after the ancient sculptors had carved the last figure and removed the last scaffolding.
The discovery of the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the discovery of the key to cuneiform writing, resemble each other in more ways than one. It will be remembered that a soldier found the Rosetta Stone, and that an Englishman was the first man to indicate the manner of reading it. Rawlinson, whose genius solved the puzzle of Persian cuneiform, was also a soldier and an Englishman. It seems strange that science should be indebted to a doctor and a soldier for lifting the curtains of the past, that scholars who had spent their lives studying foreign languages should have to rely upon two men to whom these things were just an absorbing hobby.
When Henry Rawlinson sailed for Bombay to enter the service of the East India Company in 1827, he was only seventeen years old. Blessed with an uncanny knack for learning languages, he found this ability stood him in good stead upon his arrival in India. Where other men were beaten by native dialects, he took to them as a duck takes to water. Before he was twenty, he was one of the interpreters for the army of the East IndiaCompany, and long before he was thirty he could speak Persian like a native.
His remarkable abilities stamped him as a man who would go far, as one destined to play many parts in the ever-changing East. For a time he concentrated his energies on reorganizing the Persian army; at other periods he was frequenting the courts of the Shah and the Amir of Afghanistan, filling the intervals with hard fighting, a good deal of administration, and the pleasure that lay nearest his heart—the study of dialects.
The Orient cast a spell over him, and the legends of Persia particularly appealed to his imagination. He was in the land where history began. The past called to him. Little bits of burnt brick with strange marks on them intrigued him. It was as though a robin had hopped all over them while they were wet, and had left behind impressions something like a bird leaves in the snow. He knew these fragments were the old writings, though they were like no known writings on earth, and at last he made up his mind to see if he could find the key to the cuneiform characters.
In 1835 Rawlinson, then a young man of twenty-five, took up his residence at Kermanshah, as commander of all the troops in the province. Behistun was no more than 20 miles away, and something must have told the soldier thathere was the key to the riddle he sought. So, when opportunity served, he jogged along the old road to the rock of Behistun, and began to copy the inscription. He had no rope, no ladder to assist him. All he had to rely upon were his own sure feet and strong hands. A slip meant certain death, yet the risk sat so lightly on his shoulders that he made his dangerous way up and down the precipice three and four times a day.
There came a time when ladders were absolutely essential to secure the copies he needed. So narrow was the ledge at the foot of the sculptures that Rawlinson was forced to place his ladder almost perpendicularly against the face of the rock. For long periods he perched in a most precarious position at the top of the ladder and glued himself to the rock. The least little movement outwards on his part and the ladder would have overbalanced and plunged with him to destruction. He knew it, yet he continued his work as calmly as though he were at a desk instead of standing on a crazy ladder at the edge of a precipice.
On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion he escaped death by a miracle. He sought with his ladder to bridge a chasm in order to copy other inscriptions, but the formation of the rock made it impossible to place the ladder flat. Eventually,after some trouble, he arranged the ladder with one side resting firmly on each opposing rocky ledge, while the other side hung free immediately below.
Standing on the lower side, he took hold of the upper side of the ladder with his hands and started to walk across. Suddenly, without warning, the lower side of the ladder with all the rungs broke away from the upper side and dropped into the dizzy chasm. Rawlinson, as he fell, clung desperately to the top side of the ruined ladder. For a brief moment he swung on the verge of a terrible death, then, hand over hand, he made his way back to safety. In the end he managed to copy the Persian and Median inscriptions, but the other inscription in Babylonian on the outjutting rock defeated all his efforts to reach it.
For three years he studied his inscriptions, and began to lay their secrets bare. The first draft of his great work was written. Then duty called him elsewhere, and the Afghan War put an end to his studies, compelling him to lay his book aside.
It was 1844 before he was able to resume the work he was so anxious to do. That year saw him appointed British Consul at Baghdad, and he took up his residence in the city on the Tigris and his studies at the same time. He was once more inthe neighbourhood of Behistun, and eventually he made his plans for procuring a copy of the Babylonian inscription which had defeated him years before.
Riding along the old highway to Behistun, he carried with him this time much rope and many sheets of thick paper. He studied the well-known rock from below. There was the long line of figures carved in the limestone, to their left the series of inscriptions cut in column. A little above, on the slanting rock, was the inscription he desired. Through a telescope he could make out the inscriptions he had already copied, but he needed the wings of an eagle to lift him to the other rock. He made his way round the top of the bluff, studying it from all angles, and concluded that it was impossible for him to obtain a copy of the last inscription.
He inquired among the Kurdish peasants for one who would climb up to the rock and make a copy in the way he directed. He offered a good reward, but the peasants shook their heads. They considered the feat impossible. Rawlinson, paying no heed, pushed his inquiries further afield, and at last came on a Kurdish boy who willingly undertook the task.
The lad was lithe, agile, sure-footed as a chamois, and he climbed up to the platform in front of the sculptures with little trouble. Equipping himselfwith some ropes and pegs and a hammer, he gazed up at his objective. The rock jutted outwards over the sheer precipice; it seemed impossible for anything but a fly to crawl over its face. For a little while the keen eyes of the lad sought for handholds and footholds; then he squeezed himself into a crevice at the side of the big rock and began to worm his way upward.
Rawlinson gazed on while the lad mounted a foot at a time. Often the climber stopped while his fingers sought another hold, then he progressed a little higher. But at last even he came to a stop; he was unable to go on.
Reaching above his head, he drove one of the wooden pegs deep down into the soil covering the rock. Attaching a rope to it, he tested it, pulling this way and that, to make sure that the peg held firmly.
The onlookers watched with bated breath as the lad attached himself to the end of the rope, as he tried to swing himself across to the other side of the rock, clinging with hands and feet to the rocky surface, with death yawning for him below. Failure met his gallant attempt. Once more he tried, swinging over the rock face, with only a rope between himself and Eternity. Ten, fifteen, twenty feet he traversed, to find that further progress was impossible. Quickly reaching out, he drove anotherpeg deep down into the soil above his head, as quickly attached a rope. The fixing of a seat to the ends of the two ropes to form a cradle was not very difficult, and sitting in this cradle the lad was able to go all over the rock, taking impressions of the inscription under Rawlinson’s direction on sheets of damp paper. In ten days the task was finished, and Rawlinson possessed the first complete copy of the cuneiform inscriptions at Behistun ever held in the hands of man.
The supreme task of deciphering these inscriptions occupied Rawlinson on and off for many years. As already mentioned, the first draft of his book on the inscriptions was finished before he left Kermanshah; and when he came to the consulate at Baghdad he threw himself heart and soul into making a complete revision of his draft to embody his later studies and knowledge. Often in the intense heat he worked in a summer-house at the bottom of the garden, a pet lion lying at his feet, and a water-wheel from the river Tigris pouring water over the roof of the summer-house to keep it cool.
There was the Greek script to assist Young and Champollion to decipher the hieroglyphics of the Rosetta Stone, but there was no known writing at all in the inscriptions at Behistun. There were three inscriptions carved on the rock face, Persian, Babylonian and Median cuneiform. The clue tothem was lost. No living race wrote in such a manner, and not a single man knew how to read the curious wedge-shaped writing of the ancients.
Rawlinson therefore laboured under a much bigger handicap than that imposed on Young and Champollion. But Rawlinson was one of those men to whom a handicap means something to be surmounted. The bigger the handicap, the greater the satisfaction in overcoming it. The inscriptions at Behistun seemed to challenge him, to defy him to read them, as from their lofty pinnacle they had challenged men for ages past.
Rawlinson was the man in a million. The lure of the past and the fascination of the East spurred him on to do the impossible. His courage was as great as his knowledge of dialects was profound. It was no hope of reward, of glory, that urged him to wrest the secret from his sheets of paper impressions. It was the desire to pit his brain against the baffling writing, to master it.
Grotefend years before had pointed the way, but Rawlinson was ignorant of this fact. All the years that Rawlinson was writing and studying at Baghdad, an Irish clergyman, Dr. Hincks, was engaged on the same mighty task in a quiet rectory in Ireland, solving the puzzle which Rawlinson had already solved. Other men were wrestling withthe same difficulties, but Rawlinson knew absolutely nothing of them or their endeavours. He worked away incessantly, relying upon himself alone. He studied the queer, wedge-shaped impressions for months, noted their resemblances, found the characters that were repeated, and little by little, a character at a time, he built up that dead language, succeeded in reading the writing of the peoples who inhabited Persia and the plains of Mesopotamia long before the birth of Christ.
In 1846 his great book, giving his reading of the inscriptions at Behistun, was published in London by the Royal Asiatic Society. The scientific world was astounded. People thought such a thing impossible. Many imagined that Rawlinson had invented some sort of reading of his own for the cuneiform characters. They reasoned that as there was no guide whatsoever, no man could ever read them.
They reasoned wrongly, as time was to prove. The unearthing in Mesopotamia of a romantic cylinder of clay, all covered with arrow-headed characters, brought the longed-for opportunity of testing whether Rawlinson was right or wrong, whether he had indeed solved the mystery.
Copies of the cylinder were given to four men who had learned to read cuneiform writing, among them Rawlinson. Each was asked to make atranslation, and to submit it to the authorities of the British Museum. The four translations were made, and the authorities sat down and compared them.
Each translation told the same story of Tiglath-pileser, gave the same names and dates! It was a wonderful triumph for Rawlinson, for it proved beyond all doubt that he had indeed solved the mystery of the dead writing of Persia and Babylon.
Rawlinson himself attributed his triumph to his familiarity with the local Persian dialects; it was his intimate knowledge of the languages spoken by the peasants and tribes of Persia that enabled him to get to the root of many of the words which so sorely puzzled him. By the time he managed to obtain his copy of the Babylonian inscription through the aid of the little Kurdish boy, he had already wrested the secret from the Persian inscription, and his book had been published a year.
He found the clue to cuneiform in the name of two kings, just as Young found his first clue in the name of Ptolemy. Before he bent his energies on deciphering the Behistun inscriptions, he had closely studied two other inscriptions which were identical but for two words. Rawlinson, puzzling over these words, at length concluded they were the names of two kings, that one king was thefather and the other the son. He reasoned correctly, and thus obtained a clue to the inscriptions at Behistun, the deciphering of which ranks as one of the greatest achievements of the human brain.
By courtesy of the British MuseumA RARE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ROCK SCULPTURES AT BEHISTUN, SHOWING DARIUS THE GREAT RECEIVING CAPTIVES OF WAR
By courtesy of the British MuseumA RARE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ROCK SCULPTURES AT BEHISTUN, SHOWING DARIUS THE GREAT RECEIVING CAPTIVES OF WAR
By courtesy of the British Museum
A RARE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ROCK SCULPTURES AT BEHISTUN, SHOWING DARIUS THE GREAT RECEIVING CAPTIVES OF WAR
Over five hundred years before the birth of Christ, Darius, King of Persia, caused an account of his campaigns to be engraved on the rock in Persian, Babylonian and Median, so that all men who passed that way might read of the deeds of the great king. A full-length portrait of the monarch was carved in stone for posterity to gaze on his features, and to add to his glory he was shown receiving some of the prisoners captured in his campaigns.
The remarkable skill shown by the Persian king in selecting the site is proved by the fact that the figures still exist, in spite of the storms beating on them for two thousand four hundred years. Darius was not ignorant of human nature. He knew full well the tendency of man to destroy. To defeat this tendency he had the rock cut away sheer to the foot of the cliff, while to preserve his inscription from the ravages of time he caused it all to be brushed with a sort of yellow varnish, a varnish of such unique quality that some of it protects the stone to this very day.
We know much, can do many things. We fly in the air, tunnel the mountains, travel beneaththe sea. Yet there is still a little that is hidden from us; and one thing of which we remain ignorant is the secret of that old Persian varnish, which will endure frost and hail and rain and shine for twenty-four centuries.