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| Empires of the Plain |
Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon by
Lesley Adkins is published in the UK in paperback by Harper Perennial, and in hardcover
in the US and Canada by Thomas Dunne Books (an imprint of St Martin's Press).
Apart from World English language, Polish and Bulgarian rights, all other
rights for Empires of the Plain are currently available. Please contact me
directly for further information. In Poland the book is published as Runa Mury
Babilonu by Wydawnictwo Amber.
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Empires of the Plain is is a highly topical book, because it is set in
Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and India. As such, it is an essential read for anyone
wanting to understand the historical background of this region
in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The book concentrates on the
entertaining story of Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, a fearless soldier, sportsman and
imperial adventurer of the first rank, who spent twenty-five years in the
service of the East India Company. During this time he survived the dangers of
disease and warfare, including the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War. A gifted
linguist, fascinated by history and exploration, Rawlinson became obsessed with
cuneiform, the world’s earliest writing. The key to understanding the many
cuneiform scripts and languages was an immense inscription high on a sheer rock
face at Bisitun (or Behistun) in the mountains of western Iran, carved on the
orders of King Darius the Great of Persia over 2,000 years ago. Only |
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Henry Rawlinson at the age of 40, sitting at a
desk covered with sheets of cuneiform drawings, as painted by Henry Wyndham
Phillips |
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| Rawlinson had the physical and intellectual skills, courage, self-motivation and opportunity to
make the perilous ascent and copy the monument. This was no ordinary
inscription, but was written in three languages and three cuneiform scripts,
like an enormous Rosetta Stone. Equipped with copies of this inscription,
Rawlinson was in an enviable position to tackle decipherment of cuneiform.
While based for many years in Baghdad, he also became involved in the very
first excavations of the ancient mounds of Mesopotamia, sites like Nineveh and
Babylon that produced many more cuneiform inscriptions, and his success in
decipherment resurrected unsuspected civilizations, revealing intriguing
details of everyday life and forgotten historical events. By proving to the
astonished Victorian public that people and places in the Old Testament really
existed (and that documents and chronicles had survived from well before the
writing of the Bible), Rawlinson became a celebrity and assured his own place
in history.
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Henry Rawlinson was born in 1810 in the large manor house within the village of
Chadlington in north Oxfordshire, close to the town of Chipping Norton. Here he
spent much of his childhood on an idyllic estate of several hundred acres. The
manor house still survives, next to the church, but much of Wychwood Forest to
the south has been cleared, so the view from the house has changed greatly.
There are reminders today of the Rawlinson family in Chadlington. Set in the
west wall of the manor house is a plaque commemorating the life of Henry
Rawlinson, while Coronation Cottage nearby celebrates the astounding win his
father had at the Derby with a horse by the name of Coronation. In West
Chadlington, the modern Rawlinson Close keeps the family name alive, while in
the church a stained glass window commemorates Henry’s father Abram and his
mother.
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Looking northwestwards to the manor house and
church at Chadlington in Oxfordshire |
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Stained glass window in memory of Henry
Rawlinson’s parents |
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As a young boy, Henry also spent much time at Bristol, where he lived with his
aunt and uncle in Park Street on what was then the very edge of the city. His
uncle Richard Smith was a surgeon, who became infamous for what he did with the
skin of the hanged man he had dissected in front of a large audience. Henry’s
aunt, Anna Smith, was part of a large literary circle in Bristol, many of whom
were also involved in the campaign to abolish slavery. At the age of eleven,
Henry began to spend less and less time at Chadlington and Bristol, because he
was sent away to various boarding schools, his last one being at Ealing, then a
village near London, and not as today part of the urban sprawl. |
In 1827 Rawlinson went to India as a military cadet of the East India Company’s
army, based initially at Bombay, a city on the west coast that is today known
as Mumbai. Military duties were not onerous, which left Rawlinson plenty of
time to engage in his passions of horseracing and the hunting of game. At that
time India abounded in wildlife, and so nobody around him was bothered by
conservation issues. Unusually for a man of his age, he also had other
passions: history, languages and buying books. He was so good at languages that
he became an interpreter in his regiment, and in 1833 he was chosen to go to
Persia because of his excellent knowledge of Persian. It was in Persia (today
known as Iran) that he became obsessed with ancient cuneiform writing.
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Cuneiform literally means ‘of wedge-shaped form’ and is probably the earliest
writing in the world, first invented by accountants to keep track of produce
entering and leaving the palaces of Mesopotamia. It gradually became more
complex, so that it was used for writing down languages, not just lists. It may
have been ‘picture writing’ at a very early date, but most cuneiform writing
that we see on monuments, clay tablets, relief sculptures and so on resembles
abstract strokes and arrows. The Persian king Darius the Great unwittingly
helped the decipherment of cuneiform enormously, because he actually invented a
simplified form of cuneiform that could be used to write down the language of
Old Persian.
When Rawlinson first went to Persia, cuneiform was barely understood, although
a German, Georg Grotefend, had made a useful attempt to work out the meaning of
the signs. As well as being gifted in languages, both ancient and modern,
Rawlinson had the good fortune to be posted to Kermanshah, a remote town in the
west of Iran in the Zagros mountains, just a few miles from a rock-cut monument
at Bisitun that turned out to be far more significant than Egypt’s Rosetta
Stone. Cuneiform was a writing system, not a language. This is rather like
Roman letters today, which are used to write down many languages, such as
English, German, French, Swedish, Spanish, and so on.
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| On the rock face of the Bisitun mountain, the Persian king Darius the Great had
ordered a huge inscription to be carved, with the same message written in three
different languages, all carved in cuneiform writing. One of those languages
was Old Persian, carved in Darius’s newly invented cuneiform, and the other two
languages were Babylonian and Elamite. Rather fortunately, after the monument
was completed, Darius ordered all access to it to be quarried away, so nobody
could reach it and deface it. It was far too difficult for anyone to climb,
until the intrepid Rawlinson came along. With nerves of steel, he repeatedly
climbed up to the monument, copying at his peril the enormous inscription,
which in the end gave him the key to deciphering two of the languages,
Babylonian and Old Persian, and greatly helped with the third, Elamite.
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The Bisitun mountain: the cuneiform monument
is just right of centre |
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Rawlinson’s drawing of part of the cuneiform
inscription at Bisitun |
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The cuneiform inscription and relief
sculptures of Darius the Great at Bisitun |
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All did not go smoothly with the work at Bisitun, as Rawlinson was
sent to Afghanistan, to become embroiled in the First Anglo-Afghan War. He was
based for around two years as the political agent (diplomat) in Kandahar, a
city that has appeared in the news so often following the events of September
11 2001. While much of the British Army perished, Rawlinson survived, and
accepted a posting to Baghdad, where he remained for twelve years. Apart from
his diplomatic duties, he made two expeditions back into Persia to copy more of
the Bisitun monument, and also continued his cuneiform decipherment work,
making many discoveries while based in the British Residency at Baghdad by the
Tigris river. Also in Baghdad he made the acquaintance of Austen Henry Layard,
who began to excavate the huge ancient mounds of Nineveh and Nimrud, with
astounding and unsuspected results. When Layard finally gave up his work,
Rawlinson became much more involved in the excavation of Iraq’s ancient cities.
He was not without rivals in his decipherment work, as many others were working
on the problem, and Rawlinson's biggest threat was Edward Hincks, a brilliant
scholar and parish priest from Ireland, but whose worst enemy was lack of
money.
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Part of the British Residency at Baghdad,
where the decipherment of cuneiform took place |
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Baghdad in the 1850s, with the Tigris River
and an East India Company steamer, as viewed from the British Residency |
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Even when he retired to England, Rawlinson continued his work at the British
Museum, helping other students, including George Smith, who became so
proficient that he was taken on as an employee of the museum. Smith made the
astounding discovery on one clay tablet that there was a story of the flood
similar to that in the Old Testament, but much earlier in date. This was
exciting, yet disturbing news, and resulted in the Daily Telegraph sponsoring
Smith to undertake further excavations at Nineveh. Rawlinson married late in
life, as did Layard. He had two sons, but his wife died tragically early. He
himself kept busy right to his death at the age of 84, most notably as a Member
of Parliament, with the Royal Asiatic Society, Royal Geographical Society, as a
Trustee of the British Museum, and as a Director of the East India Company.
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| | 'A surprisingly action-packed biography of the soldier, adventurer, athlete, scholar, and diplomat whose exploits in deciphering cuneiform scripts literally forced a revelation of the originality and depth of ancient Mesopotamian cultures onto a skeptical Western world ... Sir Henry Rawlinson was essentially James Bond in the flesh a century before Ian Fleming was born ... Well-told story of a life dedicated to scholarship, with great adventures and derring-do an unexpected bonus.' [Kirkus Reviews 2004]
| | 'A lively account' [Maggie Hartford, Oxford Times, June 2005]
| | 'insightful page-turner of a biography' [Stuart Ferguson, The Wall Street Journal, December 2004]
| | 'An erudite, adventurous tale' [Maggie McDonald in the New Scientist, November 2004]
| | Like a Boy’s Own adventure serial ... a Victorian Indiana Jones’ [Telegraph, July 2003]
| | ‘Empires of the Plain is a welcome addition to history writing on the archaeological exploration of the Near East’ [The Times July 2003]
| | ‘Lesley Adkins tells the tale with considerable panache and scholarly detail.’ [Nonesuch, the University of Bristol alumni magazine, autumn 2003] |
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Henry Rawlinson was hanging by his arms, watched in horror by his two
companions. What had stopped him plunging to his death was the grip of his
hands on the remaining length of wood that bridged the gap in the ledge – the
ledge beneath the great cuneiform inscription cut into the side of a mountain
at Bisitun in Persia. Years before, Rawlinson had thought nothing of climbing
up and down this perpendicular rock with nobody to help him, defying the
intentions of Darius the Great, King of Persia, who more than two thousand
years earlier had ordered the cliff face below his monument to be cut back and
smoothed to prevent anyone climbing up and vandalizing it. Rawlinson was no
longer an agile young soldier, but a thirty-four-year-old diplomat in Baghdad,
yet he had lost none of his mountaineering expertise and remained physically
fit through horse riding and hunting. He had made the long journey on horseback
to Bisitun with ropes, ladders and men to try to copy much more of the
inscription, as well as the enormous relief sculpture itself. It was only for a
few moments that Rawlinson clung to the piece of wood across the break in the
ledge.....
Rawlinson’s Rock
Chapter 1 - Into India
Chapter 2 - From Poona to Panwell
Chapter 3 - In the Service of the Shah
Chapter 4 - The Cuneiform Conundrum
Chapter 5 - Discovering Darius
Chapter 6 - Bewitched by Bisitun
Chapter 7 - Royal Societies
Chapter 8 - An Afghan Adventure
Chapter 9 - Back to Baghdad
Chapter 10 - Introduction to Layard
Chapter 11 - Old Persian Published
Chapter 12 - Nimrud, Niffer and Nineveh
Chapter 13 - An Irish Intruder
Chapter 14 - Battling with Babylonian
Chapter 15 - A Brief Encouter
Chapter 16 - Celebrity
Chapter 17 - Rivals
Chapter 18 - Magic at Borsippa
Chapter 19 - The Final Test
Digging Down to Babylon
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