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(#litres_trial_promo) His thirst for learning led him into debt: ‘The Borkas are a class of men who go about selling mostly books, and of them I bought most of mine, especially oriental works. The only time I ever got into trouble for debt was with one of these Borkas, a pock marked brute with big turban. I had a row with him and refused to pay him, and he had me arrested. I was on the point of starting up the country to Ahmedabad and Guzerat, and I owed him 75 Rupees – but with expenses the sum amounted to double and then other claims came in upon me.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He was loaned £50 to help settle his debts, and towards the end of his life noted that apart from a further £50 borrowed from his father, he never owed money again.
On 1 June 1828, Rawlinson travelled over 300 miles north to join his new regiment, the 1st Grenadier Native Infantry, at Ahmedabad, the capital city of Gujarat that had been founded in the fifteenth century. Here he remained desperately unhappy that he had heard nothing from his family, noting sadly in his journal on 6 July: ‘On this day twelvemonth I bade adieu to the fair, the lovely shores of Albion. I have since never passed a day, I might almost say an hour, without thinking of my early friends, of sisters who in days of yore protested that they loved me – but mark their conduct – they have let me languish on a foreign shore, unnoticed and uncheered by one single line or token of recollection for a long lonely year. They have forgotten me and I will forget them … I am resolved. I will forget you all, until I again believe you worthy of my regard. I am wretched, I am miserable, but I swear – never to think on you again … henceforward my thoughts shall be of myself, my mind shall rest upon the future. I have set the stamp of everlasting misery on my brow – but I swear, I swear, I swear would that I would die.’
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Rather than admit he was miserable, Rawlinson resorted to pleasure and neglected his studies, about which he was later ashamed: ‘my days were spent in gambling, my nights in drinking – the billiard table and the Mess room were my only supports.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was not until 21 October that he received ‘a very nice long letter from Abram’,
(#litres_trial_promo) but still nothing from his sisters. Three days later came the long-awaited news from Maria, and with great relief Rawlinson wrote: ‘now indeed that I have received your journal I feel a pleasure in sitting down in the evening and recording my adventures (such as they are)’.
(#litres_trial_promo) What he did put in his journal was the routine of his life at Ahmedabad: ‘Saturday [25 October]. The days all pass much in the same manner. Parade at sunrise, they last until 7 – breakfast at 8 – study more or less till 11 – write, play billiards, go out visiting, idle or sleep until ½ past 2, dress for dinner at 3 – pool or billiards afterward, then out riding until dark, and in the evening sometimes cards, but generally we retire quietly to our respective domiciles and pass the evening as best we may, not but that it is far from unusual to have a bit of supper swilled down with a pint or two … and sometimes too we go so far as to indulge in a bit of a spree in the bazaar afterwards – this you must allow is a most monstrous course of life even when compared with yours at Chadlington – I am really quite sick of it.’
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From now on he was more relaxed and less than a week later he fell in love with a young widow, Mrs Doherty: ‘I mustered courage to go up and have a chat – she was rather entertaining, and I of course was immediately over head and ears in love – this seldom lasts more than a day or two.’
(#litres_trial_promo) After only two days he commented: ‘it cannot be said that I am at all seriously committed, but really a pretty woman is such a scarcity here that we transform her into an angel.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Over the following days the eighteen-year-old ensign did his utmost to accept invitations where she would be present and was extremely happy when ‘she evidently showed a decided preference for my conversation above the others’.
(#litres_trial_promo) By late November he admitted that he was totally lovesick. He obviously considered marrying her, but his regiment soon left for Bombay, and she later married a judge.
The regiment was back in Bombay on 1 December, and by now Rawlinson had received two more family letters – one from Georgiana and the other from his younger brother George. He resumed his studies, concentrating on Marathi, the language of the Maharastra state in which Bombay is situated. The following year, 1829, he ‘worked like a horse at languages’,
(#litres_trial_promo) then passed his Marathi examination, and in July gained the post of Quartermaster, Paymaster and Interpreter with his regiment. He resumed a vigorous social life, being ‘Steward of the Balls, Manager of the theatre, head of the Billiard & Racquet Rooms’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In addition, he was involved in hunting, shooting and horseracing and was constantly trying to impress the women in Bombay, where ‘I do flatter myself that I cut no very disreputable figure’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In private, though, Rawlinson noted that ‘I was educating myself by an extensive course of reading … From this time dates my passion for books.’
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In 1830 the regiment moved to Poona (now known as Pune) in the Western Ghats mountain chain, a march of nearly 100 miles south-eastwards from Bombay. Poona acted as a refuge from the summer heat for those in Bombay, with an extensive military camp about 2 miles from the town. Here Rawlinson remained for over three years, another militarily inactive period, but one that continued to be highly enjoyable. Years later he wrote that this period was ‘the most enjoyable of my life. I had excellent health, was in the heyday of youth, tremendous spirits, was celebrated in all athletic amusements, riding, shooting and especially hunting, and with the whole world before me.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He was so busy that he did not resume his journal until 11 April 1831, his twenty-first birthday, evidently irritated that nobody had marked the occasion, which recalled ‘more forcibly to my mind the loss I experienced in being thus far absent from the bosom of my family’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In years to come he kept returning on his birthday to this same journal entry in order to add comments on the progress in his life.
At Poona, Rawlinson’s maxim was: ‘“never engage in anything unless there is every chance of becoming first in it” – if I did not think I could be first I gave it up.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He was so good at sports that nobody would accept his challenge to compete for the considerable stake of £100 in a combined competition of ‘running, jumping, quoits, racquets, billiards, pigeon-shooting, pig-sticking, steeple-chasing, chess, and games of skill at cards’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In November 1831 at Newmarket in England, George Osbaldeston undertook a momentous horseracing match, completing 200 miles in less than eight hours using twenty-eight horses. It received massive attention, and the officers in Poona debated how they could emulate this success. It was Rawlinson who accepted a wager to race from Poona to Panwell, the mainland port of Bombay. The distance was 72 miles and the stake was £100, with a forfeit of 4 rupees to be paid for every minute over the four hours and the same amount to be paid to the rider for every minute under that time. ‘The general opinion,’ Rawlinson noted, ‘was that the match would not be won.’
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At quarter-past-five in the morning of 22 May 1832, the 6-foot tall, 12-stone, twenty-two-year-old rider set off, dressed in ‘hunting costume, jockey cap, thick ticking jacket, with a watch sewn into the waistband, samberskin breeches, and a pair of easy old boots’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He encountered numerous setbacks, from being forced to scramble with his horse over the backs of bullocks that were obstructing his way to descending the precipitous Ghats with his horse out of control. He changed horses ten times, on the third occasion being forced to abandon the exhausted animal and run uphill for a quarter of a mile to meet his next mount, because it had been stationed in the wrong place. Thousands of villagers lined the last three miles, and to the incredulity of the umpires he rode into the compound of Panwell tavern after a ride of just three hours and seven minutes, soundly winning the wager. Riding back to Poona in the afternoon with the same horses and in almost the same time, he ‘appeared at a party the same evening apparently as fresh as a lark but this was swagger!’
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So remarkable was Rawlinson’s achievement that it was reported in newspapers in both India and England, yet in spite of these diversions he still found time for study and wrote in his journal: ‘I read a great deal, and passed a first-class examination in Persian, and in fact I believe I was a general favourite.’
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Three: In the Service of the Shah (#ulink_d9cfbbdc-c4d4-5c11-b379-af7ee20174f6)
Having arrived in Bombay as a raw and immature East India Company cadet in 1827, on his ‘fatal day’ of 26 October, Rawlinson left India exactly six years later, a more mature and experienced officer, especially competent in the Hindustani, Marathi and Persian languages. His destination was Persia, known today as Iran.
The East India Company’s interest in Persia was originally commercial, but over the previous three decades every diplomatic effort had been made to maintain the country’s independence so that it could not be used as a base by Russia, Afghanistan or France for an invasion of British India, a threat that was felt to be very real. Fath Ali Shah, the ruler of Persia (‘Shah’ being the Persian title given to the country’s king), had made alliances with Britain and then France, but turned to Britain again in 1809. The following year British officers began to train the Shah’s army and accompany it into battle, but once peace was established between Britain and Russia in 1813 and Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo two years later, this military presence was largely withdrawn.
By the early 1830s, Russian influence in Tehran began to alarm the British to such a degree that the Company formed a new military detachment, drawn from all over India. Under the command of the forty-four-year-old Cornishman Colonel William Pasmore of the Bengal Native Infantry, the detachment consisted of native troops, eight officers, fourteen sergeants and an assistant apothecary. Rawlinson was chosen because of his proficiency in Persian, a language he was inspired to pursue by Sir John Malcolm, who had died of influenza in England a few months earlier. That inspiration caused ‘the most momentous change in his whole life’
(#litres_trial_promo) and would have a profound impact on the study of ancient cuneiform writing.
The military detachment sailed from Bombay on 26 October 1833 and completed the 1,700-mile journey to Bushire in early November. Known today as Bushehr, this Persian Gulf port is situated at the northernmost end of a narrow promontory, and the East India Company set up a factory there in 1763, although it was of little use as a port because ships had to drop anchor 2 to 3 miles offshore and transfer cargo in small boats. Rawlinson and his fellow officers were heading for Tehran and so needed to cross the coastal strip and make their way through the formidable Zagros mountains, rising to over 13,000 feet in height. News that the narrow mountain passes were already blocked with deep snow forced them to remain nearly three months in Bushire, considered ‘a most wretched place’,
(#litres_trial_promo) but their stay did at least coincide with the cooler weather and enabled sufficient baggage animals to be organized for the long trek ahead.
At the beginning of February 1834 Colonel Pasmore at last ordered his men to leave Bushire, and after a climb of 120 miles up through the mountains they reached Shiraz. This city is at an altitude of 5,000 feet and it became the capital of the province of Fars in the late seventh century, after the Arab conquest. From the thirteenth century it was renowned as a literary centre, especially because of two poets who were born and buried there: Sa’di (died 1292) and Háfez (died 1390). To the north of Shiraz the mountains rise steeply, and deep snow in the passes brought a halt to their journey.
Rawlinson made use of his enforced stay at Shiraz by immediately riding out to the ruins of Persepolis, some 30 miles away. Known now as Takht-i Jamshid (Throne of Jamshid) after a mythical king of Persia, Persepolis lies on the edge of a wide plain. It was Darius the Great, soon after his accession as King of Persia in 522 BC, who decided to build an impressive new capital city there, which he called ‘Parsa’. The city had monumental palace buildings constructed on a huge artificial stone terrace overshadowed by a fortified hill. The ancient Greek name of Persepolis may be a contraction of ‘Persai polis’ (meaning ‘the city in Persis’), or it can be translated as ‘destroyer of cities’, a more apt phrase for the site because nearly two centuries later, in 331 BC, it was looted and burned to the ground by Alexander the Great and his troops who had set out from Greece to conquer the Persian Empire. The destroyed city was abandoned and never rebuilt, but great stone columns, gateways, staircases and impressive relief sculptures remained standing, and Rawlinson spent many hours examining these ruins and copied some of the cuneiform inscriptions – strange writing with abstract, geometric signs. Though this site had been visited and recorded by many European travellers, he had not encountered such inscriptions before and was fascinated.
Still unable to move on to Tehran, Rawlinson made a further trip with two other officers and his head groom back into the mountains, this time to explore the deserted ruins of Bishapur – ‘The Beautiful [City of] Shapur’ – a city that had been founded nearly eight centuries after Persepolis. It took its name from the second Sasanian ruler of Persia, Shapur I, who ruled for over three decades from AD 240. He belonged to the Sasanian (or Sassanian) dynasty that was founded by Ardashir, supposedly a descendant of the legendary ruler Sasan. Shapur himself was particularly successful in battle against the powerful Roman Empire, defeating two of its emperors and even capturing Valerian in AD 260 – the only time a Roman emperor was taken prisoner. At Bishapur Shapur’s victories were commemorated in three sculptured reliefs on the rock faces of a river gorge, showing the king on horseback trampling and receiving in submission his Roman enemies, while beyond the gorge at the foot of a mountain he built the royal city of Bishapur.
Rawlinson had been warned that ‘a notorious Robber chief had possession of the whole country and it was as much as my life was worth to venture into his lands. I also learnt from my servant who had been in his service, that Bakir Khan the son was in reality a very good fellow, smoking his segar [cigar], and taking his glass of wine as kindly as any English gentleman – he was also a very good rider and first rate shot … I took the precaution therefore before starting to take a few presents, on the chance of meeting Bakir Khan, and above all I put aside a few bottles of sherry and brandy.’
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After some hours sketching ruins and copying inscriptions, they rode on a few miles and agreed to climb a steep mountain to look for the famous Cave of Shapur with its colossal statue of Shapur I, once over 20 feet high, but now collapsed. ‘Up to this time,’ Rawlinson recorded, ‘we had not seen a single soul in any part of the ruins and so hoped to escape all observation of the robber tribes who lived near.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Leaving their horses with the groom, they began the difficult climb in the sweltering heat. Although they were all capable, resourceful soldiers, only Rawlinson had the nerve and climbing ability to reach the cave: ‘The ascent of the mountain was exceedingly difficult, and my two companions … gave in before reaching the summit. I went on, found the cave and carved my name on the statue.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Some years later he was told that ‘some travellers, penetrating to the statue and imagining they were the first Europeans to visit the spot, were misdeceived and astonished by finding it’.
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For two hours Rawlinson stayed in the cave, while his companions returned to camp, so when he returned to his groom, he was alarmed to be surrounded by Persian horsemen, followers of Bakir Khan, who was himself visible in the distance. In order to avert a potentially dangerous situation, Rawlinson rode straight up to him and greeted him in Persian. Although he was reproached for coming to the area like a spy, a friendly conversation followed, ending with Bakir Khan asking for something to drink. Rawlinson’s groom filled up a drinking cup with half a bottle of brandy, which Bakir proceeded to drink rather rapidly until he staggered about and collapsed. Immediately Bakir’s men aimed their long matchlock guns at Rawlinson, who seized the cup and drank the remaining liquid in case it was thought to be poisoned. While they hesitated to fire, Bakir Khan showed signs of recovery and asked: ‘Sahib, what was that liquid fire you gave me? It was very good but awfully strong. I thought it was sherry, but it was the father of all sherries, where did it come from?’
(#litres_trial_promo) Rawlinson diplomatically replied that he had given him brandy, the strongest of all liquors, having heard he could drink anything. Before leaving, Bakir promised ‘to take care of any travellers who might bring letters from me, and I believe he acted up to this promise [and] always behaved well to Englishmen’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Rawlinson was saddened a few years later when Bakir Khan was killed by government forces ‘for some banditti proceedings’.
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With weather conditions improving, the detachment set off from Shiraz towards the end of February and managed to travel 250 miles until hampered by deep snow in the mountain passes beyond Isfahan. From the late sixteenth century, Isfahan had been transformed into one of the most magnificent cities of Persia by Shah Abbas I (ruler from 1588 to 1629), who made it his capital. Its splendour was short-lived, as the Afghans invaded Persia and besieged the city in 1722, massacring most of its inhabitants, and it never recovered its former glory. After a week, the British detachment advanced as far as Qum (pronounced Ghom in Persian), one of the most sacred places of pilgrimage for the Shi’ite Muslims.
In AD 817, Fatima al-Ma’suma died on a journey to her brother, Imam Ali Reza, and was buried at Qum, where her shrine became a site of pilgrimage. Imam Ali Reza died a year later and was buried at Messed in north-east Persia, the country’s holiest city. Both the shrine of Imam Reza and that of Fatima were restored some eight hundred years later by Shah Abbas I and, not long before Rawlinson’s visit, the reigning Shah, Fath Ali, had repaired Fatima’s shrine and embellished the dome with gilding. The shrine was strictly barred to non-believers, but Rawlinson was determined to be the first European to gain entry, even though it was ‘whispered that instant death would be the portion of the audacious infidel who should be found intruding into its hallowed precincts’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Over fifty years later, he wrote that ‘I visited the sacred shrine in the disguise of a pilgrim, a visit of great danger which has never been repeated by any one up to the present time’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Thrilled to be inside, he was nearly detected by turning his back on the holy spot as he viewed everything around him, but realized his error in time – and came out alive.
The detachment continued northwards from Qum for another 90 miles and finally reached Tehran in mid-March. The city lies in the foothills of the Elburz mountains, a snowy backdrop dominated by the dormant volcano Damavand, which is the highest mountain in Persia at 18,600 feet. It was only a modest trading town when it became the capital city of Persia in 1789, but over half a century later Tehran’s population had risen to around 50,000. A near-contemporary description of the city was uncomplimentary, reckoning that the ‘streets swarm in the day time with beggars from every region in Asia, their attire as diversified as their extraction … The Bazaars of Teheran are constructed in the form of long, covered corridors, lighted from above. On either side of the interior, are ranges of shops, occupied by dealers and working people, each quietly plying his avocation … The Bazaar is both a market and a factory … The streets of Teheran have never been cleaned since the place was built … The public ways are infested with the remains of camels, apes, mules, horses, dogs and cats; and here they lie, until some starving dog strips the bones of their flesh, and leaves them to the gradual corrosion of time’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The detachment remained at Tehran for several months ‘studying Persian and becoming acquainted with the country’.
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To emphasize his importance, Fath Ali Shah, the second ruler of the Qajar dynasty, kept the officers of the detachment waiting a few weeks before receiving them, and Rawlinson’s own observations of the occasion indicate his opinion of the absurd pomp and rigid etiquette. In order to impress the Persians, Rawlinson and the other officers formed a glittering and gaudy spectacle as they set out on their horses from the residence of the British Envoy in the south of the city. ‘A party of two-and-twenty Europeans thus brilliantly attired,’ Rawlinson noted, ‘is a spectacle to which the eyes of the Teheranees are but little accustomed.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Riding through the narrow streets and bazaars, they reached the Golestan Palace, dismounted and were led through courtyards and gloomy passages to the splendid Golestan Garden. The Shah was in an adjoining audience room, ‘but, it being utterly inconsistent with etiquette that we should proceed thither by the direct route, we were paraded half round the enclosure before being permitted to approach the throne’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Seated on a throne in one corner of the room overlooking the garden, the Shah was surrounded by sword and shield bearers and miscellaneous princes, who were attired in expensive robes and equipped with jewel-encrusted weapons. The throne, Rawlinson observed, ‘was shaped much like a large high-backed old-fashioned easy chair, and, though made of gold, and studded throughout with emeralds and rubies, appeared a most strange ungainly piece of furniture’.
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This display of wealth contrasted with the simplicity of the room and with the appearance of the elderly Shah (then sixty-four years of age). Although portrayed in numerous flattering paintings gorgeously attired and with a beard down to his waist, Rawlinson thought him a person of ‘a plain and almost mean appearance. The old man’s beard is still of prodigious length, but its claim to supremacy in this respect may, I think, be fairly questioned. His face is dark and wrinkled; his teeth have all fallen out from age; and he retains not a trace of that manly beauty which is said to have distinguished him in former days, and which characterizes even now the pictures which are daily taken of him.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In a polite conversation lasting just fifteen minutes, the Shah expressed the value he placed on the detachment, and they were then dismissed with the greatest honour.
As his son Crown Prince Abbas Mirza had died the year before after a long illness, Fath Ali now appointed as his successor his twenty-six-year-old grandson Muhammed Mirza (‘Mirza’ being a Persian title meaning ‘born of a prince’, given to those of good birth), who was one of the twenty-six sons of Abbas Mirza. This announcement dashed the hopes of Fath Ali’s other sons and grandsons, who, according to Rawlinson, numbered nearly three thousand, ‘and every Persian in consequence felt a pride in being the subject of such a king. The greatest misfortune, indeed, that can befall a man in Persia is to be childless. When a chief’s “hearthstone,” as it was said, “was dark,” he lost all respect.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Summoned from his military campaigns beyond the north-eastern border of Persia, Muhammed Mirza lifted his siege of the Afghan city of Herat and entered Tehran in a grand procession on 14 June. He was proclaimed Crown Prince straightaway, and the British detachment was transferred to him as a bodyguard, accompanying him at his investiture a few days later.
Because the city of Tabriz, capital of the province of Azerbaijan, was also the official residence of the heir-apparent, Muhammed Mirza was sent there as governor by the Shah. Situated in the far north-west of Persia, this was strategically important territory as it bordered Russia and the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Tabriz had been captured by Russia as recently as 1827, after provocation by Persia, although it was restored the following year. The city was located in a valley at the foot of the mountains, and had over the centuries been battered by invading armies, epidemics and devastating, frequent earthquakes, as well as bitterly cold winters with heavy snowfall and hot, dry summers. Accompanied by Colonel Pasmore’s British detachment, Muhammed and the Persian army from his Herat campaign set off from Tehran on 4 July after delays finding sufficient transport animals for the journey of over 300 miles.
Most of the British officers suffered from illness on the march, including Rawlinson who had to be carried for much of the way in a palanquin (a covered litter). ‘Prostrated by fever and ague’,
(#litres_trial_promo) he was most likely suffering from malaria, although it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that the cause of the illness was found to be a microscopic parasite transmitted through mosquito bites. The symptoms of malaria include violent shivering, followed by a fever with very high temperature, then profuse sweating, as well as headaches and vomiting, culminating in a period of fatigue. Such symptoms caused Rawlinson to spend several days in bed when they reached their destination towards the end of July.
Throughout August and September 1834 the British officers relentlessly trained the Persian troops, stationed on the disputed frontier region. In mid-October Rawlinson and two colleagues obtained a few days’ leave and headed across the border towards Bayazit, a town of about three thousand Armenian inhabitants, 20 miles south-west of Mount Ararat, where a Turkish force was encamped. In the nearby village of Ahura, on the south-eastern slope of Mount Ararat, a legend persisted that a shepherd had once seen a great wooden ship on their mountain, which was believed to be none other than Noah’s Ark of the Old Testament book of Genesis. Today three main controversies still surround Noah’s Ark. Where did it land? Could it have survived to the present day? And did it ever exist? As related in Genesis, God decided to destroy everything living on earth with a catastrophic flood because wickedness among people was so great, but Noah, a righteous man, was told to build an ark (a box-like boat) to protect himself, his family and a pair of every bird and animal. Of enormous size (300 cubits long, equivalent to 450 feet), the ark was equipped with three decks and took over one hundred years to build. The flood, caused by relentless rainfall for forty days and forty nights, did not begin to subside until after a hundred and fifty days, and the tops of mountains only began to be visible after a further two months.
Genesis, originally written in Hebrew, does not say that the ark came to rest on a specific peak, but on the ‘mountains of Ararat’, and for believers in the literal story of the ark, the imposing Mount Ararat has been favoured as the resting place since medieval times. The mountain actually has two peaks 7 miles apart, the highest being Great Ararat, which rises to 16,945 feet and has a permanent ice cap and glaciers. It was not originally known as Ararat, but as Masis to the Armenians and Agri Dag in Turkish. The reference in Genesis is probably to Urartu, a very powerful state in the Lake Van area in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, extending into what is now Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The name Urartu is found in the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria, its great rival to the south, although the people of Urartu actually called their own land Bianili.
From the mid-nineteenth century there have been over forty claims of spotting the ark on Mount Ararat, at times seen embedded in ice or submerged in a lake, since when about 140 expeditions have attempted to find the ark. Ancient wood can survive for thousands of years in very dry or in waterlogged conditions, but Mount Ararat is a large and inhospitable dormant volcano, although no known eruptions have occurred in historical times. There is no evidence of marine deposits from a flood, and the volcano has probably erupted within the last 10,000 years, since any Biblical flood. The ice cap, hundreds of feet thick, is thought to be the most likely hiding place for the ark, and yet the movement of the glaciers would pulverize a wooden vessel.
The summit of Mount Ararat was reached for the first time, on his third attempt, in October 1829 by a German professor of natural philosophy, Friedrich Parrot, only five years before Rawlinson’s visit. Rawlinson was unaware of Parrot’s success, and although he believed in the ark story, he was less certain that Ararat was its resting place. Nevertheless, it was an irresistible, formidable challenge: ‘I should enter on the attempt with sanguine expectations, and if ever I have an opportunity for putting my wishes in execution during my residence in the North of Persia, I shall certainly avail myself of it in the middle of August as the most favourable time for the ascent.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The opportunity never arose, but years later the search for Noah’s Ark was overshadowed by the decipherment of similar flood stories from earlier civilizations written in cuneiform on clay tablets.
On 10 November news reached the British camp of the sudden and unexpected death three weeks earlier of Fath Ali Shah at Isfahan and his burial at Qum in the shrine of Fatima. With the Persian troops, Rawlinson marched back to Tabriz, where the Scottish General Henry Lindesay-Bethune had just arrived to take over from Colonel Pasmore. Lindesay-Bethune was an impressive figure ‘six foot eight inches in height (without his shoes), and thus realized, in the minds of the Persians, their ideas of the old heroes of romance’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Fath Ali may have been poisoned, and the delay in Muhammed Mirza hearing about the death had allowed his position as heir to the throne to be disputed by other claimants. Muhammed was unable to advance on Tehran in force because his Persian troops had not been paid for four years, and so Russia and Britain agreed to ensure his succession, with the British Envoy providing funds for the soldiers’ pay. A few days later Lindesay-Bethune set off with the troops for Tehran and on the way forced the surrender of the army of one of Muhammed’s uncles who had proclaimed himself Shah. Tehran was reached in late December, and on 2 January 1835 Muhammed, as the new Shah, entered the city. Lindesay-Bethune marched the Persian troops to Isfahan and Shiraz to put down further resistance, after which Muhammed Shah had various uncles, brothers and nephews exiled, imprisoned or blinded.
In mid-January Rawlinson and some of his fellow officers met Muhammed Shah for the first time in the main reception room of the palace, but Rawlinson’s verdict, recorded in his private journal, was damning: ‘[he] has little appearance of Eastern sovereignty about him. Instead of a fine, bold, manly bearing, with the gleam of intellect upon his brow … he possesses a gross, unwieldy person, a thick, rapid, unimpressive utterance, an unmeaning countenance, and a general bearing more clownish and commonplace than is often met with even in the middle ranks of Persian society. There is in his appearance no spark of grace, dignity, or intelligence.’
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By contrast, the palace reception room was considered by Rawlinson to be ‘probably the most splendid apartment in Persia’,
(#litres_trial_promo) the focus being the magnificent seventeenth-century Peacock Throne with its 26,000 emeralds, rubies, diamonds and pearls. Commissioned by the Mughal Emperor of India, Shah Jehan, for his Red Fort at Delhi, it had been brought back to Persia by Nadir Shah in 1739 as part of the treasure he had looted from the city after massacring some 20,000 of its citizens. Muhammed Shah, who had chosen not to sit on the throne but on more comfortable velvet cushions, firmly announced his wish ‘to have an army of 100,000 disciplined troops, and – Inshallah – to revive the days of Nadir in Iran. Otherwise the conversation related chiefly to the wonders of European science – balloons, steam guns, Herschel’s telescope, and the subject of aerolites were successively touched upon.’
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The coronation of the new Shah took place on the last day of January, and those attending included ‘the chief executioner and his establishment, who, with their very red robes and turbans and axes of office, presented a very imposing appearance’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Rawlinson had not changed his opinion of the Shah, who ‘waddled in his usual undignified manner across the chamber to the foot of the throne, clambered up the steps, and sat himself down at the further end, leaning against the richly carved marble back. His appearance was rendered more ludicrous on this occasion than I ever previously beheld it, by his being obliged to keep one hand up at his head in order to preserve the ponderous top-heavy crown, which he wore, in its place … It appeared to be made of white cloth, and owed its weight, of course, to the vast quantity of jewels with which it was adorned.’
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Rawlinson, newly promoted to Lieutenant, evidently impressed the Shah, however, as he was chosen to raise and train troops from Kurdish tribes in the province of Kermanshah for the Governor Bahram Mirza, who was the Shah’s own brother. Accompanied by one other European – Sergeant George Page – Rawlinson left Tehran on 10 April for the town of Kermanshah (today renamed Bakhtaran), 300 miles to the south-west in the Zagros mountains. The following day was his twenty-fifth birthday and he made an extremely brief journal entry: ‘The year has evolved and brought no material change, either in my fortune or my feelings.’
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Kermanshah was on the main trade route between Tehran and Baghdad, in a region rich in ancient rock-cut reliefs and inscriptions of varying dates. Just over halfway there, Rawlinson passed the large town of Hamadan at the foot of Mount Elwand (or Alvand), once the ancient city of Ecbatana, which was founded as the capital of the empire of the Medes in the eighth century BC. At an altitude of 5,900 feet in the mountains, Ecbatana controlled the major east – west route from the plains of Mesopotamia to the central Iranian plateau. Famous in ancient times for its vast wealth and architectural splendour, Ecbatana became part of the Persian Empire when it was conquered in 550 BC by King Cyrus the Great, who used it as his summer capital. Passing through this area so rich in the remains of ancient and largely unknown civilizations, Rawlinson was in his element, appealing as it did to his flair for exploration and linguistics, and his growing interest in ancient history.
A detour was made to find cuneiform inscriptions Rawlinson had heard about a few miles away along a wooded gorge of Mount Elwand, aware that other travellers had seen them but unaware that copies had been done as recently as 1827 and subsequently given to Friedrich Edward Schulz. A German professor of philosophy, Schulz had himself been recording inscriptions and other antiquities for the French government in the Lake Van area, until he was murdered by Kurds in 1829. His papers passed to Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin, an Oriental scholar in Paris who had been a great friend of Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs, until politics tore them apart. Although Saint-Martin intended to publish these inscriptions from Mount Elwand, he died of cholera at the age of forty-one in 1832, only months after Champollion’s death. Saint-Martin’s papers passed to Eugène Burnouf, another Oriental scholar in Paris who had replaced Champollion as a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and became Professor of Sanskrit at the College of France. While Rawlinson was copying the Elwand inscriptions, Burnouf was preparing them for publication.
In the Elwand Gorge, two adjacent square panels of trilingual cuneiform inscriptions, one slightly higher than the other, had been cut into the steep rock face, praising Ahuramazda (Persian for ‘Great God’) and recording the lineages and prowess of the Persian king Darius the Great in one panel, and his successor Xerxes I in the other. The site became known as Ganj Nameh (Tales of a Treasure) in the belief that the strange inscriptions described the location of a large treasure hidden during the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Rawlinson spent some time carefully copying these inscriptions, unaware that the real treasure they contained were clues to the decipherment of cuneiform, because they were trilingual inscriptions; like those at Persepolis and Bisitun, they had been carved in the three ancient languages of Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Rawlinson later recorded that the ‘first materials which I submitted to analysis were the sculptured tablets of Hamadán [Mount Elwand], carefully and accurately copied by myself upon the spot, and I afterwards found that I had thus, by a singular accident, selected the most favourable inscriptions of the class which existed in all Persia for resolving the difficulties of an unknown character’.
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Four: The Cuneiform Conundrum (#ulink_505d2d78-be7a-571e-a00d-30b84a954764)
Before the decipherment of cuneiform, stories in the Bible and those of Greek and Roman writers were the only written record of the ancient history of the Middle East. Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, is an explanation of the origins of heaven and earth, the very name Genesis being derived from the ancient Greek word for ‘origins’. It relates that after the Flood, Noah, his wife, his sons Shem, Ham and Japeth and their wives were the only people in the world. God spoke to Noah and his sons: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Noah died at the ripe old age of 950, and his sons had numerous descendants. Nimrod, a great-grandson of Noah, was supposedly the initial ruler of Shinar and Assyria, which made up Mesopotamia, stretching from the Taurus mountains of Anatolia southwards to the Persian Gulf and encompassing much of modern Iraq. Shinar was the Hebrew name for Babylonia (southern Mesopotamia), while Assyria was the name given to northern Mesopotamia. The name Mesopotamia is itself an ancient Greek term, ‘between the rivers’, referring to the Tigris and Euphrates. Genesis records Nimrod as the founder of the first cities after the Flood, including Babel, Nineveh and Calah – better known today as Babylon, Nineveh and Nimrud.
As all the people of the world descended from Noah and his sons, only one language should have been spoken, and so the author of Genesis tried to explain that the confusion of many languages was yet another punishment from God. Of those people who had migrated to Shinar, Genesis records: ‘they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and bake them thoroughly.” And they used brick instead of stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top reaches to the heavens; and let us make a name for ourselves, so that we are not scattered over the face of the whole earth.” And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people speaking the same language. This is the beginning of what they will do and nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them all over the earth, and they left off building the city. That is why its name was Babel – because the LORD there confused the language of all the earth’.
(#litres_trial_promo) This story refers to the building of the fabled city of Babylon that grew up alongside the Euphrates, 55 miles south of the later city of Baghdad. Although supposedly one of the first cities after the Flood, archaeological excavation has shown that Babylon was not one of Mesopotamia’s oldest cities, but that it only developed around 1800 BC and that there are many older cities along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.
The main natural resources of ancient Mesopotamia were clay, silt and mud, as well as bitumen, which seeped to the surface in many areas. Buildings were constructed primarily of bricks manufactured by mixing together mud, straw and water and shaped in wooden moulds, after which they were left to dry hard in the sun, and only rarely baked in a kiln. Mortar was unknown, but mud bricks were bonded together with mud and also bitumen. Bricks were entirely coated with bitumen as a protection against damp when it was necessary to waterproof the foundations of buildings, because such bricks rapidly revert to mud when wet. Even with normal wear and tear, mud bricks gradually turn to dust, so that collapsed buildings would form a layer of soil over which new buildings were constructed. With the accumulation of rubbish and decomposed bricks, mounds (called tells) were formed and have become a distinctive feature of the Mesopotamian landscape.
The Genesis story relates that at Babylon a mud-brick tower – the Tower of Babel – was constructed with the intention of reaching heaven, which incurred the displeasure of God. The story may have been inspired by Babylon’s immense ziggurat known as Etemenanki (‘Foundation of Heaven and Earth’). Like other ziggurats, Etemenanki was a solid stepped pyramid with a monumental exterior staircase and a temple on top. The reason for God’s displeasure is not given in Genesis, but instead of sending another flood, the punishment this time was to disperse the inhabitants of Babylon far and wide and to ‘confuse their language’,
(#litres_trial_promo) so that they spoke different languages and could no longer communicate and cooperate. Because the similar-sounding Hebrew word balal means ‘confuse’ (and therefore a confusion of languages, or babble), the Genesis writer believed that this was why the city was called Babel, but it was actually due to the much earlier name of Babilu, which means ‘gate of the god’. Later on, the ancient Greeks called the city Babylon. The origin of the city’s name had nothing to do with why many languages are spoken throughout the world, but referred to the impressive gates of this fortified city.
The lack of stone and the abundance of mud not only determined building methods in Mesopotamia, but also its very writing system. With no other suitable material for writing, the ubiquitous mud was used to make rectangular, square or occasionally oval tablets. From a ball of damp clay, tablets were flattened into a shape that fitted in the hand, though some could be far larger, and they generally had one convex and one flat side. Writing on the tablet was done with a special implement (stylus) when the clay was still damp, first on the flat side, then the convex side. Styli have not survived as they were made from perishable materials, primarily reeds that grew abundantly in the marshlands: the Babylonian word for a stylus was qan tuppi, ‘tablet-reed’. Writing was not normally done by incising or scoring lines with the stylus, but by making impressions in the damp clay of the tablet, and so it was easier to make straight rather than curved lines. Because one end of the reed stylus was cut at an angle, signs were made up of lines or strokes that had one end wider than the other, displaying a characteristic wedge or tapering shape. The system of writing is known today by the clumsy word ‘cuneiform’, which is literally ‘of wedge-shaped form’, from the Latin word cuneus, meaning wedge. Mistakes were erased by smoothing the clay surface with the stylus; after writing, tablets were left to dry hard in the sun, or occasionally fired in a kiln.
Cuneiform was not a language, but a script or writing system that was used to convey several different spoken languages. In Egypt, hieroglyphic writing was used only to write down the ancient Egyptian language, so hieroglyphs tend to be considered as both a writing system and the ancient language, but cuneiform is more like the later Roman script, which was first used at Rome to write down the Latin language. With modifications, this Roman script has continued to be a writing system for over two thousand years and is used today to write down numerous languages worldwide, such as English, German and Spanish.
Cuneiform is similar to the Roman script in that it too was used for a long period to write down different languages, evolving to suit each language and also evolving over time. For around three thousand years it was the writing system that recorded the many languages spoken across an extensive area, from Iraq to Syria, central Turkey, Palestine and south-west Iran. These languages included Sumerian, Akkadian, Urartian, Elamite and Old Persian. The last known use of cuneiform was in AD 75, on a clay tablet about astronomy found at Babylon. Because the system of cuneiform varied from language to language and changed over time, decipherers had a twofold problem: working out the particular writing system and translating the language in question. With the resulting tangle of multiple languages and varying versions of cuneiform script, decipherment could never be a single landmark achievement. The prize was not the knowledge of a single ancient civilization, but the knowledge of many ancient cultures, and the challenge was too much work for one person – too much for a single lifetime. Those attempting the decipherment of cuneiform had no concept of the enormous task ahead.
