Pornosophie, Erotologie & Aphrodisiaka

The perfectly Manly Man, I think, according to Harvey Mansfield as well as Immanuel Kant. Soldier, traveller, scholar & inspired decipherer of cuneiform …. The man who resurrected unsuspected ancient cultures we would never have heard about Innana.’s civilisation.

From 1827 Henry Rawlinson – fearless soldier, sportsman and imperial adventurer – spent twenty-five years in India, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan in the service of the East India Company. Among his passions were history, languages and buying books. In 1833 he was chosen to go to Persia because of his excellent knowledge of Persian. It was in Persia that he became obsessed with cuneiform, the world’s earliest writing. The key to understanding cuneiform was an immense inscription high on a sheer rock face in the mountains of western Iran. Only Rawlinson had the physical and intellectual skills, courage, self-motivation and opportunity to make the perilous ascent and copy the monument – an enormous Rosetta Stone – and make important contributions to the decipherment of the three languages and the three cuneiform scripts it was written in: Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite.

Like a Boy’s Own adventure serial … a Victorian Indiana Jones’
[Telegraph, July 2003]

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. Rawlinson had the good fortune to be posted to Kermanshah in the west of Iran, just a few miles from a rock-cut monument at Bisitun. 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 and three different cuneiform scripts. 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 – King Darius’s newly invented cuneiform – and greatly helped with the third, Elamite.

“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. …
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In 1844 Rawlinson 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 the very first excavations of the ancient mounds of Mesopotamia, sites like Nineveh and Babylon. These produced many more cuneiform inscriptions, and Rawlinson’s 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.

[…] a small, elderly man by the name of Ya qub. […] he had been employed in the Residency all his life, and [that] of all the Consuls-General whom he had served he respected and loved and admired Rawlinson most of all. In knowledge and learning he was, he said, “like God,” as a horseman he was like Antar [an Arab hero], as a king he was like Nimrod, and when he spoke at the Mijlis (i.e. Town Council) of Baghdad the heart of the Wali Pasha melted, and the knees of his councillors gave way under them.
Ya qub related to Budge numerous stories of Rawlinson. Each year, he said, his power in the country became stronger, and “towards the end of his time here had he taken one dog, and put his English hat on his head and sent him to the Serai, all the people in the bazar would have made way for him, and bowed to him, and the soldiers would have stood still and presented arms to him as he passed, and the officials in the Serai would have embraced him; and if he had sent another dog with another of his hats across the river to Kazimen, the Shi ites and Sunnites would have stopped fighting each other, and would have asked him to drink coffee with them.«
Budge, 1920, pp 231-2 & p. 232

Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon (© 2003) 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).
Empires of the Plain Website: http://www.adkinshistory.com/empiresoftheplain.aspx
Order the book: Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon