Past Perfect: Deciphering Darius

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After being posted to India in 1827, a young cavalry officer named Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810–1895) demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for languages, mastering Hindustani, modern Persian and Arabic. In 1833 he was sent to Persia to help train the Shah’s troops. While visiting the mountainous region of western Kurdistan, he became fascinated by a massive inscription near the town of Behistun (modern Bisitun). The inscription was written in the then-undeciphered cuneiform script in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian (Akkadian). Accompanying the inscription was a relief depicting the Persian king Darius the Great (522–486 B.C.). Before the trilingual inscription could be deciphered, Rawlinson faced the daunting challenge of transcribing the three scripts, which were carved on a sheer cliff face hundreds of feet above the roadbed. For 12 years, Rawlinson scaled the cliffs, finally managing to copy the lower inscriptions written in Old Persian and Elamite (which he calls “Scythic” in the following passage). The Babylonian inscription remained out of reach, however, until Rawlinson enlisted the aid of a Kurdish boy who hoisted himself to the top of the inscription and made papier-mâché casts of the text. Rawlinson deciphered the inscription—leading to the decipherment of Mesopotamian cuneiform in general—by recognizing the names of various kings in the Old Persian inscription and then observing consistent relationships between words in Old Persian and Babylonian.

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The rock, or, as it is usually called by the Arab geographers, the mountain of Behistun, is not an isolated hill, as has been sometimes imagined. It is merely the terminal point of a long, narrow range which bounds the plain of Kermanshah to the eastward. This range is rocky and abrupt throughout, but at the extremity it rises in height, and becomes a sheer precipice. The altitude I found by careful triangulation to be 3,087 feet, and the height above the plain at which occur the tablets of Darius is perhaps 500 feet, or something more.

Notwithstanding that a French antiquarian commission in Persia described it a few years back to be impossible to copy the Behistun inscriptions, I certainly do not consider it any great feat in climbing to ascend to the spot where the inscriptions occur. When I was living at Kermanshah fifteen years ago, and was somewhat more active than I am at present, I used frequently to scale the rock three or four times a day without the aid of a rope or a ladder; without any assistance, in fact, whatever. During my late visits I have found it more convenient to ascend and descend by the help of ropes where the track lies up a precipitate cleft, and to throw a plank over those chasms where a false step in leaping across would probably be fatal. On 032reaching the recess which contains the Persian text of the record, ladders are indispensable in order to examine the upper portion of the tablet; and even with ladders there is considerable risk, for the foot ledge is so narrow, about eighteen inches or at most two feet in breadth, that with a ladder long enough to reach the sculptures sufficient slope cannot be given to enable a person to ascend, and, if the ladder be shortened in order to increase the slope, the upper inscription can only be copied by standing on the topmost step of the ladder, with no other support than steadying the body against the rock with the left arm, while the left hand holds the notebook, and the right hand is employed with the pencil. In this position I copied all the upper inscriptions, and the interest of the occupation entirely did away with any sense of danger.

To reach the recess which contains the Scythic [now generally called Elamite, a language that has still not been fully deciphered] translation of the record of Darius is a matter of far greater difficulty. On the left-hand side of the recess alone is there any foot ledge whatever; on the right-hand, where the recess, which is thrown a few feet farther back, joins the Persian tablet, the face of the rock presents a sheer precipice, and it is necessary therefore to bridge this intervening space between the left-hand of the Persian tablet and the foot ledge on the left-hand of the recess. With ladders of sufficient length, a bridge of this sort can be constructed without difficulty; but my first attempt to cross the chasm was unfortunate, and might have been fatal, for, having previously shortened my only ladder in order to obtain a slope for copying the Persian upper legends, I found, when I came to lay it across to the recess in order to get at the Scythic translation, that it was not sufficiently long to lie flat on the foot ledge beyond. One side of the ladder would alone reach the nearest point of the ledge, and, as it would of course have tilted over if a person had attempted to cross in that position, I changed it from a horizontal to a vertical direction, the upper side resting firmly on the rock at its two ends, and the lower hanging over the precipice, and I prepared to cross, walking on the lower side, and holding to the upper side with my hands. If the ladder had been a compact article, this mode of crossing, although far from comfortable, would have been at any rate practicable; but the Persians merely fit in the bars of their ladders without pretending to clench them outside, and I had hardly accordingly begun to cross over when the vertical pressure forced the bars out of their sockets, and the lower and unsupported side of the ladder thus parted company from the upper, and went crashing down over the precipice. Hanging on to the upper side, which still remained firm in its place, and assisted by my friends, who were anxiously watching the trial, I regained the Persian recess, and did not again attempt to cross until I had made a bridge of comparative stability. Ultimately I took the casts of the Scythic writing … by laying one long ladder, in the first instance, horizontally across the chasm, and by then placing another ladder, which rested on the bridge, perpendicularly against the rock.

The Babylonian transcript at Behistun is still more difficult to reach than either the Scythic or the Persian tablets. The writing can be copied by the aid of a good telescope from below, but I long despaired of obtaining a 033cast of the inscription; for I found it quite beyond my powers of climbing to reach the spot where it was engraved, and the craigsmen of the place, who were accustomed to track the mountain goats over the entire face of the mountain, declared the particular block inscribed with the Babylonian legend to be unapproachable.

At length, however, a wild Kurdish boy, who had come from a distance, volunteered to make the attempt, and I promised him a considerable reward if he succeeded. The mass of rock in question is scarped, and it projects some feet over the Scythic recess, so that it cannot be approached by any of the ordinary means of climbing. The boy’s first move was to squeeze himself up a cleft in the rock a short distance to the left of the projecting mass. When he had ascended some distance above it, he drove a wooden peg firmly into the cleft, fastened a rope to this and then endeavoured to swing himself across to another cleft at some distance on the other side; but in this he failed, owing to the projection of the rock. It then only remained for him to cross over to the cleft by hanging on with his toes and fingers to the slight inequalities on the bare face of the precipice, and in this he succeeded, passing over a distance of twenty feet of almost smooth perpendicular rock in a manner which to a looker-on appeared quite miraculous. When he had reached the second cleft the real difficulties were over. He had brought a rope with him attached to the first peg, and now, driving in a second, he was enabled to swing himself right over the projecting mass of rock. Here, with a short ladder, he formed a swinging seat, like a painter’s cradle, and, fixed upon this seat, he took under my direction the paper cast of the Babylonian translation of the records of Darius which is now at the Royal Asiatic Society’s rooms, and which is almost of equal value for the interpretation of the Assyrian inscriptions [such as those found by Austen Henry Layard at Nineveh in the late 1840s and shipped to the British Museum] as was the Greek translation on the Rosetta Stone for the intelligence of the hieroglyphic texts of Egypt.

After being posted to India in 1827, a young cavalry officer named Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810–1895) demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for languages, mastering Hindustani, modern Persian and Arabic. In 1833 he was sent to Persia to help train the Shah’s troops. While visiting the mountainous region of western Kurdistan, he became fascinated by a massive inscription near the town of Behistun (modern Bisitun). The inscription was written in the then-undeciphered cuneiform script in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian (Akkadian). Accompanying the inscription was a relief depicting the Persian king Darius the Great (522–486 B.C.). Before the trilingual […]