Deciphering the ancient world (Artefact Series: 2)

For the archaeologist-excavators of ancient Egypt and the near East, all hidden treasures were of interest - but the collectors of these treasures were often particularly interested in  those artefacts that contained textual remains. These seemed likely to reveal far more detail about their societies than mute images and architectural elements. Thus the Rosetta Stone of ancient Egypt was highly coveted when it was found by the French in 1799, and was chief among the trophies seized from the French by the victorious English army in 1802. A little later, when excavations in Mesopotamian (Ancient Iraqi) sites were underway, there was a pronounced focus again among collectors on what could be found in particular of this ancient culture’s texts. 

When first found, however, these textual sources were a closed book since they employed writing systems long lost to contemporary scholars. The Rosetta Stone was written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, a writing system that had disappeared by the 4^th century AD, to be replaced by Coptic and Greek. Deciphering hieroglyphic texts in the modern era was the achievement of a small number of European philologists of the first half of the nineteenth century and in particular of the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832), though the work had begun with the English polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829). 

Jean-Francois Champollion and the Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone was their test case. Written in three different scripts – hieroglyphic (the formal script of religious texts), demotic (a day to day writing system used for documents etc) and Greek – the Rosetta Stone offered a challenge to philologists who suspected the three scripts were all versions of the same text. Champollion’s advantage was his fluency in Coptic, a later version of the Egyptian language written in Greek script; his intimate knowledge of this language, plus his intuition about how hieroglyphics functioned (as a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs) led to his breakthrough, and by 1822 he was able to present his findings to a Parisian audience. Now it would be possible to translate the many other remaining texts unearthed by archaeologists, including the Book of the Dead, a collective term for the funerary documents that accompanied the dead, including spells and wishes for the afterlife. With this knowledge, many of the secrets of ancient Egypt could be unlocked.

Detail from the papyrus of Hunefer (c.1275BC), including hieroglyphic text from the 'Book of the Dead'

The deciphering of texts in Mesopotamia was completed later, partly because the discovery of artefacts, including texts, from the near East largely post-dated the great Egyptian campaigns. Mesopotamian texts used cuneiform, a writing system built on recurring patterns of block-like elements (cuneus means a cube or wedge in Latin) made of horizontal and vertical strokes. Here again was a non-alphabetical system that had become a completely closed book. It had had a long history: developed first in southern region of Mesopotamia (Sumer) in the third millennium BC, it was adopted by many ancient near Eastern societies over hundreds of years, only finally dying out in the era of the Roman Empire during the 1^st century AD and largely replaced by alphabetical Aramaic. 

Stone slab inscribed with cuneiform text

Work on unlocking the secrets of cuneiform had begun in the late eighteenth century, largely on cuneiform texts in Old Persian, dating from the relatively late era of the great Persian (Achaemenid) empire. But systematic research only really began with the discovery, in the 1840s, of the ancient city of Nineveh (today’s Kouyunjik, near Mosul, Iraq). A previously unseen world was opened up at Nineveh with the discovery of architectural remains and precious artefacts. These were of immense interest to the archaeologists involved, the Englishman Austen Henry Layard (1817-94) and Iraqi Hormuzd Rassam (1826-1910), a local archaeologist but one who worked for British collectors.  

Austen Henry Layard

Hormuzd Rassam

19th century illustration, Excavations at Nineveh

Again, for the collectors, it was often the textual evidence from this lost world that was of primary interest. One such was amateur philologist Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810-95), who served as a political agent (for the British government) in Baghdad, but had a passionate interest in eastern languages present and past. Rawlinson urged Layard and Rassam to search for remains of ancient Mesopotamian texts at Nineveh and was rewarded by their discovery of the vast library of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (7thc BC), a haul of what would amount to 30,000 clay tablets, covered with cuneiform text in the ancient language of Akkadian. Back in Britain, Rawlinson would devote much of his later career at the British Museum to the decipherment of this script. 

A second amateur philologist fascinated by these finds was the Irishman Edward Hinckes (1792-1866), a clergyman who, in his spare time, devoted himself to the study of ancient languages. And a third was the German Jules Oppert (1825-1905) who taught German in France but who devoted his spare time, again, to the study of Eastern languages. Together with Rawlinson, these three achieved such breakthroughs that they became dubbed ‘the holy trinity of cuneiform’ and through their scholarly work offered direct access to an ancient world that had previously only been known through Old Testament sources or ancient Greek or Latin writers. Particularly notable among the Royal Library treasures from Nineveh were the remains of what was to be dubbed the Epic of Gilgamesh. This mythical tale of great antiquity probably originated in the 3^rd millennium BC but seems to have been compiled into one coherent narrative in the 2^nd millennium (c. 18thc BC). Written and rewritten many times since, a full version was transcribed in cuneiform (on 12 clay tablets) somewhere between the 13^th and 10^th centuries BC and it was this version, or a substantial part of it, that was discovered at the Library in Nineveh.

Much of the work in deciphering the Gilgamesh epic was done by another amateur philologist, George Smith (1840-76). From a working-class background, Smith was apprenticed as a boy to a London print- and publishing-house but spent much of his spare time in the nearby British Museum studying the recently-arrived treasures of Nineveh. He became increasingly familiar with the Akkadian language, in cuneiform script, and for his achievements in this field came to the attention of Samuel Birch, Director of the museum’s Department of Antiquities. Birch in turn introduced Smith to Rawlinson, and it was Rawlinson who in 1861 persuaded the museum to offer Smith a part-time position to work on the Nineveh tablets. 

These tablets had been found on site in hundreds of fragments, smashed by later invading armies who had burnt much of Ashurbanipal’s palace and library to the ground (ironically, the marauders’ fires helping preserve the clay tablets of text by subjecting them to something like the furnace of a kiln, which hardened them and prolonged their life). Smith’s initial work was to clean and piece together the fragments, as a prelude to deciphering their contents.             

George Smith

Cuneiform tablet inscribed with a section of the Epic of Gilgamesh

So impressed was the museum by his work that by 1870 he had been promoted to a full-time post, as Senior Assistant in the Assyriology Department. He could now devote himself even more intensely to unlocking the secrets of ancient Mesopotamia and particularly the Gilgamesh text.

Gilgamesh was important because it was the earliest known continuous written narrative, one with a named hero. But beyond this, the story acquired a particular significance because in a number of ways, it seemed to prefigure stories from the Old Testament. The late nineteenth century was a time of intense interest in biblical studies and particularly in the question of the status of the Bible as myth or compilation of historical events. In an age of Darwinian scepticism about the origins of life, the Christian text was being subjected to a new scrutiny. 

Of the Old Testament parallels, the most striking in Gilgamesh is the story of the flood, from Genesis. And it was Smith who discovered and revealed the parallels, as a result of successfully deciphering the eleventh tablet of the epic. In Gilgamesh, as in the Genesis story, the gods create a flood to punish a sinning humanity while a heroic man, Noah’s precursor, saves animals and humanity in an ark, and as in the Biblical story the ark rests upon a mountain to escape the flood waters while a bird is released to carry the news. 

The Gilgamesh story was of great antiquity. The Old Testament’s Genesis, by comparison, was a relative newcomer, dating back to around the 5^th century BC. It is highly likely then that Gilgamesh was an inspiration for the Genesis story of the flood and moreover that the mythical tale might have been partly based upon a real event. The Mesopotamian plains, nourished by the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, were part of the ‘fertile crescent’ which arced into Egypt, but they were also known for their susceptibility to frequent flooding. 

Whether the tale was based upon real-life events or simply imagined, it gave an historical context to the Biblical story and challenged its origins. Smith revealed the startling parallels between an ancient Mesopotamian text and the much later Genesis story when translating the eleventh tablet before the assembled members of the Society of Biblical Archaeology in December 1872. Included in the audience among a number of learned dignitaries was the Prime Minister, William Gladstone. The work of Assyriologists and their revisionist studies of the Bible were reaching the highest levels of society and being regarded as culturally of the greatest importance.   

As a result of this work, Smith was funded to make three journeys (two in 1873 and one in 1876) to Nineveh to search for more Gilgamesh tablets. The first trip was paid for by The Daily Telegraph newspaper, which foresaw a valuable media coup, the next two were funded by the British Museum. On the third journey, Smith fell ill and died at the young age of 36.  He had already secured his fame, however, with a raft of publications on cuneiform and ancient Mesopotamia which, like Egypt before it, was becoming a subject of intense historical and archaeological fascination and which was revealing the secrets of its religious beliefs, laws and customs through texts, to a degree impossible without the decoding of its writing systems by a small group of philologists.