In 1857, three men, alongside many others, accepted an odd challenge: to independently translate 800 lines of Akkadian text. They were not to communicate with each other or to publish results until all finished. The sealed translations would be sent to the Royal Asiatic Society in Mayfair, an area in London. There, six judges, distinguished linguists, would examine the results.
The contest would settle one of the hottest scientific controversies of the mid-19th century. Explorers had been unearthing clay tablets and stone inscriptions covered with wedge-shaped carvings for decades. Some, including the three contestants, insisted the wedges were an ancient form of writing of an extinct language. Others insisted this was nonsense. Critics believed archaeologists and linguists translating the symbols were assigning them arbitrary values.
“The Mesopotamian Riddle” examines the emerging field of archaeology in the 19th century. Ancient Egypt exploded on Europe’s academic scene following Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798. The translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics began soon afterward. Then, in the 1830s, Europeans began exploring ruins left by ancient civilizations in today’s Iran and Iraq. Fragmentary ancient Greek writings and biblical accounts were all that were then known of these civilizations.
Author Joshua Hammer follows the discoveries of the principal investigators (beyond the three mentioned in the title) of these ancient writings, providing profiles of each, along with their accomplishments and insights. Henry Rawlinson was a soldier and diplomat who began translating ancient Persian in the 1830s. Austen Layard was traveling to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a coffee planter. Beguiled by the ruins he found in Mesopotamia, he abandoned his plans in favor of exploring them. Edward Hincks was an Irish country parson with a skill in languages. William Fox Talbot was an inventor (a pioneer in photography) who acquired a taste for cryptography. In addition to these was Jules Oppert, a more peripheral figure, a French archaeologist specializing in the Middle East.
Each became a major contributor to what became archaeology. Along the way, they established that mighty civilizations had thrived before those of the Greeks and Romans. They upended rationalists who claimed biblical accounts were just myths. The translations of these ancient writings provided a link to stories in the Bible.
Hammer tells an exciting story. At times, the book reads like a fast-paced adventure novel. In a thoroughly researched account, he reveals the discoveries of these early archaeologists. He presents the finds they made, illustrates the blind alleys they entered and exited, and reveals their rivalries and quarrels. They were shown to be simultaneously brilliant and petty. The result proves these discoverers of lost human cultures to be entirely human themselves.
