Milton C. Fisher<\/b><\/p>\n
Sir H. C. Rawlinson seated at his desk with the Behistun Rock behind him.<\/b><\/p>\n
Imagine yourself standing on the top rung of a ladder balanced on an 18 inch wide shelf 300 feet up a sheer cliff. Then, imagine steadying yourself with your left elbow and holding a notebook in your left hand while you calmly<\/i> make notes character by character with your right hand! All this after having lowered your ladder, all your equipment and yourself down from the rocky crags above with a rope. Now you have some idea what Sir Henry Rawlinson did to make the translation of Akkadian (Old Babylonian) cuneiform possible!<\/p>\n
Here is how he modestly (or with typical English reserve?) put it in the introduction to his memoir, \u201cI will not speak of the difficulties or dangers of the enterprise. They are such as any person with ordinary nerves may successfully encounter; but they are such, at the same time, as have alone prevented the inscriptions from being long ago presented to the public by some of the numerous travellers who have wistfully contemplated them at a distance.\u201d1 <\/p>\n
The degree of Rawlinson\u2019s understatement can only be appreciated when one is aware of the physical features of the Behistun Rock. The massive inscription, a combination of sculpted bas-relief figures and incised cuneiform characters, covers a 25 by 50 foot surface more than 300 feet above the base of the cliff. The location is in the foothills of the Zagros Range, the mountains of which rise to a height of 4000 feet. Rawlinson was, in 1835, the first modern person known to touch, examine closely, and make pencil copies of the script.<\/p>\n
Today we expect quick, even immediate results in problem solving.<\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 1:2 (Spring 1988) p. 7<\/p>\n
Our computer age contrasts with \u201cthe old-fashioned way.\u201d<\/p>\n
If J.F. Champollion\u2019s work with Egyptian inscriptions seemed slow (mentioned in the previous issue of A&BR) – decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform from Mesopotamia was much worse. Champollion had put in eight years of intensive effort, with the 1822 publication of his results coming two full decades after access to the Rosetta Stone \u2014 key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics.<\/p>\n
In 1802, German scholar Georg Frtedrich Grotefend had published the first heroic attempts at identifying forms and meanings of Old Persian cuneiform. He had worked with copies of an inscription from Persepolis made by a Danish explorer in 1766. Then, 44 years later, after eleven years of sporadic effort, an English soldier turned orientalist, Henry Creswicke Raw-linson, finally published his own independent and more extensive work on the same language. That was in 1846, eighty<\/i> years from the start of such investigations!<\/i><\/p>\n
Thus, as with the arduous task of deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs (\u2018priest-writing\u2019), so in the case of Akkadian cuneiform (\u2018wedge-shapes\u2019), one person in particular is credited with success. But it was the way<\/i> he went about it (see above) that makes Rawlinson\u2019s achievement literally heroic<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Professionally a military man, Major Henry Rawlinson\u2019s interest in ancient history was stirred early. At age 17, while sailing for service in India he made the acquaintance of Sir John Malcolm, Governor of Bombay and scholar, called the \u2018Historian of Persia.\u2019 \u201cTales of his battles with the Mahrattas and his experiences amongst the Persians probably fired Rawlinson\u2019s youthful imagi-<\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 1:2 (Spring 1988) p. 8<\/p>\n
nation and gave that bent to his tastes which resulted in his subsequent choice of a career,\u201d says one biographer.2 <\/p>\n
But it was only during Rawlinson\u2019s own later appointment as British consul general at Baghdad (1843\u20134) that he had opportunity to finish his study of the Behistun material. He was never really the complete scholar (he was unable to read Grotefend\u2019s work in German); however, he did utilize his knowledge of Sanskrit and Zend for working with Persian.<\/p>\n
He ended his foreign career by occupying a high place on the Council of India.<\/p>\n
The God Ahuranmzda on the Behimtun Rock Inscription<\/b><\/p>\n
In the 1200 lines of cuneiform text etched on the mountainside Darius I (521\u2013485 BC) boasts of his exploits in three languages. The main inscription is in Persian (just below and to the right of the carved figures), with an Elamite translation left of that. The crucial Old Babylonian (Akkadian) version is above the Elamite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Milton C. Fisher Sir H. C. Rawlinson seated at his desk with the Behistun Rock behind him. Imagine yourself standing on the top rung of a ladder balanced on an 18 inch wide shelf 300 feet up a sheer cliff. Then, imagine steadying yourself with your left elbow and holding a notebook in your left … Continue reading “WHO\u2019S
\nWHO IN ARCHAEOLOGY?
\nSIR HENRY CRESWICKE RAWLINSON:
\n1810\u20131895”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}