Bathrobe sent me a link to Joshua Hammer’s Smithsonian article about the decipherment of cuneiform (archived), calling it “not new, but thrillingly written,” and he’s right — I thought I knew the basics of the story, but I now have a much clearer picture (and a burning dislike of the egregious Henry Rawlinson). It starts:
On a late-summer day in 1856, a letter carrier stepped from a mail coach in front of a three-story townhouse in Mayfair, in central London. Crossing the threshold, the courier handed a wax-sealed envelope to a clerk. The missive was addressed to Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, one of Europe’s leading research institutions.
The postman had no way of knowing that the envelope would help rewrite the story of civilization’s origins and ignite a contest for international renown. At stake: the immortality conferred on those who make a once-in-a-century intellectual breakthrough. Three men—driven by bound-less curiosity, a love of risk, and the distinctive demons of aspiration and ambition—were most responsible for making the contest possible.
And here’s a bit from the middle to whet your appetite:
Talbot dispatched a letter—the letter that would change everything—to London’s Royal Asiatic Society, offering to send in his own translation and have a panel of judges compare his work with Rawlinson’s. If the versions turned out to be identical—or even close—“it must indicate that they have Truth for their basis,” he wrote. After a negotiation with Rawlinson and the British Museum, Talbot received a lithograph copy of the inscriptions in January 1857 and got to work.
On March 21, two dozen members of the society converged on 5 New Burlington Street for their regular Saturday conclave, filing through the spacious interior, checking their topcoats and hats, and making their way to a ground-floor gallery.
Go ahead and read it (though you may skim over the background info on Middle Eastern history, as I did, if you’re familiar with it), and remember the name of the brilliant Hincks, cheated out of his rightful glory!
The article calls Hormuzd Rassam an Arab, but WP says he was ethnic Assyrian. Do some Assyrians consider themselves Arab?
I’ve always thought that the fascinating tale of the decipherment of the cuneiform scripts and the languages written in them would have been better known to the educated public, if it hadn’t been for the fact that it doesn’t lend itself to the pop-sci trope of “this solitary genius cracked the age-old mystery by himself” as readily as the decipherment of hieroglyphic. At all.
Also, Egypt is sexy. (Ishtar by herself can’t redress the balance.)
The article mentions Carsten Niebuhr, the hero of Thorkild Hansen’s Det lykkelige Arabia, which I read at about 12. Niebuhr, born in the Danish possesions in Northern Germany, was a cartographer and the only surviving member of the Danish scientific expedition to Arabia in the years 1761-1767. The antagonist is Peter Forsskål, a Swedish biologist and student of Linnaeus – who ends up getting his due by (1) dying in Yemen out of sheer stubbornness, and (2) having his name given to a nettle by his old mentor.
The first parts of the text give the impression that cuneiform is vastly older than Egyptian hieroglyphs, an assertion reflected in the title of the book it is adapted from: The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing. Aren’t they actually thought to be about the same age?
@David Eddyshaw — I was reading Jean-François Champollion’s Wikipedia page last week (thanks to another language hat post, natch) and it doesn’t make the decipherment of hieroglyphics sound like “this solitary genius cracked the age-old mystery by himself” either!
…though maybe popsci books tell it that way >.>
Sure: it wasn’t. Though Champollion genuinely was more central to that effort than any single individual was with cuneiform.
The cuneiform story also suffers in the pop-sci stakes from being in actual reality much more messy, with several really rather different scripts and several quite unrelated languages involved, not just (approximately) one. It’s a much more complex tale to tell.
There are a number of things that make the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics a better story than most other similar tales. To start with, Egyptian civilization, including its hieroglyphic writing, had never been forgotten and remained part of the popular imagination in Europe. The decipherment also came pretty early, showing that such decoding was actually possible. And the story with the Rosetta stone and the cartouches is also easy to tell and understand.
…though a nettle that doesn’t sting.
Yes, an engagingly-written article. Clay tablets, compared to hieroglyphs, aren’t much to look at, but their texts may be more influential than the Egyptian.
Champollion, who only later visited Egypt, deserves much credit, though he was substantially helped by prior work of Thomas Young.
Herculaneum holds great promise, though, so far, works of Philodemus (a specialty of Dirk Obbink) are a disappointing random selection.
At her blog, Faces and Voices, Roberta Mazza offers a bit more info about the newly-surfaced Brothers Poem by Sappho.
If by “newly-surfaced” you mean 2014.
David M.: though a nettle that doesn’t sting.
One that doesn’t even sting.
(I don’t remember much of the book anymore, except the contrast between Niebuhr’s humble curiosity and Forsskål’s stiffminded bitterness. And a pompous expedition leader, who also died. I may be mixing his death with Forsskål’s.)
Crazy story of the Danish expedition! Apparently the king, at first, planned to elevate the greatness of Christianity by sending Lutheran missionaries to Danish possessions in India, but on an academician’s advice decided to send scholars to find more details about the Old Testament times instead…
Aren’t they actually thought to be about the same age?
It used to be the received wisdom that Sumerian writing was a bit older (not vastly so, though); IIRC it’s relatively recent archaeological discoveries that have pushed back the start date for hieroglyphic.
Be that as it may, hieroglyphic from a very early stage seems to have been a much more linguistically sophisticated writing system than the chariot crash which is Sumerian cuneiform. It probably wasn’t actually all that difficult for an Old Kingdom native speaker of Egyptian: it must surely have been much easier than learning modern Chinese writing (a low bar, admittedly.)
You could imagine hieroglyphic as the creation of a solitary genius, whereas cuneiform was evidently designed by a committee (with a weak chairman.)
To be fair to Mesopotamia, the brilliant stroke in hieroglyphic was in only writing consonants, which was probably a feature rather than a bug in Egyptian; in Sumerian, not so much.
…it must surely have been much easier than learning modern Chinese writing (a low bar, admittedly.)
Should it be “a high bar”?
Is there a good telling of the story of the code-cracking of hieroglyphics that also gives some history of hieroglyphics? Until today, I had the vague impression that the system was largely logographic for millennia with alphabetic representation being a late development.
Should it be “a high bar”?
It’s not hard for a writing system to be easier than the Chinese – hence it is a low bar to clear to be easier than Chinese.
A book I’d recommend is “The Keys of Egypt”, by Lesley & Roy Adkins (Harper Collins 2000), which describes both Young’s efforts to read the names of Greek Pharaohs and Queens and Champollion’s advance to understanding the actual ancient Egyptian language. Alphabetical signs, i.e., one-consonant signs, were used from the earliest stages. See for example WiPe article on the Egyptian language: The oldest known full sentence has 10 one-consonant and 7 two-consonant signs. A fully alphabetical writing system was used only much later for Coptic (Greek alphabet plus extras).
Thanks. Ordered a paperback.
The cuneiform story also suffers in the pop-sci stakes from being in actual reality much more messy, with several really rather different scripts and several quite unrelated languages involved, not just (approximately) one. It’s a much more complex tale to tell.
Once you interpret it that widely (i.e. including all the scripts* commonly known as “cuneiform”, and not just the Mesopotamian one**), the main hero of the story is obvious: Henry Rawlinson, who braved the sheer cliffs and narrow ledges of Behistun to copy the trilingual texts for future research.
TIL that he was also a significant contributor in the later decipherment. The pop-sci versions I’ve read seem to somewhat gloss over that period, going almost directly from Rawlinson’s climbing (and delegating) skills to the tale of the four translations.
(I guess we do also need to fit Grotefend in this somewhere… to a large extent he’s the Thomas Young analogue in this story.)
*) except Ugaritic I guess – that one’s its own story of weird decipherment attempts
**) which, of course, itself was used for several quite unrelated languages
From the Pffft! article on Thomas Young (scientist); ref. 50 is The abovementioned Keys of Egypt.
In The Keys of Egypt, Chapter 9 describes Young’s death, the posthumous publication of his “Rudiments of an Enchorial [= demotic] Dictionary …” and then says that