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Papyrus disintegrates, parchment and paper burn, but clay tablets can survive fire — even the almighty conflagration, which in 612BC destroyed nearly all the vast palace of King Sennacherib in Nineveh, now northern Iraq. Deep in the charred library of those ruins, in the early 1860s, George Smith discovered a little snatch of the story of Utnapishtim. The ruler had been that rarity of ancient times, a good king, who was divinely warned to build a boat to save him from a great flood. When the rains subsided, he sent out a dove that returned as the boat was settling on a mountain top.
The fragment was a copy of a passage written in the Old Babylonian period and it predates the story of Noah by several centuries. Smith’s discovery, linking such an ancient text to biblical narrative, caused a tremendous sensation, particularly at a time of religious scepticism. The story forms part of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh and was written in cuneiform, a style of writing made by scratching tiny trapezoidal marks into wet clay with a cut reed. Its interpretation had eluded scholars for centuries. In The Mesopotamian Riddle, Joshua Hammer recounts the lives and work of three of the men who competed to be the first to understand it.
Cuneiform was used, with innumerable variants, in many ancient languages, three of which appear carved into a sheer rock face at Behistun in western Iran by Darius the Great. Returning home after a mighty and typically violent victory, he paused to record his own immense importance, in three languages, for posterity. For centuries, all three were incomprehensible. However, just as the Rosetta stone became the key to deciphering hieroglyphics, so too Behistun held the vital clue. All three languages carried the same message: crack one, and you have a good chance of unlocking the others.
Henry Rawlinson, a soldier and employee of the East India Company, was determined to decipher them. Apparently Old Persian and Elamite were comparatively easy, and he used those to work on the third and most ancient, the Semitic/Sumerian language known as Akkadian. He employed papier-mâché moulds — he called them “squeezes” — to reproduce the writing, and he did well, at least in his own opinion: many of his conclusions would prove seriously dubious.
The second man was Austen Henry Layard, a determined, hands-on archaeologist who worked for a time with Rawlinson and made very significant discoveries. Finally, Edward Hincks, a country pastor in Ireland and expert in Hebrew and hieroglyphics, spotted fascinating biblical parallels. Hincks has since received the acclaim he was denied in his lifetime by his jealous, occasionally dishonest competitors. As Hammer says, they formed a “sometimes friendly, often combustible pas de trois”.
Hammer is an extraordinarily prolific writer and journalist, whose subjects range from Timbuktu to Palestine, Japan and beyond. Unsurprisingly, The Mesopotamian Riddle takes in a bewildering number of side-stories: it is hugely and enjoyably crowded. Historical events, vying for attention and zipping through continents and millennia, constantly interrupt the narrative.
The Crimean war, the founding of the British Museum, the potato famine, the year of revolutions, the first Anglo-Afghan war, the Great Game of imperial rivalry between Russia and Britain, the discovery of Pompeii, Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, the looting of Halicarnassus and the hallucinatory habits of the Zoroastrian magi, all elbow their way in — as do many linguistic ideas, from the as yet unconquered language of Easter Island to how Joseph Biden is written in Cyrillic. Logograms, glyphs, determinants, phonemes and syllabaries jostle with the printer’s truly heroic efforts to produce countless examples of those pesky little bird’s-foot symbols that form the tantalisingly obscure formulas of the cuneiform script. I might have to take a deep breath and read it all over again.
The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer Simon & Schuster £25/$29.99, 400 pages
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