The Race to Decipher the World's First Writing

Summary

Episode Summary: "The Race to Decipher the World's First Writing"

Introduction

In this captivating episode of Dan Snow's History Hit, historian Dan Snow delves into the intriguing journey of deciphering cuneiform—the world's first known writing system. The episode, titled "The Race to Decipher the World's First Writing," explores the historical significance of cuneiform, the challenges faced by 19th-century scholars, and the fierce rivalry that ultimately unlocked ancient Mesopotamian secrets.

The Dawn of Writing: Cuneiform in Mesopotamia

The story begins [00:00] around 3,500 BC in Uruk, one of the world's first cities. Here, a scribe initiates the use of a reed stylus to press wedge-shaped symbols into clay, giving birth to cuneiform. For millennia, this script recorded everything from military victories to daily life in civilizations like Sumeria, Assyria, and Babylon. However, over time, the ability to read cuneiform was lost, leaving its rich history shrouded in mystery.

Rediscovery in the 19th Century

Fast forward to [04:35] June 10, 2025—London, 1857—to an era brimming with archaeological enthusiasm. The Industrial Revolution had sparked a global fascination with ancient civilizations. Among the newly unearthed sites in Mesopotamia, the palaces of ancient Assyria revealed thousands of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform, but their meaning remained elusive to Europe's brightest minds.

Key Figures in the Decipherment Journey

Austin Henry Layard: The Pioneering Archaeologist

Austin Henry Layard emerges as a central figure [09:22] in this historical narrative. Originating from a British colonial background, Layard abandoned his law career to embark on perilous travels across the Ottoman Empire. His determination paid off when, after five years, he began excavating the ruins of Nineveh in northern Iraq around [11:33] 1845-1846. Layard's discoveries included intricate alabaster bas reliefs and monumental statues like the Lamassus—mythological guardians half-human, half-bull or lion—now housed in institutions like the British Museum.

Henry Rawlinson: The Linguistic Genius

Simultaneously, Henry Rawlinson, an East India Company officer and a master linguist [15:28], was making strides in deciphering cuneiform. Inspired by the success of scholars like Champollion with Egyptian hieroglyphs, Rawlinson focused on Persian cuneiform before tackling the more complex Assyrian script. His relentless efforts [20:09] culminated in a monumental report in 1846 proclaiming the decipherment of Persian cuneiform.

Edward Hincks: The Reclusive Clergyman

Contrasting Rawlinson's public persona was Edward Hincks, an Anglican priest and scholar [26:37] stationed in the remote parish of Killylake, Ireland. Despite his limited interaction with fellow scholars, Hincks independently worked on cuneiform decipherment, contributing significantly to the understanding of Akkadian, the language of Assyria and Babylon.

The Fierce Rivalry and the Decipherment Challenge

The competition between Rawlinson and Hincks intensified as both vied to crack the cuneiform code. Their rivalry peaked [29:21] in 1857 when William Henry Fox Talbot, a polymath and co-inventor of photography, initiated the Cuneiform Challenge. This contest tasked scholars with translating a clay cylinder inscribed with cuneiform within two months. The successful translations by Rawlinson, Hincks, and two other scholars [32:13] validated their breakthroughs, officially declaring cuneiform deciphered in June 1857.

Impact of Deciphering Cuneiform

The decipherment of cuneiform had profound implications [33:35] for understanding ancient Mesopotamian civilizations. Scholars unearthed a wealth of information covering legal codes like the Code of Hammurabi, epic literature such as Gilgamesh, and detailed accounts of medicine, astronomy, and daily life. These texts provided unparalleled insights into one of humanity's earliest complex societies, revealing both their scientific advancements and their often brutal political dynamics.

Continuing Mysteries and Modern Parallels

Despite the successes of the 19th-century scholars, some writing systems, like the Indus Valley script, remain undeciphered [41:45]. The episode draws parallels between the historic efforts to decode cuneiform and modern-day challenges in understanding ancient scripts, highlighting the ongoing quest for knowledge and the tantalizing possibilities that remain just out of reach.

Conclusion

"The Race to Decipher the World's First Writing" masterfully narrates the adventurous and competitive efforts that brought cuneiform from obscurity to scholarly understanding. Through the dedication of figures like Layard, Rawlinson, and Hincks, humanity unlocked a critical chapter of its history, enriching our comprehension of ancient civilizations and their enduring legacies. As Dan Snow eloquently puts it, this journey "opens up a long-lost vital chapter of human history," underscoring the timeless importance of uncovering and interpreting our past [43:38].

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Notable Quotes:

• Josh Hammer: "Did they know about Mesopotamian civilization in particular, though?” [05:08]

• Dax Shepard: "The knowledge was lost. We humans forgot how to read it.” [04:35]

• Dax Shepard: "Rawlinson was doing both fieldwork and laborious desk work to crack the code.” [20:09]

• Dax Shepard: "If you want to pick a specific moment in the history of decipherment when they could say, you know, they have cracked the code, it would have been June 1857.” [32:59]

• Dax Shepard: "There was really a fascinating mix of practical science and traditional beliefs in Mesopotamian culture.” [35:35]

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This episode not only sheds light on a pivotal moment in archaeological and linguistic history but also celebrates the relentless human spirit that drives us to uncover and understand the roots of civilization.

Transcript

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[Josh Hammer]

Hi everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's history hit three and a half thousand B.C. that's five and a half thousand years ago humans began gathering in the world's first cities. And as they did so, a scribe in the mud brick metropolis of Uruk took up a reed stylus and pressed tiny wedge shaped symbols into soft clay. It was the start of cuneiform. For the next 3,000 years that script would chronicle military triumphs, scientific breakthroughs, the movements of the stars through the heavens, epic tales, medical advice and the daily routines of the great Mesopotamian civilizations. Sumeria, Assyria, Babylon. And then later on their successor, the powerful empire of Persia. But then that knowledge was lost. We humans forgot how to read it. Fast forward thousands of years to London in 1857. An age enthralled by accounts of human advancement. Ever quicker journeys across the Atlantic. The ability to communicate over unimaginable distances, scientific understanding and the field of archaeology was right up there with engineering and science as a place where exciting breakthroughs were closely followed by huge public interest. In Mesopotamia, the ruins of ancient palaces emerged from desert sands. And they fired the imaginations of people all over the world. But the little tablets found within those palaces, covered in strange markings, well they proved elusive. They proved stubbornly unreadable even to Europe's brightest minds. And this is the story of the unlikely trio who unlocked the secrets of ancient Babylon, Syria. Sumeria, a dashing archaeologist, a polished British officer turned diplomat, and a reclusive, grouchy Irish clergyman. They set out to find Mesopotamia and then crack the code of cuneiform, unlock a long lost vital chapter of human history. And, friends, they succeeded. It tells us all about her is Joshua Hammer. He's a freelance journalist who writes the New York Times and Smithsonian magazines, among others. He has done time as a war correspondent. He has just published the Mesopotamian Riddle. If you are in the uk, he is coming to London to do some talks, so make sure you check that out. And he's now going to help us unravel the mystery of Mesopotamia.

[Dan Snow]

Enjoy.

[Dax Shepard]

T minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

[Dan Snow]

And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

[Josh Hammer]

Josh, thanks for coming on the show.

[Dax Shepard]

You're welcome, Dan.

[Josh Hammer]

I realize I don't really know what Victorians. Did they know about Mesopotamia? I mean, people talked about the Fertile Crescent, right? The sort of birthplace of civilization. Did they know about Mesopotamian civilization in particular, though?

[Dax Shepard]

Not much. Up till about the mid-1840s, there were references to Assyria, the great empire of Assyria, in the Bible and in some of the Greek histories like Herodotus wrote about it. But other than that, there were very few relics, completely unlike Egypt, which was on everybody's minds in those days.

[Josh Hammer]

Okay, so it's sort of references in the Bible to Assyria is where we're at. Were there explorers, were there people making journeys through that territory? Before the early 19th century, there were.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it. I would say that in the 18th century, people made it as far as Persepolis in the former Persia, the great city of the former Persian Empire. So they often passed through Iraq getting what is modern day Iraq, getting to Persia. But they kind of bypassed Mesopotamia, what was then Mesopotamia, because nobody thought there was anything there. There were relics. There were remnants of of the ancient Persian Empire further east, but very little extant. I mean, sometimes they've ventured down to Babylon, the ruins of Babylon, and look around there in the early 1800s, but nobody was finding anything. So it was. A lot of people thought the whole thing was imaginary.

[Josh Hammer]

So can you, Josh, quickly, very quickly, just now, tell us what, in fact, modern scholarship means when it talks about Assyria, Babylon? Just give us just a very, just brief chronology of what's going on in that Part of the world, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so Assyria was what we know now is that Assyri of sprang up in what is now northern Iraq around Mosul about 1900 BC and it took about a thousand years or so of steady growth before it became what was then what is now considered to be the earliest empire of the ancient world. I mean, a very aggressive empire that had a standing army. And they rolled out in every direction. They rolled it through Anatolia, through modern day Turkey, they rolled through Israel and Syria, all the way to the Mediterranean. They went east all the way through what is now Iran, all the way to Afghanistan. Conquering cities, taking hundreds of thousands of captives, dealing with people with incredible brutality and keeping a very graphic records of their conquests. So by about 700 BC they controlled basically most of Asia, the Near east and the Middle east all the way to Afghanistan. It was a huge, wealthy, powerful, brutal empire.

[Josh Hammer]

And as you said, described by historians really as the first of the many empires that will attempt to dominate that particular neck of the woods, reached its.

[Dax Shepard]

Peak in about 700 B.C.

[Josh Hammer]

Great. Okay, so we now know that. But in the 19th century, they did not really realize that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, well, they had, as I said, a few fragmentary accounts and people didn't necessarily trust what the Bible had to say about them, all this. But there were biblical accounts because one of the Assyrians great targets were the Jewish kingdoms of Judea and Samaria. They were always going after them and capturing cities, conquering one state or another, deporting captives. You know, the whole ten tribes of Israel has been known over for thousands of years originated those tribes were lost because they were conquered by the Assyrians and then dispersed to various parts of the world. World. So that's what we knew.

[Josh Hammer]

And the lamentations of the Jews in their exile in Babylon, is that kind of.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, the lamentation. So Babylon, we haven't really talked yet about Babylon. I mean, Babylon was a what was then called a vassal state of Assyria. It was a powerful city in itself. Herodotus, the Greek historian, said it was the greatest city of the ancient world. But it was also a vassal state in service to Assyria. It was a colony of Assyria, although it often rebelled against the Assyrians and then just got shot down brutally. But eventually, after assyria collapsed in 612 BC Babylon lingered on. Great king Nebuchadnezzar. He went off and he conquered the Jews, destroyed Jerusalem in about 580 B.C. so Babylon existed for a bit longer than Assyria.

[Josh Hammer]

So we're going to get into the 19th century now. And we are going to, I suppose. Let's look at some of these extraordinary people that you've. That you've highlighted, that you've looked into who helped to transform the Western view of these mighty lost empires.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So nobody knew much about these places until a guy named Austin Henry Layard, the son of a British colonial bureaucrat whose father died young. Laird was sent off to work for a prosperous, wealthy uncle in the city of London as a law clerk with the idea of becoming a lawyer. Hated the job, quit. Ventured off on this overland journey across the Ottoman Empire, had an incredible number of adventures. You know, was. Was attacked and robbed and left for dead a couple of times. Ended up making it to what is now Mosul in what is now northern Iraq, and saw these great mounds looming across the Tigris river and became determined to dig in them because from the accounts that I just was telling you about, he knew that there was probably a great. He believed there was a great empire or great city buried underneath that. Those mounds. So it took him about five years to raise the money to get the connections, but he went back to Mosul, began to dig, and in late 1845, early 1846, began to uncover these great lost cities that had vanished about 600 B.C. so Layard brought it all back to life.

[Josh Hammer]

I'm just starting to realize there's a sort of English or British trope here about going to the Ottoman Empire, traveling around, being quite naive, getting beaten up, left for dead in the ditch. Because I think Stanley does that early in his career. I think Lawrence Rabia, that's how he sets out as well. So they're clearly in the footsteps of this guy Layard, who I had never heard of. So I'm very grateful to you.

[Dax Shepard]

Amazing. And you're British and you never heard of him. Yeah, he's for some reason vanished in the annals of time. I don't know. He's really. He was really an extraordinary character.

[Josh Hammer]

Yeah. As you just said, he kind of. He discovers a lost civilization. There's not many people have done that, really.

[Dax Shepard]

He was one of the most famous men in England in the 1850s, and.

[Josh Hammer]

He came back really?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I. I mean, Charles Dickens considered Laird a good friend. He became a parliamentarian, quite an effective parliamentarian, apparently. But basically, I mean, he hit his peak as the. As this archaeologist in the 1840s. Nobody had done what he did.

[Josh Hammer]

And he's finding the. I mean, you say that he finds palaces. I mean, obviously the ruins of palaces, but underground, I mean, under these mounds, I mean, are they quite. In what state of completeness are they? And what's he finding in the palaces that allows us to start really, really unlocking the secrets of this.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, let's talk about Nineveh was the greatest city of Assyria. It was the. Of Assyria for a hundred years. And Herod is described as one of the great cities of the world. In Nineveh, he uncovered a labyrinthine palace of hundreds of rooms that was pretty well preserved. It had been burned, the city had been burned. There was a lot of rubble, but a lot of things were preserved. He found these mud brick walls lined with alabaster bas reliefs, which showed an incredible detail. Various aspects of the Assyrian Empire, mostly the royal court, but scenes of battles, very, very. You can go to the British Museum and see this stuff today. It's remarkable. I mean, they were far and away better artists, better sculptors than the Egyptians. But they brought to life in these very well defined bas reliefs, scenes of Assyrian soldiers capturing cities, killing those they conquered, Royal lion hunts in the bush, life in the royal court, river journeys on the Tigris, all done with remarkable detail. And we're talking hundreds of these things that he would send down the Tigris river and onto the British Museum. But he also found incredible statues. You know, those wonderful Lamassus which continues to define ancient Assyria. These are these mythological creatures. I'm sure you've, you know what I'm talking about. If I describe them. Half, half human, half bull or lion with wings. And they stood outside, these long bearded creatures, head of a human being and body of a bull or a lion. And they basically guarded the gates of Assyrian cities or guarded the throne rooms of Assyrian kings. And there are many of them. There are, I think, four beautiful ones in the British Museum. They're in the Louvre, they're in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When the British population, English population, saw these things for the first time after they came off the boats and were, I mean, they weighed 20, 30 tons, were carried by a team of horses to the British Museum and unloaded there. And of course, Illustrated London News and other newspapers covered every minute of this. I mean, people were just amazed. People were just. It was the talk of the town and the country for, for months as they began to get a glimpse of this dreamlike empire that suddenly emerged out of the dust.

[Josh Hammer]

So exciting and probably more important, if less dramatic than those enormous statues, those monumental objects, were all the cuneiform inscribed tablets. So tell me about that. What is cuneiform and what are these tablets?

[Dax Shepard]

The Tablets. Well, they first appeared carved into stone because generally along with these alabaster carvings, there were these swirling characters which we now know kind of were epigraphs. They describe what observers were looking at. But then about a year later, he stumbled into a room where he found thousands of tablets, most of them in fragments because the rooms had collapsed, but they had been baked by fire because the conquerors of Nineveh had set the place on fire and destroyed the city by fire. But paradoxically, the fires actually preserved these clay inscriptions for eternity. The first thing he encountered was the library of a king named Sennacherib, a very brutal king. He had a sense that these were documents, you know, Assyrian documents, but he didn't know what they were because he couldn't read them. A couple of years later, one of his assistants stumbled into the. In another palace in Nineveh, the library of a king called Ashurbanipal, which was about 10 times greater than the library of Sennacherib. By this time, they had begun to decipher this. The other scholars had begun to decipher these tablets and the inscriptions on the walls. But it would be another couple of years before they really got a clear impression of what they said and developed an understanding of, of that. But, yeah, the writing that was discovered, these, these mysterious characters found everywhere in the palaces of Assyria dug up by Layard, really kind of stimulated a quest to figure out what the hell they were talking about here.

[Josh Hammer]

And do we have to talk about Henry Quesrick Rawlinson, who, who is one of the. The leading figures on that quest.

[Dax Shepard]

Rawlinson was sort of a classic to the manor born, arrogant, great horseman, great linguist, East India Company officer who was shipped off to India when he was 17, right out of a very elite British public school, was bored in India. All the great battles had ended. There was kind of the great calm, and the East India Company had conquered most of India, but ended up going to Persia, being dispatched to Persia as a military trainer. And Persia was a very different kind of place. First of all, there were wars going on. The Kurds were always rebelling in the mountains. But even more important, there were a great number of inscriptions, ancient inscriptions from the great Persian Empire which followed the Assyrian Empire. This is about 500 to 300 BC before it was destroyed by Alexander the Great. The Persians also used cuneiform. And Rawlinson just became absolutely infatuated with ancient Persia and he became determined to decipher the writings of the Persians. So that's how he got his start in this whole Thing it began with Persian cuneiform, cuneiform being a writing system, a series of wedges. And that then led him to tackle what he considered and what really the world considered a far greater challenge and a more interesting challenge, which was the writings of ancient Assyria.

[Josh Hammer]

And he's literally scouring the landscape looking for clues. I mean, literally.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, the great thing, taking great risk. So, you know, the Rosetta Stone was this trilingual in script inscription discovered by the French after they conquered Egypt that allowed Champollion and Young to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs. This happened in 1822. So this was on the minds of people, including Rawlinson. I mean, Champollion and Young were heroes. You know, in those days, these great linguists were celebrated is, you know, the way we'd celebrate the guys who figured out recombinant DNA today. You know, great scientific discoveries, the same level of complexity and understanding of the world. So hieroglyphs got everybody go after cuneiform. And Rawlinson, as he was wandering around on horseback through Persia, discovered this giant bas relief and thousands of lines of inscriptions carved on a cliffside in northwest Persia right at the edge of the Zagros Mountains. The great thing about this for him was that it consisted of cuneiform writings in three different languages. One of them was ancient Persian and one of them was ancient Assyrian. So it was his Rosetta Stone. The Persian was the first thing he went after because it was a much easy language. It was a phonetic language. And once he nailed the Persian, that then allowed him to go after Assyrian, which was what everybody really wanted. I mean, the Persian Empire lasted a couple of hundred years. It was King Darius, King Cyrus, where the Assyrians had endured for 2,000 years. So that was. And they had an incredible, much more colorful, important history. So that was whatever everybody wanted to know what the Assyrians were saying.

[Josh Hammer]

For me, it makes me so proud to be British because my experience of Britishness is just being that guy crawling up a massive cliff with everyone around you going, what is the point of this idiot doing this in the midday sun? And just sort of to look at dusty, completely archaic inscriptions carved into a cliff face. I just love that. I love that image of Rawlinson doing that.

[Dax Shepard]

Rawlinson spent like hundreds of hours. He made three. It's pretty remote corner of Persia, you know, it's not easy to get to. No real regular transport I'm aware of. In the 1820s, 1830s. I think he made his first trip there in 1836 and his last one in about 1847. So three long trips over a decade, each one of which involved scaling this basically sheer face cliff, perching on a ledge. He almost died a couple of times. And just copying down, first by hand, perched on a ladder, copying down every one of these characters first by hand, as I said. Then he came up with this method of putting, of creating these paper mache squeezes where you press wet paper against the inscriptions on rock and it provides a reverse image. So that was much easier to do once they developed that method.

[Josh Hammer]

Josh, can you still see it today or has it been destroyed over there?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I haven't seen it. I would love to go to Bayistune, as it's called. B E H I S T U N It's still there. I mean, it's not going anywhere. It's been there for 2000 since, since 500 BC, 2500 years. But I'm, you know, I, I know people who've been out there. Yes.

[Josh Hammer]

And does Rawlinson start with the cracking of the code, or is that left to people back at their desks in the uk?

[Dax Shepard]

No, Rollinson doing. Rawlinson is doing both. He's both out there in the field. And he was for a while, a long period. He was, in fact, he spent about 30 years in the Middle east, all told, the near east, as they called it back then. But he was the Resident Ambassador, the British ambassador, or actually the East India Company representative in Baghdad. So he would, you know, do this incredible work out on the field and then ride his horse back to Baghdad and then sit there in his office cooled to a near like 33, 34 centigrade by over 90 Fahrenheit by a water wheel, which would continuously pour tepid Tigris river water on the roof of this study that he set up on the embassy grounds right at the water's edge, keep things, you know, tolerable even during the summer when it was, you know, infinitely hotter outside. And he would just work away for endless hours, toiling away at trying to decipher first the old Persian. And then, because these inscriptions basically said the same thing, more or less, he was able to take that old. Once he cracked old Persian, he could then apply that inscription to the parallel text, the Akkadian, which was a much more complex writing. It was like the hieroglyphs. It had a phonetic part to it where there were a bunch of characters that were just alphabetic and then a lot of characters that were logograms, where they were just signs for things. So we're talking 700, 800 different characters in the, in the Assyrian language, the Akkadian language that he had to figure out.

[Josh Hammer]

It makes me feel queasy just even thinking about it. But imagine as he's doing that, he's the first person in thousands of years to engage with these names and ideas and pieces of history that are totally lost.

[Dax Shepard]

In 1846 he sent in a four or five hundred page report to the Royal Asiatic Society in London saying, I have solved the writing of King Darius the Great of Persia. I've done it. He was the first by far. There were a few competitors, but nobody came close. He published this monstrous track. They devoted in an entire issue of the quarterly Royal Asiatic Society journal to his work. And yeah, he was the guy who cracked the code. He cracked the code of Persian. He had really no serious competition. When he then turned immediately afterwards to try to crack the code of Assyrian, or as it's called, it became known as Akkadian. It's basically a syro Babylonian because the Assyrians and the Babylonians wrote and spoke the same language. When he turned to that one, this 600 character, 700 character, incredibly complex system, he then found that in fact he had intense competition and it drove him nuts. I mean he really felt, this is my territory. Nobody can. Nobody can. You can read his letters, it's. They just sort of ooze arrogance and smugness and self satisfaction. But this was before he found out that he had a real competitor off in remote Northern Ireland trying to do the same thing in his remote corner of the of the world, far from the actual in situ inscriptions. And this guy gave Rawlinson a run for his money.

[Josh Hammer]

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[Josh Hammer]

So the other guy, the other horse in the race is not the action man out there in the Middle East. It's just a guy sitting in a study in Ireland somewhere, just with his books.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what intrigued me about this. He's a complete opposite of Rawlinson. This guy was an Anglican or Church of Ireland priest. He'd been a scholar at Trinity College in Dublin. He became disillusioned with academics, was kind of a temperamental, testy character. I think he made a lot of enemies, seemed to make a lot of enemies everywhere he went, even in his congregation. When he became a churchman, he was dispatched by the Church of Ireland. His name was Edward Hinks. I don't know if we've even mentioned that, but Edward Hinks was dispatched up to this fairly remote parish in a town called Killylake. K I L L Y L E A G H and there he spent the rest of his life. He spent 40 years up there, occasionally made occasional trips to London, visited his parents in Belfast. But basically the rest of his life he was in this very isolated part. It was a prosperous town, it was a fairly isolated place. And this is where he conducted his studies, first of Old Persian and then of Acadian, like, like Rawlinson. And they two met a couple of times specific, specifically at one convention or conference up in Edinburgh. But other than that, there was a brief encounter in the Royal Asiatic Society by a guy who, by the secretary who wanted to try to mediate between them and get them to meet each other and maybe share ideas, which they didn't end up doing at all because they basically despised each other. But Hanks and Rollinson were at it, you know, in their separate corners of the planet, doing the same thing, publishing independently and had a, had a fierce rivalry, one of the great rivalries of Victorian England.

[Josh Hammer]

And he's just a natural born code breaker. I mean, that's, he's doing the same kind of job.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, And Laird was. One of the most interesting aspects of this story is that Laird and Rawlinson, those guys were both in the, in the Arista. I mean, Laird was up digging and digging up in Mosul, these great Assyrian sites, shipping this stuff down to Rawlinson in Baghdad. They had a real bond going on for a few years. Gradually, Laird began to realize that maybe he was betting on the wrong horse, that Hinks was the man who could hold the ant, held the answers. And so you see this kind of gradual estrangement going on between him and Rawlinson and pretty soon he's like off in Killale hanging out with Hanks, doing inscriptions together, sitting side by side in Hinx's study. Laird is filled with awe and admiration. And Rawlinson is off there in, in exile in Baghdad hearing about these meetings and just going, going nuts. As you can imagine, this incredibly arrogant guy who believed that he had the territory all to himself, suddenly found himself challenged by this upstart priest. He didn't have much use for religion either, so on top of this, he was a cleric who was challenged.

[Josh Hammer]

And so at what stage can they just get into it and start just reading these tablets? Is that something that comes?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I will say, you know, they each started almost at exactly the same time in about summer of 1846, by around 1850, 1851, they were, each was Fairly confident that he had made strides and was able to read some of this using the old Persian parallel texts approaching it the same way and their intuition and wild guesses and you know, various other means that these cobra educated guesses, not wild guesses, but that code breakers use. But there was still a tremendous amount of skepticism. I mean I'm writing now about doing a National Geographic piece about the last undeciphered writings on the planet and sort of like a few of these scholars are in the position that Rawlinson and Hinks were in, whereas they're saying that they solved it, but nobody believes them.

[Josh Hammer]

Where's the proof?

[Dax Shepard]

What's the evidence? You know, how do you decide? I mean, you can tell me all you want that you've cracked it, but there were many things that they were saying that the scholarly community just looked on with utter skepticism, doubt, even ridicule. So it wasn't really until 1857 that a third scholar, another an upstart named William Henry Fox Talbot, who was also a really well known figure in Victorian England, who has been almost completely forgotten, co inventor of photography, a true polymath, an amazing mind who became fascinated by a cereal Babylonian writing because it was the thing to be fascinated by back then, I guess. And he worked at it independently as well though he was in communication with Hinks and he said, hey, you know, he's facing all the skepticism from people who are saying this is nonsense, you guys are making all this up. You know, how do we believe, how can we trust anything you're saying? So he devised a competition, a contest, a challenge that would be sponsored by the Royal asiatic Society in 1857 that he hoped would convince the skeptics that the writing was decipherable. And that was the great cuneiform challenge of 1857 in which those three guys plus a fourth scholar, a French German scholar named Jules au Pere O P P E R T would independently just try to decipher a cylinder, a clay cylinder, eight sided cylinder, about the size of a bowling pin from 800 BC on which were inscribed thousands of infinitesimally tiny cuneiform characters. Each of them would be given two months to set to translate this independently, no contact allowed between them. Sealed. Their answers would be sealed, sent to the Royal Asiatic Society and a panel of judges would study each of them and determine whether the right their submissions were close enough that you could then officially declare they've cracked the code.

[Josh Hammer]

And I guess they had, they had cracked the code.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, they had, yes. There were a lot of A lot of mistakes and a lot of. A lot of sections that were left blank and a different levels of success. But things were. Rawlinson and Hinx were by far the. Declared by the judges, by far the closest. The other two were also rans, but close enough. You had four guys who were close enough so that they could then say, yeah, okay, looks good to us. Looks like cuneiform. The riddle has been solved. And from that point on, things advance pretty quickly. But if you want to pick a specific moment in the history of decipherment when they could say, you know, they have cracked the code, it would have been June 1857.

[Josh Hammer]

And, Josh, finally tell us about some of the magic, the mysteries that we. Since that have been able to decipher. I mean, I get very frustrated when I go into a pharaonic tomb, for example, or you look at a cask in which there would have been a mummy, because there's loads of hieroglyphs on it. And I'm like, great. They're gonna say in this year this battle took place. You know, if you're used to the Greek and Roman world, it's all just like, fact. It's very use. You know, it's. Who was governor, who were the senior Roman officials that year. The hieroglyphs are just like a bunch of religious greed. It drives me insane. Yeah, is there cool stuff on there? Is it history? Is it science? Is it. Is it literature?

[Dax Shepard]

There's an awful lot of history. There's an awful lot of bragging, you know, I mean, these Egypt, these Assyrian kings, Ashurbanipal would write these. He would kind of leave it up to the scribes to describe his many talents, but he would write these endless proclamations, descriptions of all the things he was great at, from solving complex algebra to riding his horse, at galloping across the plains, to killing lions, to, you know, conquering nations. But there was really fascinating stuff. I dug up an old book from about 1910, when I was in the British Library that had a series of translations of medical texts. The Assyrians were really big on medicine, and they had these, you know, and. And I would. It's. Their approach to medicine sort of mirrored their approach to almost everything, which is that they combined practical science. Well, I mean, you know, traditional medicine. They had a firm belief in traditional medicine, probably using things that worked with incantations and spells and curses and that sort of thing. So you would have a cure for conjunctivitis, which would involve, like, making a sort of poultice out of sulfur and Various roots and herbs, pressing it against your eye for a couple of days while reciting an ancient Sumerian charm. Who knows if the Sumerian charm probably didn't do much, but maybe the poultice was effective. They had approaches to mental illness. They also had an incredibly sophisticated science. I mean, the Babylonians developed a sophisticated lunar solar calendar with the summer and winter solstices. They had astronomical observations that were actually pretty, pretty spot on. An awful lot of superstition, an awful lot of astrological and superstitious readings. I mean, the king had a whole team of astrologers and readers of sheep entrails and other diviners of the future to tell him pretty much on a daily basis, kind of like Nancy Reagan 40 years ago, tell him on a daily basis, you know, how to operate, what to do. If there was a total eclipse of this moon, for instance, would spell disaster for the king. He was told to stay indoors. And in those circumstances they would hire or they would force a fake king and queen to serve in there in his place for the day, and then while he was out tending the fields, and then afterwards the fake king and queen would be put to death. But that was the, the way they got around the, the curse of the, of the total eclipse of the sun. So there was great detail, you know, great, great stuff that gave you insights into the science and superstitions of the ancient world.

[Josh Hammer]

And we got the, the code of Hammurabi people will have heard of.

[Dax Shepard]

Or then there was El. Course, yes. I mean, legal codes, history, literature. Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh. Eventually we got crank Gilgamesh and then.

[Josh Hammer]

Enheduanna, who's this mysterious female writer, who is the priestess of the. Well, I can't remember, is it the moon or the sun?

[Dax Shepard]

Is that Sumer? Is that from Sumer?

[Josh Hammer]

Yeah, that was in Sumer.

[Dax Shepard]

Sumer. Sumer. That. Well, that was obviously the first Mesopotamian civilization, right, that predated the Assyrians by 1500 BC. 1500 years. But it was through our understanding of Assyrian 0 Babylonian that the code breakers were able then to go after Sumerian and define, you know, get a good sense of human existence 2000 years before the Assyrians were around. So, yeah, and it really began 1857 was the year that we got the confidence, we figured this out. Let's move forward. And that's when you had this fantastic figure named George Smith, who was a Rawlinson protege who ended up finding out, deciphering the description of the Great Flood, you know, that predated the biblical description that the great deluge tablets from Sumer and then found the Gilgamesh tablets and it all went off from there and we ended up with this really fairly all inclusive understanding of Assyrian society in Babylon. Thanks to, thanks to these guys.

[Josh Hammer]

More on ancient ancient Assyria after this.

[Dax Shepard]

Don't go away.

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[Josh Hammer]

But I've always wondered why those Assyrian stories and mythologies aren't as popular and well known as the Greek and Roman ones, for example, or even some of the Egyptians. And I guess it's because actually we've only been able to read this stuff, as you point out, incredibly recently. It didn't have time to soak into that, you know, the kind of enlightenment writers who are so influenced by the Greek and Roman texts they're reading like none of you didn't get that effect in the 18th century. It's all still pretty, pretty new.

[Dax Shepard]

It's pretty, it's. Well, you know, it's 180 years. You figure by now, well, you think.

[Josh Hammer]

By now people would have.

[Dax Shepard]

But no, I think there's some reasons for that as I go into in the book. First of all, you know, you don't, you did not except for these wonderful Lamassus, these great giant beasts, you know, that guarded. And the, the Ishtar, famous Ishtar gate of Nebuchadnezzar found in Babylon. These guys were building their palaces out of, out of mud brick and Unlike the, unlike the, the Egyptians who used stone. So a lot of this stuff didn't. Almost nothing survived, you know. Yeah, you had these alabaster sculptures and you had some, some, some, some monum, a few monumental pieces, but nothing compared to the Egyptians or the Greeks or the Romans for that matter. You also, it's also, I think the remoteness of this place. Who's, who goes to Iraq? Nobody, nobody dared go to the outer edges of the Ottoman Empire when they were crawling all over Egypt. I mean, Egypt was bringing in tourists from about 18, you know, 18 from the time of Napoleon's conquest. Tourists were going to Egypt, but Ottoman. I mean, Mesopotamia was just seen as a much more remote and dangerous place. And it was dangerous. It was, you know, it had a roving bands of Bedouin rebels who were, who would attack people on the roads. How many people do you know who've been to ancient Babylon? You know, the ruins of Babylon? Yeah, I mean, I went there, but I went there when I was a war correspondent. I had to be, you know, during a LULL in the U.S. you know, invasion of Iraq. So for numerous reasons. Also, one other thing I want to say is about the Assyrians is that, you know, they really have gotten this reputation as this particularly brutal society and to a certain extent, well deserved. I mean, their kings have been compared to Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan. It doesn't exactly offer a particularly inviting atmosphere to bring in a big fan base. Some Assyriologists would say that that perspective or that reputation is really unwarranted. I would say it is largely warranted. But there are other aspects of Assyrio Babylonian civilization that aren't quite as intimidating or awful.

[Josh Hammer]

I've got to ask you, while I got you here, Josh, you're doing a piece on languages that we're still trying to work out. I'm obsessed with the Inca Khipu. The Inca Khipu is so exciting, isn't it? These strings that. Strings on a string with different lengths, different knots than different colors.

[Dax Shepard]

Good one. I haven't really thought about that one.

[Josh Hammer]

Well, but is it. Well, I guess it's not really. It's not an Alphabet, is it? But it's, it's a communication system.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, a different kind of communication system. I'm looking specifically at writing one of which is the Indus Valley script. This, this, the one from western India, eastern Pakistan, that was around since about 25003000 BC and it has resisted all efforts to decipher it. And the. A governor, An Indian governor or a Chief minister of a Tamil Nadu state just offered a million dollars to anybody who could decipher it. So that briefly made some news. And yeah, it's quite interesting. It's thousands of inscriptions discovered. Nobody has, I mean all the. I've met people down in India and I met people here in Berlin who claim to have their theories. You know, very elaborate, detailed, sophisticated analyses that could be pure hogwash. So that's what I when I was mentioning the 1857 competition. You know, maybe one of these guys is Rawlinson, you know, the modern day Rawlinson.

[Josh Hammer]

Time will tell.

[Dax Shepard]

Haven't found any bilinguals to, you know, the other known language. That's the way that these codes are usually cracked is because there's an existing writing system side by side with the unknown one that allows you to make these parallels and figure things out that does not exist in the Indus Valley script at all. And a couple of others are in the same position.

[Josh Hammer]

Wow, that's so exciting. Josh, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and telling us all about it. What is the book called?

[Dax Shepard]

The Mesopotamian Riddle.

[Josh Hammer]

Well, it's a riddle no longer thanks to all those eccentric geniuses in the.

[Dax Shepard]

19Th century archaeologist, a soldier, a clergyman in the race to decipher world's the oldest rating subtitle.

[Josh Hammer]

Boom. It's got it all. Thanks Josh, really appreciate that. Thank you.

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