The Ultimate Mesopotamian Mystery

For thousands of years, ancient cuneiform - the script of the ancient Mesopotamians was lost to time, until being dramatically rediscovered in the 19th century by an adventurous group of unlikely Victorians. A dashing archaeologist, an officer turned diplomat and a reclusive clergyman raced to decipher it and unlock the secrets of long-lost empires. Joining us is Joshua Hammer, a former war correspondent and author of 'The Mesopotamian Riddle'. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Tim Arstall. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.

• 1:07Dan Snow?

  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,

• 1:46Dan Snow?

  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.

• 2:14Dan Snow?

  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,

• 2:57Dan Snow?

  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. To tell us all about it is Joshua Hammer. He's a freelance journalist who writes for New York Times and Smithsonian magazines, among others.

• 3:41Dan Snow?

  He has done time as a war correspondent. He has just published The Mesopotamian Riddle. If you're 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. Enjoy.

• 4:15Dan Snow?

  Josh, thanks for coming on the show.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  You're welcome, Dan.

• 4:18Dan Snow?

  I realise 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 civilisation. Did they know about Mesopotamian civilisation in particular, though?

• 4:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:48Dan Snow?

  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?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  There were. Well, 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, well, 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 the ancient Persian Empire further east, but very little extant. I mean, sometimes they'd venture 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.

• 5:40Dan Snow?

  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.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay, so Assyria was what we know now is that Assyria sprang up in what is now northern Iraq around Mosul about 1900 B.C. And it took about 1,000 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 so on.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  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 B.C., 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.

• 6:55Dan Snow?

  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.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Nishthas peak in about 700 B.C.

• 7:04Dan Snow?

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

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Well, they have, as I said, a few fragmentary accounts, and people didn't necessarily trust what the Bible had to say about 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 10 tribes of Israel has been known 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. So that's what we knew.

• 7:42Dan Snow?

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

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the lamentations. So Babylon, we haven't really talked yet about Babylon. I mean, Babylon was 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 B.C., 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.

• 8:28Dan Snow?

  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, the Western view of these mighty lost empires?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Yes, so nobody knew much about these places until a guy named Austin Henry Laird, 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,

• 9:25Speaker 01

  he knew that there was probably a great, and 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 Laird brought it all back to life.

• 9:50Dan Snow?

  I'm just starting to realise, there's a sort of English or British trope here about going to the Ottoman Empire, travelling around, being quite naive, getting beaten up, left for dead in the ditch. So 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 Laird, who I had never heard of. So I'm very grateful to you.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Amazing, and you're British and you've 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.

• 10:16Dan Snow?

  Yes, you just said, he kind of, he discovers a lost civilisation, that's what I'm thinking, I've done that really.

• 10:21Speaker 01

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

• 10:25Dan Snow?

  Really?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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.

• 10:38Dan Snow?

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

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Well, let's talk about Nineveh was the greatest city of Assyria. It was the capital of Assyria for a hundred years and Herodotus described it 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 there were a lot of things were preserved. He found these mud brick walls lined with alabaster bower leaves, which showed in incredible detail of various aspects of the Assyrian Empire, mostly the, 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

• 11:38Speaker 01

  they brought to life in these very well-defined bower leaves, 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 on to the British Museum. But he also found incredible statues, you know, those wonderful Lamasus, 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.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  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 to, 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 tired. It was the talk of the town

• 13:02Speaker 01

  and the country for, for months as they began to get a glimpse of this dreamlike empire that suddenly emerged out of the dust.

• 13:08Dan Snow?

  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?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  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 described 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.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  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 Asherbanapah, 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 that. But yeah, the writing that was discovered, these, these mysterious characters found everywhere in the palaces of Assyria dug up by layer

• 14:44Speaker 01

  really kind of stimulated a quest to figure out what the hell they were talking about.

• 14:49Dan Snow?

  And do we have to talk about Henry Quasric Rollinson, who is one of the leading figures on that quest?

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Rollinson was sort of a classic to the manner 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 was a, there were a great number of inscriptions, ancient inscriptions from the great Persian Empire,

• 15:40Speaker 01

  which followed the Assyrian Empire. This is about 500 to 300 B.C. before it was destroyed by Alexander the Great. The Persians also used cuneiform. And Rollinson 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.

• 16:19Dan Snow?

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

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Well, the great thing, I mean, so you know, the Rosetta Stone was this trilingual 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 Rollinson. I mean, Champollion and Young were heroes, you know, in those days, these great linguists were celebrated as, you know, the way we'd celebrate the guys who figured out the recombinant DNA today, you know, great scientific discoveries, the same level of complexity and understanding of the world. So hieroglyphs got everybody to go after cuneiform. And Rawlinson, as he was wandering around on horseback through Persia,

• 17:04Speaker 01

  discovered this giant bower leaf 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.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:54Dan Snow?

  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.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Rawlinson spent like hundreds of hours. He made three, it's pretty remote corner of Persia, you know? It's a 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

• 18:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:04Dan Snow?

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

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't seen it. I would love to go to Behistun, 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 2,000, since 500 B.C. 2,500 years, but you know, I know people who've been out there. Yes.

• 19:23Dan Snow?

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

• 19:30Speaker 01

  No, 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 do this incredible work out in 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

• 20:15Speaker 01

  tolerable even during the summer when it was 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 Assyrian language, the Akkadian language that he had to figure out.

• 20:59Dan Snow?

  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.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  In 1846, he sent in a four or 500 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 tract. They devoted 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 trying to crack the code of Assyrian. Or as it's called, it became known as Akkadian.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  It's basically Assyro-Babylonian because the Assyrians and the Babylonians wrote and spoke the same language. When he turned to that one, this 600 character, 700 character, credibly 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 NC2 inscriptions. And this guy gave Rawlinson a run for his money.

• 22:35Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the mysteries of Mesopotamia, more coming up.

• 22:46Dan Snow?

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• 23:28Dan Snow?

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• 25:20Dan Snow?

  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.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  That's what intrigues me about this. He's the 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 is Edward Hinks. I don't know if you've even mentioned that, but Edward Hinks was dispatched up to this fairly remote parish in a town called Kilyllegh, K-I-L-L-Y-L-E-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

• 26:14Speaker 01

  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 Akkadian, like Rawlinson. And they two met a couple of times, 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 Rawlinson were at it, you know, in their separate corners of the planet, doing the same thing, publishing independently and had a fierce rivalry, one of the great rivalries of Victorian England.

• 26:58Dan Snow?

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

• 27:02Speaker 01

  And Laird, what was one of the most interesting aspects of this story is Laird and Rawlinson, those guys were both in the, in the East. I mean, Laird was up digging and digging up in Mosul, these greatest Syrian 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 Hanks was the man who could hold 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 Killey Lake, hanging out with Hanks, doing inscriptions together, sitting side by side in Hanks's study. Laird is filled with awe and admiration.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  And Rawlinson is off there 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 challenging him.

• 28:06Dan Snow?

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

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Well, I will say, you know, they each started almost at exactly the same time, in that 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. Um, the code breakers use, um, but there was still a tremendous amount of skepticism. Um, 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

• 28:57Speaker 01

  the position that Rawlins and Hanks were in, whereas they're saying that they solved it, but nobody believes them. Where's the proof? What's the evidence? You know, how do you decide? I mean, you can tell me all you want that you cracked it, but uh, 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, uh, an upstart, um, 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

• 29:40Speaker 01

  a Syro-Babylonian, uh, 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 Hanks. 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. Um, and that was the Great Cuneiform Challenge of 1857, in which those three guys, plus a fourth scholar, a French German scholar

• 30:23Speaker 01

  named Jules Opert, 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 B.C., on which were uh, 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.

• 31:06Dan Snow?

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

• 31:09Speaker 01

  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 lot, different levels of success. But things were, Rollinson and Hinks 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, it looks good to us, looks like cuneiform, the riddle has been solved. Um, and from that point on, things advanced 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, uh, June 1857.

• 31:51Dan Snow?

  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. And if you're used to the Greek and Roman world, it's all just like fact, it's very useful, 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.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  What's the cool stuff?

• 32:24Dan Snow?

  Is there cool stuff on there? Is it history? Is it science? Is it, is it literature?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  There's an awful lot of history, there's an awful lot of bragging. Um, you know, I mean, these, these Assyrian kings, Asher Banapal 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 gal, 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 like about 1910, when I was in the British Library, that had a series of translations of medical texts.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Who knows if 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 a 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 would had a whole

• 34:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  You know, great, great stuff that gave you insights into the science and superstitions of the ancient world.

• 35:17Dan Snow?

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

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Oh, then of course, yes. I mean, legal codes, history, literature, Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, eventually we got crack Gilgamesh.

• 35:28Dan Snow?

  And then Enheduanna, who's this mysterious female writer.

• 35:32Dan Snow?

  Who is the priestess of the, well, I can't remember, is it the moon or the sun?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Isn't that Sumer? Is that from Sumer?

• 35:38Dan Snow?

  Yeah, that was in Sumer.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Sumer, you know, Sumer, that was, well, that was obviously the first Mesopotamian civilization, right? That predated the Assyrians by 1500, 1500 years. But it was through our understanding of Assyrian, zero Babylonian, that the coal 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

• 36:24Speaker 01

  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 and Babylon, thanks to, thanks to these guys.

• 36:39Dan Snow?

  More on ancient Assyria after this. Don't go away.

• 36:50Speaker 03

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• 37:06Speaker 02

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• 37:46Dan Snow?

  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 Enlightenment writers, who were so influenced by the Greek and Roman texts, they didn't get that effect in the 18th century. It's all still pretty new.

• 38:13Speaker 01

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

• 38:18Dan Snow?

  Well, you'd think by now, people would have.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  But no, I think there's some reasons for that, as I go into in the book. First of all, you know, you did not, except for these wonderful La Masus, these great giant beasts, you know, the Gorti, and the Ishtar, famous Ishtar Gate of Nebuchadnezzar, found in Babylon. These guys were building their palaces out of mud brick. And unlike 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, a few monumental pieces, but nothing compared to the Egyptians, or the Greeks or the Romans, for that matter. It's also, I think, the remoteness of this place. Who goes to a route?

• 39:01Speaker 01

  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 would attack people on the roads. How many people do you know who've been to ancient, you know, the ruins of Babylon?

• 39:30Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I went there, but I went there when I was a war correspondent. And I had to be, you know, during a lull in the US 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, you know, a big fan base. Some Assyriologists would say that that perspective or that reputation is really unwarranted.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  I would say it is largely warranted, but there are other aspects of Assyro-Babylonian civilization that, you know, that aren't quite as intimidating or awful.

• 40:24Dan Snow?

  I've got to ask you what I got you here, Josh. You're doing a piece on languages that was trying to work out. I'm obsessed with the Inka Kipu. The Inka Kipu is so exciting, isn't it? These strings, that strings on a string with different lengths, different knots and different colors.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good one. I haven't really thought about that one.

• 40:39Dan Snow?

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

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, a different kind of communication system. I'm looking specifically at writing, one of which is the Indus Valley script. This, uh, this, the one from Western India, Eastern Pakistan, that was around since about 2,500, 3,000 B.C. And it has resisted all efforts to decipher it. And the, a governor, an Indian governor, a chief minister of a time or another, they 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. Uh, 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.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Well, 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.

• 41:37Dan Snow?

  Time will tell.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  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, uh, 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.

• 42:00Dan Snow?

  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?

• 42:05Speaker 01

  The Mesopotamian Riddle.

• 42:07Dan Snow?

  Well, it's a riddle no longer, thanks to all those eccentric geniuses in the 19th century.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Archaeologists, a soldier, a clergyman in the race to decipher the world's oldest writing sometime.

• 42:18Dan Snow?

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

• 42:31Dan Snow?

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