A Contest for the Ages: Deciphering Cuneiform
The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
Historians love L.P. Hartley’s phrase “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there” because it rings true. In that foreign country, people also speak different languages and use different forms of writing. Some ancient languages are challenging for later generations, but we have a clear path to them, from later forms of the language or related writing. Other languages we come to with almost a blank slate. Such was the case with cuneiform, and its clay tablets, in the nineteenth century.
Hieroglyphs were famously deciphered with the aid of the Rosetta Stone, kicked up by French soldiers in Egypt in 1799. Prior to its discovery, with its inscriptions of the same decree in multiple languages, scholars had been unable to decode hieroglyphs, which had fallen out of use centuries earlier. Cuneiform posed an even greater challenge. The term “cuneiform” comes from the shape of the writing, “wedge-shaped.” Cuneiform’s wedges offer few visual clues—they do not resemble any objects and they do not resemble any modern alphabets. Making matters more complicated, cuneiform was used by different groups of people at different times. Cuneiform may all look somewhat the same to the uninitiated, but it is not.
Today, scholars can read cuneiform. The Mesopotamian Riddle is all about the adventure that made that possible. It involved nights poring over clay tablets, but it also involved dangerous excavations, daring cliff climbs, and an intense contest. The three main characters in the book are Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810-1895), Austen Layard (1817-1894), and Edward Hincks (1792-1866). Rawlinson was an East India Company official who made several dangerous climbs to gather information from the “Behistun Inscription,” which has text in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian. He spent his spare time as an imperial official working on cuneiform. Much of the time, he was in close contact with Layard, an unconventional Englishman born in France and raised in Italy, who was responsible for major excavations in Nineveh and Babylon. The British Museum identifies over 23,000 “related objects” tied to Layard. Hincks was a relatively unknown rector in the Church of Ireland and a passionate intellect working away for achievement and recognition.
All three of these men shared an interest in ancient Mesopotamia. And as Layard’s finds made their way back to the metropole, more people in England and the rest of Europe became interested, too. A handful of men were translating cuneiform, but there were questions about how much progress was being made. Did any of the alleged translations align? In 1856, the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland launched a contest to determine whether or not progress was being made in deciphering cuneiform and to identify who was the greatest translator.
The two main figures in the contest were Rawlinson and Hincks. Rawlinson had already deciphered ancient Persian and had “demonstrated a flair for languages, a skill at scaling heights in search of millennia-old inscriptions, and a powerful yearning, he confided to his sister, to do something to attract the world’s attention” (3). He came from a fairly prominent family and, by 1856, had already achieved some fame with regard to ancient languages. Hincks was Rawlinson’s chief rival. Joshua Hammer describes him as “brilliant, tormented by crippling anxiety and the specter of financial ruin, hungry for peer recognition of his linguistic gifts, and principled to a fault” (3). Rawlinson was the frontrunner and went down in history as the winner, but the reality is more complicated. The Mesopotamian Riddle engages all the drama of the contest, including some unfair dealings, and the dramatic stories of the biographies of Layard, Rawlinson, and Hincks.
This book is somewhat like archaeology itself, taking us through layers of history. At the surface, we have the scholars of today, who recognize that Edward Hincks was ahead of Rawlinson in deciphering cuneiform and that Rawlinson undercut him. Today’s scholars also have an understanding of the ancient cultures Assyria made possible by the decipherment of cuneiform. More is known about cities like Nineveh. Even people with no training have read The Epic of Gilgamesh, in translation. In the present, most people also look more askance at empires and gathering antiquities around the world than Layard, Rawlinson, and Hincks did.
The next layer down takes us into the nineteenth-century world of Layard, Rawlinson, and Hincks. Hincks was a cleric whose pay came partly from taxes and whose Irishness was considered a disadvantage. Rawlinson was at the vanguard of the British Empire, an EIC official at the British Residency in Baghdad. He worked on his translations in a palatial home filled with servants and a menagerie of exotic animals, including a pet lion. A mongoose “wandered freely, attacking the venomous snakes that sometimes crept into the Residency pas the sepoys’ watchful eye” (97). Austen Layard did his work as an excavator threatened by disease, Ottoman officials, and bandits. In one instance he remedied an abscess in his jaw by applying leeches to his face (102). He uncovered lamassu that had not been seen for centuries. The world of Layard, Rawlinson, and Hincks is foreign to us now, not just the world of ancient Assyria.
The final layer in the book is the world in which cuneiform was used. Hammer offers us an introduction to Mesopotamian history. We learn about cities like Babylon and Nineveh, and empires like the Assyrian and Persian. The world of ancient Mesopotamia is often overshadowed in the cultural imagination by Egypt, but it is not less interesting or accomplished. It is also intertwined with biblical history. If most readers know little about ancient Mesopotamia, they probably know even less about the use of cuneiform by different linguistic groups and different eras. The Mesopotamian Riddle offers enough history of ancient Mesopotamia to provide context and provoke interest.
If the setting for The Mesopotamian Riddle is hard to imagine today, so are many of the individuals. Figures like Layard and Rawlinson speak to the existence of a certain “type” of Victorian man. They were capable of physical bravery and endurance and hard-nosed action. They were also serious scholars and capable artists. Rawlinson eagerly spent his working hours as an administrator for the British Empire and his spare moments poring over clay tablets, deciphering as much and as quickly as he could. These were not men who would have spent the weekend watching sports. Even Hincks, who seems to have had no physical adventures, took his hobbies seriously enough to devote nearly all his free time to them. They wanted to leave a mark on the world and they were passionate about learning. They would not be bragging about their “5 to 9” of fitness and protein shakes before your “9 to 5.”
William Henry Fox Talbot is a minor character in The Mesopotamian Riddle and an additional fascinating figure. He was a “scientific prodigy” who excelled at mathematics and chemistry. He was an inventor of photography, which came about in relation to his passion for drawing (252). He also loved horticulture the study of languages. He was a polymath who became “consumed by his most difficult project: the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform” (254). (His biography, The Pencil of Nature, is available on Project Gutenberg.)
Justice is a prominent theme in The Mesopotamian Riddle. In the nineteenth century, explorers and imperialists approved of taking antiquities back to the metropole. Now there are many movements for returning objects to their original geography. Major causes include the Benin bronzes and the “Elgin” marbles. The tension is identified in Mesopotamian Riddle, but not resolved, much like real life. Justice is also present in the story of Hincks and Rawlinson. For many years, Rawlinson received nearly all the credit for deciphering cuneiform and was considered superior to Hincks in his efforts. Yet, it is clear now that while Rawlinson was not a fraud, Hincks had the advantage and was both treated and regarded unfairly in his own time. This book sets the record straight.
The Mesopotamian Riddle is an entertaining and informative read. It is a book about ancient languages and efforts to decipher them, but it is not at all dry. Hammer’s prose draws on his experience as a foreign correspondent and writer for publications like Outside and National Geographic, offering up something both evidence-based and exciting. You will not come away reading cuneiform, but you should come away more curious about the world.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
