Book Review | The Colorful Crew Who Unlocked the Past

The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing
By Joshua Hammer
Simon & Schuster, 400 pp.

Modern archaeology, which began in the 18th century, underwent an explosion of activity in the century that followed. Its most remarkable achievement was the unearthing of unknown civilizations in the Near East, the cradle of Western civilization—a feat that involved an initial encounter with two major languages, Sumerian and Akkadian, long lost and forgotten. The recovery of these languages and of the striking bas-reliefs and sculptures that came with them was something like the discovery of a new planet in our solar system.

As Joshua Hammer shows in highly readable prose, the discoveries caused a sensation in England, where many of the plundered artifacts were brought. Crowds flocked to the British Museum to see them, and the two principal explorer-archaeologists on whom Hammer focuses were feted as national heroes, one being given an audience with Queen Victoria, the other embraced as a friend by Charles Dickens. The artifacts, of course, spoke for themselves; the amazingly lively Assyrian bas-reliefs of royal lion hunts and battle scenes can be admired to this day in the British Museum.

The languages, on the other hand, were initially a daunting challenge, written on clay tablets and incised in stone in cuneiform, which, to the untutored eye, appeared as angular markings that looked like chicken tracks, with no punctuation and no division between words. Their decipherment through arduous efforts is one of the great intellectual achievements of the 19th century.

Hammer, who is a freelance journalist, not a scholar, has scrupulously informed himself on these matters through reading and through extensive consultation with authorities in the field. He painstakingly shares what he has learned with his readers by frequently introducing images of the cuneiform into his text and explaining step by step how the symbols work.

Since this is a book meant to be popular history, much space is devoted to vividly evoking the 19th-century figures and scenes, even when it is not necessary for the story of recovering the ancient languages. Thus we are told that the Persian Emperor Cyrus was “a fearsome looking warrior who wore a heavy sheepskin coat, high leather boots and black kohl, or mascara, smeared around his eyes.” An archaeological dig is conveyed in the following terms: Botta, its French supervisor, “organized labor teams and ordered them to spread out across the dun-brown mound and cut trenches in the earth.

Soon, tunnels bathed in gloom snaked through the tell, strewn with broken bricks and crammed with sweating, singing, shirtless laborers.” Sometimes this penchant for colorful evocation roams far afield from the archaeological story. Here’s the beginning of the chapter in which the young Henry Rawlinson, one of the book’s two protagonists, first sets sail for the Middle East:

On an early July day in 1827, dozens of cadets stood on the deck of the Neptune in Portsmouth Harbor, excited and, in many cases, filled with trepidation about the voyage that lay ahead. Resplendent in red jackets with gold-tasseled epaulets and white trousers, the young men took the measure of one another and of the ship that would be their home for the next six months, a six-gun, three-mast, triple-deck East Indiaman merchant vessel chartered by the East India Company.

The aim is somewhat akin to that of those sumptuous movies set a couple of centuries back, where part of the pleasure for viewers comes from the elaborate recreation of the costumes, carriages, gas lamps and other paraphernalia of a vanished era. One does not want to begrudge Hammer these scene-setting passages, though they sometimes lead to a certain expository sprawl, as when the mention of Rawlinson as a soldier-archaeologist leads Hammer into a whole paragraph on such figures, going back to Rome in the first century BCE.

Much of the interest of the book is in the personalities of the main investigators. There was competition among English, French and German researchers of Mesopotamia, inflected by the nationalism of the era. Rawlinson was joined in the pursuit of discoveries by another Englishman, Austen Layard. At first, the two were friends and avid collaborators. Eventually, great bitterness ensued between them. The main cause was Layard’s siding with Edward Hincks, an Irish Protestant parson, in the interpretation of the tablets. Rawlinson and Layard had braved the terrible dangers and hardships of the Middle East in order to get their finds—blistering heat, sandstorms, brigands, dysentery, malaria, cholera and other diseases, as well as breakneck climbs up sheer cliffs to reach some of the ancient treasures. Hincks, by contrast, when he was able to get copies of the texts, worked in solitude in his country parsonage, and that work was marked by genius, often demonstrating that Rawlinson had gotten things wrong. One didn’t have to confront poisonous snakes, armed desperadoes and brutal climate in order to decipher the texts.

Another figure in this story is George Smith, a young working-class man who, having left school at the age of 14, was employed as a money engraver. Lacking in education, he had an abundance of native brilliance, and he succeeded in deciphering Akkadian where others had failed, giving us the lost Epic of Gilgamesh. He made two trips to Mesopotamia funded by a newspaper, then a third, on which he was finally sent by the British Museum. This time, alas, he contracted dysentery and died in Aleppo at the age of 36. Hammer devotes only brief attention to Smith, whose striking story is laid out in detail by David Damrosch in his excellent The Buried Book: The Loss and Recovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh from 2007. Unaccountably, Hammer does not cite Damrosch.

Though, as I have said, Hammer has done much to work up the details of this complicated historical subject, there are lapses. The ancient Nabataean kingdom was not “a Bedouin Arab state.” The Nabataeans created an important mercantile center with an urban concentration, exemplified by the extraordinary city of Petra, which can be seen in present-day Jordan, carved out of red rock.

The links between the Mesopotamian finds and the Bible understandably have compelled the attention of researchers from the first discoveries to the present. Perhaps the most famous of these connections is the discovery in the Gilgamesh epic of a flood story with details quite like those of the Noah narrative in Genesis. The inevitable inference is that the Hebrew writer was familiar with the Akkadian text and adapted it for his own purposes. The wild man Enkiddu in Gilgamesh exhibits features that also show up in the representation of Esau in Genesis. Other links, large and small, abound.

Unfortunately, Hammer is particularly shaky when he touches on the Bible. The third-century BCE Greek translation of the Bible was not done from the Aramaic but from the Hebrew. The prophet Samuel, we are told, led the Israelites to victory against the Philistines around 1100 BCE. But Samuel was not a military man and fought no battles against the Philistines, and the date is almost a century too early. The Book of Jonah is mentioned as though it were a historical source on Nineveh, though it offers a fantasy version of the Assyrian city written centuries after the destruction of Nineveh, and this late biblical book could not possibly precede the 7th century BCE as Hammer declares. The “big fish,” moreover, in Jonah is not a whale.

Similarly, the Book of Daniel, composed around 165 BCE and featuring many miraculous details, is by no means a historical source on the Babylonian court.

References to the Hebrew language are especially questionable. Hammer cites a supposed Hebrew word kinu, meaning “legitimate” or “true.” There is no such word in Hebrew, though this might be a mistake for ken. As an example of a lack of correspondence between Hebrew and Akkadian, Hammer reports that “the word if in Akkadian is shumma, it’s een or lu in Hebrew.” Lu is correct, een is again not a Hebrew word, and shumma looks suspiciously similar to the Hebrew shemma, a common term for if or lest as the language evolved into rabbinic Hebrew. I am not competent to say whether there are similar lapses in the treatment of the Akkadian, but perhaps Hammer’s consulting Assyriologists saved him there.

The Mesopotamian Riddle is clearly not a flawless book, but it is definitely a good read, and it effectively conveys much instructive information about the discovery of this ancient world, together with deftly drawn portraits of the discoverers.

What is riveting in the story Hammer tells is the stubborn persistence of these explorers and their sheer physical courage and willingness to risk life and limb in the quest to rescue the precious remnants of a seminal civilization whose very existence had been forgotten. The quest for immortality in Gilgamesh, the striking opposition between civilization and the wild in that epic, would have many echoes in later Western literature and thought.

Hammer properly summarizes the heroic character of the explorers’ project at the end of his epilogue: “Layard, Botta, Rassum and other archaeologist-adventurers had braved the dust and disease of Mesopotamia to retrieve these relics, driven by a hunger to understand the world and to grasp the immensity and longevity of human experience. Then, in a feat of analysis, intuition and stamina, Rawlinson and Hincks had extracted meaning from the 2,500-year-old signs gouged in clay and carved in stone.” This is a resonant narrative, abundantly deserving to be read, about the human imperative to seek knowledge, an enterprise more genuinely exciting than the fictitious one undertaken by the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Robert Alter is a biblical scholar and the author of 23 books, including his translation of the Hebrew Bible. He is a professor emeritus of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

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