Joshua Hammer (Simon & Schuster)
What does it take to decipher an extinct writing system? If Joshua Hammer’s new book The Mesopotamian Riddle: An archaeologist, a soldier, a clergyman, and the race to decipher the world’s oldest writing is anything to go by, the main requirements are some ethically dubious archaeological digs and a lot of rampaging testosterone.
The book is Hammer’s account of the deciphering of cuneiform, the oldest known writing system. Cuneiform was invented in around 3400 BC in Mesopotamia. It was used for thousands of years to record the triumphs and failures of a succession of societies, before finally falling out of use around 2000 years ago.
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In the 1800s, archaeologists rediscovered cuneiform, as artefacts were excavated in what was once Mesopotamia and shipped to Europe – often against the will of local communities. People wanted to know what the strange wedge-shaped symbols meant. Egyptian hieroglyphs had been deciphered in the 1820s: how hard could it be to read cuneiform?
Quite hard, it turns out. Because the writing system was used for so long, multiple languages were recorded using the same set of symbols. Worse, some of the symbols had multiple uses: the same image could denote a sound or a concept, depending on the context – and, of course, the context was frequently missing.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the challenges, three men set their sights on deciphering cuneiform. Austen Henry Layard was a failed lawyer turned reckless adventurer turned archaeologist. Henry Creswicke Rawlinson was a soldier with a passion for linguistics and an appalling snob. And then there was Edward Hincks, a parson and part-time scholar in rural Ireland.
Hammer starts the story at the most dramatic point: in January 1857, the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland launched a competition to decipher the cuneiform on a newly discovered artefact: an octagonal column, known as a prism, which was inscribed with 800 lines of tiny cuneiform characters. The idea was to see if multiple experts arrived at the same translation, because sceptics argued that other translations were so riddled with unfalsifiable assumptions that they were little better than guesswork. Spoiler alert: the translations were sufficiently similar that it was clear there was an objectively right path to be on, even if some of the details were hazy.
From there, Hammer delves into each man’s personal history and tracks his work, until the story comes full circle. His writing is engaging, moving nimbly between the men’s foibles, the geopolitics and the cuneiform puzzle itself. His explanations of the art of deciphering are terrific, conveying both the difficulty and how the researchers overcame it.
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The book has its flaws. One issue is that there are so many strands: three protagonists, two of whom criss-cross Eurasia; multiple archaeological sites, representing ancient civilisations like Assyria, Sumer and Persia; a host of languages all recorded in cuneiform. There were passages where I found myself losing track. Hammer supplies a useful timeline of ancient Mesopotamia, but one for his protagonists would have helped. Readers might do well to prepare with Moudhy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers, which recounts the history of Mesopotamia.
And then there are the maps, which are diabolical. The main one uses a greyscale key to identify different populations, but the shades are so similar that it is almost impossible to differentiate between them. A second map, of the Achaemenid Empire, uses such a confusing greyscale I found it hard to tell land from sea. This was also inserted, a bit randomly, into chapter two. Publishers, please place all maps in the opening pages for easier reference.
These niggles aside, The Mesopotamian Riddle is a gripping account of a crucial project in archaeology and linguistics. It exposes the flawed humanity of its protagonists, while showing the scale of their achievements.
Michael Marshall is a writer based in Devon, UK
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