The Imperial Idiom
Henry Rawlinson knew Baghdad and other hotspots. We could use his like
today.
BY STUART FERGUSON
Tuesday, December 21, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Tehran, Baghdad and Basra, Kandahar and Kabul: Henry Rawlinson (1810-95)
was familiar with today's hot spots. But they were really dangerous back
when he was there.
In October 1841, Rawlinson survived an assassination attempt while
serving as a political agent in British-occupied Afghanistan. Three
months later, when an entire British army was wiped out on its retreat
from Kabul, he helped rally the vastly outnumbered Kandahar garrison and
saved the day. "Rawlinson," his commanding general had declared, "you
like a skirmish. Take the cavalry and do as you think best."
He did, routing the Afghans before they could get close to the city
walls. Afterward, his servant collected the heads of the men whom
Rawlinson had personally dispatched. It was meant, no doubt, as a
thoughtful gesture, but it was not well received. "Be off, sir," his
master commanded. "I don't want heads."
In Baghdad, where Rawlinson was consul in the 1840s and '50s, his
constant attendants were plague, malaria and restless Bedouins; so were
a pet mongoose, lion and leopard. He kept cool during the summers by
rigging a waterwheel to splash the waters of the Tigris onto the roof of
his pavilion. In Persia, where he served as Britain's ambassador, he was
an influential and a respected statesman, the very model of a Victorian
major general.
But as Lesley Adkins makes clear in "Empires of the Plain," her
insightful page-turner of a biography, Rawlinson himself would have
insisted that his greatest victories were in the fields of language and
antiquities. This colonial soldier, who went to India as a feckless
teenager, managed in his spare time--and with the help of scholars--to
decipher cuneiform, an ancient form of writing used in Mesopotamia for
many languages in the millennia leading up to the first century A.D.
In 1844, Rawlinson scaled the almost sheer cliffs of Bisitun, in Persia,
copying relief sculptures and their accompanying cuneiform inscriptions
in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. The trilingual texts allowed him
to decipher their meaning. Indeed, they became to cuneiform what the
Rosetta Stone is to hieroglyphics. "Says Darius the king: This is what I
have done," the inscriptions declared, going on to list Darius's
conquests. Rawlinson also explored the ruins of Mesopotamian cities,
digging for ancient clay tablets that carried other such messages from
the past.
His contemporaries viewed Rawlinson's translations with wonder, for they
allowed erudite specialists to compare the stories of Herodotus and the
Old Testament with written records. Naturally, rivals doubted that he
had deciphered cuneiform accurately, suspecting that it was all wild
guessing. It was only an 1857 translation contest sponsored by London's
Royal Asiatic Society--pitting Rawlinson against other scholars--that
proved he had broken the code. All their translations agreed; and
Rawlinson's was among the most complete and fluid.
Knighted for his accomplishments both as a diplomat and scholar, Sir
Henry did not get around to marrying until he was 52, eventually
settling in London with his wife and children. He spent the last decades
of his life overseeing the cuneiform collections of the British Museum.
Such home-front activity must have been a relief after his long,
adventurous and sometimes lonely bachelorhood. In all the decades
Rawlinson spent in Asia, his father wrote to him exactly once, to brag
about his horse winning the Epsom Derby.
Rawlinson's London Times obituary said that he wore his ribbons and
decorations "worthily," having earned all of them. A former servant in
Baghdad believed that he was, in his learning, "like a god" and, in his
horsemanship, "like Antar" (an Arab hero). When Rawlinson spoke, the
loyal retainer claimed, "the knees of the pasha's councilors gave way
under them."
Where is his like today?
Mr. Ferguson is a writer in Highlands, N.C.
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