The Race to Decipher the World's First Writing
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Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Three and a half thousand BC, 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 three thousand years...

That script would chronicle military triumphs, scientific breakthroughs, 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. 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, 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. It

It tells us all about her. It's Joshua Hammer. He's a freelance journalist who writes the New York Times and Smithsonian magazines, among others. He has done time as a war correspondent. He has just published The Mesopotamian Riddle. If you are 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.

Josh, thanks for coming on the show. Welcome, Dan. I realize 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 civilization. Did they know about Mesopotamian civilization in particular, though? 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.

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? 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, 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 a lot of people thought the whole thing was imaginary. 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. Yes. So Assyria was what we know now is that Assyria sprang up in what is now northern Iraq around Mosul.

about 1900 BC. And it took about a thousand 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 Syria and

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 very graphic records of their conquests. So by about 700 BC, they controlled basically everything

most of Asia, the Near East and the Middle East, all the way to Afghanistan. It was a huge, wealthy, powerful, brutal empire. 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. Mishda's peak in about 700 BC. Great. Okay, so we now know that, but in the 19th century, they did not really realize that. Okay. Well, they have, as I said, a few fragmentary accounts, and people didn't necessarily trust what the Bible had to say about it.

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 over 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. And the lamentations of the Jews in their exile in Babylon, is that that could have played? 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 BC, Babylon lingered on. Great King Nebuchadnezzar, he went off and he conquered the Jews, destroyed Jerusalem in about 580 BC. So Babylon existed for a bit longer than the Syrians. 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 view of these mighty lost empires. 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, 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, he knew that there was probably a great, he believed there was a great empire, or great city buried underneath 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 BC. So Laird brought it all back to life. I'm just starting to realize there's a sort of English or British trope here about going to the Ottoman Empire, traveling 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 of Arabia, 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. 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 was really an extraordinary character. As you just said, he discovers a lost civilization. There's not many people that have done that, really.

He was one of the most famous men in England in the 1850s. I mean, he came back. Really? 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 this archaeologist in the 1840s. Nobody had done what he did. 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 what's he finding in the palaces that allows us to start really, really unlocking the secrets of this? Well, let's talk about Nineveh was the greatest city of Assyria. It was the capital of Assyria for 100 years. And Herodotus is described 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 a lot of things were preserved. He found these

Mud brick walls lined with alabaster bas-reliefs, which showed an incredible detail of various aspects of the Assyrian Empire, mostly the royal court, but scenes of battles. 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 they brought to life in these very well-defined bas-reliefs

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 onto the British Museum. But he also found incredible statues, you know, those wonderful Lamassus, which continues to define ancient Assyria. These are these mythological creatures.

I'm sure you know what I'm talking about if I describe them. Half human, half bull or lion with wings. 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 space.

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, I mean, they weighed 20, 30 tons, were carried by a team of horses on

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, it was the talk of the town and the country for months as they began to get a glimpse of this dreamlike empire that suddenly emerged out of the dust. So exciting. And probably more important, if less dramatic than those enormous statues, those monumental statues,

were all the cuneiform inscribed tablets. So tell me about that. What is cuneiform and what are these tablets? 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 describe 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. 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 Ashurbanipal, which was about 10 times greater than

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

But yeah, the writing that was discovered, these mysterious characters found everywhere in the palaces of Assyria dug up by Laird really kind of stimulated a quest to figure out what the hell they were talking about here.

And do we have to talk about Henry Quasarik Rawlinson, who is one of the leading figures on that quest? Rawlinson 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. It was kind of the great calm when 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 were a great number of inscriptions, ancient inscriptions from the great Persian Empire,

which followed the Assyrian Empire. This is about 500 to 300 BC, before it was destroyed by Alexander the Great. The Persians also used cuneiform. And Rawlinson 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. And he's literally scouring the landscape looking for clues. I mean, literally. 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 Egyptian hieroglyphs. This happened in 1822.

So this was on the minds of people, including Rawlinson. I mean, Champollion and Young were heroes. In those days, these great linguists were celebrated as the way we'd celebrate the guys who figured out the recombinant DNA today, 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, discovered this giant bas-relief 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 a Syrian, 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 2000 years. So that was, they had an incredible, much more colorful, important history. So that was whatever everybody wanted to know what the Assyrians were saying. 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. Rawlinson spent like hundreds of hours. He made three in this pretty remote corner of Persia, you know. It's 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-faced 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 creating these paper mache characters

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 josh can you still see it today or has it been destroyed over there yeah i haven't seen it i've i would love to go to bay of stune 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 2000 uh since uh since 500 bc

2,500 years, but I know people who've been out there, yes. And does Rawlinson start with the cracking of the code, or is that left to people back at their desks in the UK? 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 workout in the field and then ride his horse back to Baghdad and then sit there in his office, cool 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 house.

study that he set up on the embassy grounds right at the water's edge, keep things 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 you have to figure out. 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.

In 1846, he sent in a four or 500 page report to the Royal Asiatic Society in London saying, I have solved this.

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 track 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. 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, incredibly 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 world, far from the actual in situ inscriptions. And this guy gave Rawlinson a run for his money. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the mysteries of Mesopotamia more coming up.

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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. That's what it's really about. 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 was Edward Hinks. I don't know if we've mentioned that, but Edward Hinks was dispatched up to this fairly remote parish in a town called Killyleagh, K-I-L-L-Y-L-E-A-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, and

But basically the rest of his 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 Acadian, 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, 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. And he's just a natural born codebreaker. I mean, he's doing the same kind of job. And Laird, one of the most interesting aspects of this story is that Laird and Rawlinson, those guys were both in the Near East. I mean, Laird was up digging up in Mosul.

Uh, these great Assyrian sites shipping this stuff down to Rawlinson in Baghdad. They had a real bond going on for a few years, gradually layered began, began to realize that maybe he was betting on the wrong horse. That Hanks was the man who could hold the, held 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 Kili Lei, hanging out with Hanks, doing inscriptions together, sitting side by side in Hanks' study. Laird is filled with awe and admiration. And Rawlinson is off there in exile in Baghdad, hearing about these meetings and just 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. And so at what stage can they just get into it and start just reading these tablets? Is that something that comes? Well, I will say, you know, they each started almost at a,

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 um using the old persian parallel text 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 that code breakers use um

But there was still a tremendous amount of skepticism. 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 the position that Rawlinson and Hanks were in, whereas they're saying that they solved it.

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 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 an upstart 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 a zero 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 Hinks. 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.

And that was the great cuneiform challenge of 1857 in which those three guys plus a fourth scholar, a French-German scholar named Jules Aupert, O-P-P-E-R-T, would independently try to decipher a cylinder, a clay cylinder, eight-sided cylinder about the size of a bowling pin.

from 800 BC on which were inscribed thousands of infinitesimally tiny cuneiform characters. Each of them would be given two months 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. And I guess they had. They had cracked the code. Well, they had, yes. There were a lot of mistakes and a lot of sections that were left blank.

different levels of success, but things were, Rawlinson and Hinks were by far the declared by the judges, by far the closest. The other two were also Rands, but close enough. You had four guys who were close enough so that they could then say, yeah, okay, it looks good to us. It looks like Cuneiform, the riddle has been solved. And from that point on, things advanced pretty quickly. But if you want to pick a specific moment in

in the history of decipherment when they could say, you know, they have cracked the code, it would have been June 1857. 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 going to say in this year, this battle took place. If you're used to the Greek and Roman world, it's all just like facts. 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. What's the cool stuff on there? Is it history? Is it science? Is it literature? There's an awful lot of history. There's an awful lot of brag. You know, I mean, these Assyrian kings,

Ashurbanipal 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 and galloping across the plains to killing lions to conquering nations.

But there was really fascinating stuff. I dug up an old book from 1910 when I was in the British Library that had a series of translations of medical texts. The Assyrians were really big on medicine. And they had these, you know, and I would, their approach to medicine sort of

their approach to almost everything, which is that they combined practical science. Well, I mean, 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

and various roots and herbs, pressing it against your eye for a couple of days while reciting an ancient Sumerian charm. Who knows if the 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 the summer and winter solstices. They had astronomical observations that were actually pretty spot on. An awful lot of superstition, an awful lot of astrological and superstitious readings. I mean, the king had a whole team of

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 his place for the day while he was out tending the fields. And then afterwards, the fake king and queen would be put to death.

But that was the way they got around the curse of the total eclipse of the sun. So there was great detail, great stuff that gave you insights into the science and superstitions of the ancient world. And we got the code of Hammurabi people have heard of. Oh, then there was that, of course, yes. I mean, legal codes, history, literature. Gilgamesh. Eventually, we got Craig Gilgamesh. And then Enheduanna, who's this mysterious female writer, who

who is the priestess of the, uh, well, I can't remember. Is it the moon or the sun? Is that Sumer? Is that from Sumer? Yeah, that was in Sumer. Sumer, you know, Sumer, that was obviously the first Mesopotamian civilization, right? That predated the Assyrians by 1500, 1500 years. But it was through our understanding of Assyrian, Syro-Babylonian, that,

the co-breakers were able then to go after Sumerian and define, you know, get a good sense of human existence 2,000 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, 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 in Babylon, thanks to these guys. ♪

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

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Ranger, for the ones who get it done. 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 Egyptian ones.

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 sort of 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.

It's pretty, well, you know, 180 years. You figure by now. Well, you'd think by now people would have, yeah. But no, I think there's some reasons for that as I go into in the book. First of all, you know, you don't, you did not, except for these wonderful Lamassus, these great giant beasts, you know, that go out of the, and the Ishtar, famous Ishtar Gate of Nebuchadnezzar found in Babylon. These guys were building their palaces out of mud brick,

And unlike the, unlike the, uh, the Egyptians who use stone. So a lot of this stuff didn't almost nothing survived. You know, yeah, you had these alabaster sculptures and you had some, some, some, some monument, 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 Iraq? 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, 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

It had roving bands of Bedouin rebels who would attack people on the roads. How many people do you know who've been to ancient Babylon, the ruins of Babylon? Yeah, it's tricky. I went there, but I went there when I was a war correspondent. I had to be during a lull in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. So for numerous reasons. Also, one other thing I want to say is about the Assyrians is that

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 a big fan base. Some Assyriologists would say that that perspective or that reputation is really unwarranted. I would say it is largely warranted, but there are other aspects of Assyrio-Babylonian civilization that aren't quite as intimidating or awful.

I've got to ask you what I got you here, Josh. You're doing a piece on languages that was taught for a workout. I'm obsessed with the Inca Kipu. The Inca Kipu is so exciting, isn't it? These strings, strings on a string with different lengths, different knots, different colors. Yeah, that's a good one. I haven't really thought about that one. Well, I guess it's not really an alphabet, is it? But it's a communication system. Yeah, a different kind of communication system. I'm looking specifically at

writing, one of which is the Indus Valley script, the one from Western India, Eastern Pakistan, that was around since about 2500, 3000 BC. And it has resisted all efforts to decipher it. And an Indian governor, a chief minister of Tamil Nadu state, 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. I've met people down in India and I met people here in Berlin and

who claim to have their theories, you know, very elaborate, detailed, sophisticated analyses that could be pure hogwash. 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. Time will tell. 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 language

writing system side by side with 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. 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? The Mesopotamian Riddle.

Well, it's a riddle no longer, thanks to all those eccentric geniuses in the 19th century. Archaeologist, a soldier, a clergyman in the race to decipher the world's oldest writing. Sometime. Boom. It's got it all. Thanks, Josh. Really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you.

And now an ode to play, brought to you by Scratchers and the California Lottery Philharmonic. Take a time out from your busy day for a quick moment of play. Get some Scratchers, then get Scratchy. You deserve it, won't you say? Scratch, scratch, scratch, Scratchy, Scratchy, Scratchy, Scratch, Scratch. Feel the play, end up your game. Scratchers from the California Lottery, a little play can make.

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Ranger, for the ones who get it done.