Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, Diplomat and Assyriologist, was born November 4, 1810 in Chadlington, Oxfordshire, England. He was the second son of Abram Tyack Rawlinson and brother of George Rawlinson. He entered military service in 1827 with the East India Company. He helped to reorganize the Persian army from 1833-1839 while studying cuneiform inscriptions, and translating Darius’s Behistun inscription. In 1840 he was appointed political agent at Kandahar and in 1843 consul at Baghdad. In 1856 he became a director of the East India Company and from1859-1860 he was British minister in Persia and member of the Council of India in 1858-1859, 1868-1895. He died March 5, 1895.
Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson is best known for his decipherment of ancient cuneiform. Spending much time in the Near East as a British army officer, he knew modern Persian and other Oriental languages. The initial decipherment of cuneiform was accomplished at the beginning of the nineteenth century by George Grotefend, but he was unable to arrive to a solution and his later work was criticized for his wild guesses. Unaware of Grotenfend's work, Rawlinson made an attempt to decipher the strange shapes. While there were many visible cuneiform inscriptions in Persia, most of them were very short, consisting of only a few characters. An inscription of considerable length, was known to exist in the mountains between Hamadan and Baghdad. High up on a mountain called Behistun, there was a panel of sculptured figures with many lines of cuneiform in the same three scripts which also appeared on several other Persian artifacts.
Between the years 1835 and 1839 Rawlinson, with great risk of his life, succeeded in copying most of the great Behisitun inscription. He began by assuming that the three different types of cuneiform writing read the same thing. One of the three was simpler than the others. Its characters were less complicated in form and fewer in number. It appeared to be alphabetic while the others seemed to be pictographs, ideographs and phonetic characters.
Rawlinson began with the simpler of the two, which was found more often throughout Persia and had a hint of Persian dialect. Through his discoveries, he soon hypothesized the texts belonged to the period of the Archaemenid dynasty in Persia, of the Old Persian Empire (550-330 BCE). The Behistun inscription was set up by Darius the Great of Persia about 519 BCE. It gave an account of how Darius came to the throne after the death of Cambyses and how he overcame those who threatened to destroy the unity of the Persian Empire. This statement of Darius was widely known throughout his realm. One copy in the Aramaic language and alphabet was found written on papyrus in southern Egypt.
Once the Persian text had been translated, it was possible to turn to the study of the other two languages. One was correctly assumed to be Babylonian. This discovery is very important to students of Assyriology since Babylonian and Assyrian languages were both Semitic and closely related. The third type was called Median or Scythian. It was the most difficult of all. As Grotefend had guessed, it had a relation to the Elamite tongue, the language of Susa. It is completely unrelated to either Persian or to any of the Semitic languages and few artifacts have been found.
It was soon learned that the cuneiform system had been used by many different groups and for writing a variety of languages. Semetic speaking Babylonians and Assyrians used the cuneiform for hundreds of years, but later discovery was shown that the Sumerians were the inventors and were using it before 3000 BCE. Rawlinson’s work was the result of a breakthrough of many discoveries and provided great insight of human history.
Cottrell, Leonard. The Quest for Sumer. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965
Jones, Tom B. Paths to the Ancient Past. Toronto: Collier-Macmillan Canada, Ltd., 1967
Catholic Encyclopedia: Oriental Study and Research www.knight.org/advent/cathen/11302c.htm, 10/12/99
Rawlinson, Sir Henry Creswicke <www.biography.com>
Written by Jinnie Hinderscheit
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007