CHAPTER IX
Countless caravans wended their way from the parched plains of Mesopotamia eastwards over the Persian border, past Kermanshah, winding along the road that skirts the range of hills rising to the left, and so through Behistun, a mere collection of huts with a name that is famous throughout all the seats of learning in the world. Here the caravans halted while men and beasts slaked their thirst in the pool, but few of the travellers troubled to look a second time at the great stone of Behistun rising above the plain. Users of the road were ever more interested in the spring than in the figures sculptured in the rock.
The carvings were old—as old as the hills—and like the hills they became part of the landscape. They were legendary, carved, so people said, by the gods in the dim past. Age-old myths concerning them were poured into the ear of the stranger who passed that way, but those who used the road regularly, and those who dwelt in the neighbourhood, took no more notice of the rock carvings of Behistun than they took of the other features of the scenery. The most aged man was as ignorant of the origin of the carvings as was the youngest stripling.
There the figures stood for centuries, for thousands of years. The traders drove their animals along the road to the sound of jingling bells, quaffed the waters of the spring, and passed onward, much more concerned about their merchandise than about the carvings on the bluff.
Had the figures been more accessible, they would have vanished long ago. Senseless wanderers would have taken pleasure in smashing them, and rain and frost and sun would have completed the destruction. But the figures were carved too high, and the rock below had been cut away by the masons of old, leaving a perpendicular wall which could only be scaled at considerable risk. Above them was the sheer cliff. There was no way down to them, no easy way up to them. The escarpment on which they were carved rose for 1700 feet, and they were graved out of the living rock 300 feet above the ground.
Except for a few travellers’ tales, the carvings at Behistun were unknown to the teeming multitudes dwelling in the great cities. Few men would have thought of looking in this lonely spot in Persia for the lost key to Babylon and Assyria. Yet here was the key for the man who had the courage and determination to wrest it from the mountains. Such a man came in the end, over two thousand four hundred years after the ancient sculptors had carved the last figure and removed the last scaffolding.
The discovery of the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the discovery of the key to cuneiform writing, resemble each other in more ways than one. It will be remembered that a soldier found the Rosetta Stone, and that an Englishman was the first man to indicate the manner of reading it. Rawlinson, whose genius solved the puzzle of Persian cuneiform, was also a soldier and an Englishman. It seems strange that science should be indebted to a doctor and a soldier for lifting the curtains of the past, that scholars who had spent their lives studying foreign languages should have to rely upon two men to whom these things were just an absorbing hobby.
When Henry Rawlinson sailed for Bombay to enter the service of the East India Company in 1827, he was only seventeen years old. Blessed with an uncanny knack for learning languages, he found this ability stood him in good stead upon his arrival in India. Where other men were beaten by native dialects, he took to them as a duck takes to water. Before he was twenty, he was one of the interpreters for the army of the East India Company, and long before he was thirty he could speak Persian like a native.
His remarkable abilities stamped him as a man who would go far, as one destined to play many parts in the ever-changing East. For a time he concentrated his energies on reorganizing the Persian army; at other periods he was frequenting the courts of the Shah and the Amir of Afghanistan, filling the intervals with hard fighting, a good deal of administration, and the pleasure that lay nearest his heart—the study of dialects.
The Orient cast a spell over him, and the legends of Persia particularly appealed to his imagination. He was in the land where history began. The past called to him. Little bits of burnt brick with strange marks on them intrigued him. It was as though a robin had hopped all over them while they were wet, and had left behind impressions something like a bird leaves in the snow. He knew these fragments were the old writings, though they were like no known writings on earth, and at last he made up his mind to see if he could find the key to the cuneiform characters.