Reaching above his head, he drove one of the wooden pegs deep down into the soil covering the rock. Attaching a rope to it, he tested it, pulling this way and that, to make sure that the peg held firmly.
The onlookers watched with bated breath as the lad attached himself to the end of the rope, as he tried to swing himself across to the other side of the rock, clinging with hands and feet to the rocky surface, with death yawning for him below. Failure met his gallant attempt. Once more he tried, swinging over the rock face, with only a rope between himself and Eternity. Ten, fifteen, twenty feet he traversed, to find that further progress was impossible. Quickly reaching out, he drove another peg deep down into the soil above his head, as quickly attached a rope. The fixing of a seat to the ends of the two ropes to form a cradle was not very difficult, and sitting in this cradle the lad was able to go all over the rock, taking impressions of the inscription under Rawlinson’s direction on sheets of damp paper. In ten days the task was finished, and Rawlinson possessed the first complete copy of the cuneiform inscriptions at Behistun ever held in the hands of man.
The supreme task of deciphering these inscriptions occupied Rawlinson on and off for many years. As already mentioned, the first draft of his book on the inscriptions was finished before he left Kermanshah; and when he came to the consulate at Baghdad he threw himself heart and soul into making a complete revision of his draft to embody his later studies and knowledge. Often in the intense heat he worked in a summer-house at the bottom of the garden, a pet lion lying at his feet, and a water-wheel from the river Tigris pouring water over the roof of the summer-house to keep it cool.
There was the Greek script to assist Young and Champollion to decipher the hieroglyphics of the Rosetta Stone, but there was no known writing at all in the inscriptions at Behistun. There were three inscriptions carved on the rock face, Persian, Babylonian and Median cuneiform. The clue to them was lost. No living race wrote in such a manner, and not a single man knew how to read the curious wedge-shaped writing of the ancients.
Rawlinson therefore laboured under a much bigger handicap than that imposed on Young and Champollion. But Rawlinson was one of those men to whom a handicap means something to be surmounted. The bigger the handicap, the greater the satisfaction in overcoming it. The inscriptions at Behistun seemed to challenge him, to defy him to read them, as from their lofty pinnacle they had challenged men for ages past.
Rawlinson was the man in a million. The lure of the past and the fascination of the East spurred him on to do the impossible. His courage was as great as his knowledge of dialects was profound. It was no hope of reward, of glory, that urged him to wrest the secret from his sheets of paper impressions. It was the desire to pit his brain against the baffling writing, to master it.
Grotefend years before had pointed the way, but Rawlinson was ignorant of this fact. All the years that Rawlinson was writing and studying at Baghdad, an Irish clergyman, Dr. Hincks, was engaged on the same mighty task in a quiet rectory in Ireland, solving the puzzle which Rawlinson had already solved. Other men were wrestling with the same difficulties, but Rawlinson knew absolutely nothing of them or their endeavours. He worked away incessantly, relying upon himself alone. He studied the queer, wedge-shaped impressions for months, noted their resemblances, found the characters that were repeated, and little by little, a character at a time, he built up that dead language, succeeded in reading the writing of the peoples who inhabited Persia and the plains of Mesopotamia long before the birth of Christ.
In 1846 his great book, giving his reading of the inscriptions at Behistun, was published in London by the Royal Asiatic Society. The scientific world was astounded. People thought such a thing impossible. Many imagined that Rawlinson had invented some sort of reading of his own for the cuneiform characters. They reasoned that as there was no guide whatsoever, no man could ever read them.
They reasoned wrongly, as time was to prove. The unearthing in Mesopotamia of a romantic cylinder of clay, all covered with arrow-headed characters, brought the longed-for opportunity of testing whether Rawlinson was right or wrong, whether he had indeed solved the mystery.
Copies of the cylinder were given to four men who had learned to read cuneiform writing, among them Rawlinson. Each was asked to make a translation, and to submit it to the authorities of the British Museum. The four translations were made, and the authorities sat down and compared them.