The Mesopotamian Riddle
An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An “adventure tale for puzzle lovers and Indiana Jones fans alike” (The Washington Post) following three free-spirited Victorians on their twenty-year quest to decipher cuneiform, the oldest writing in the world—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.
It was one of history’s great vanishing acts. Around 3,400 BCE, a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For the next three thousand years, wedge-shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great kingdoms of Mesopotamia. And then…the meaning of the characters was lost.
London, 1857. In an era obsessed with human progress, mysterious palaces emerging from the desert sands have captured the Victorian public’s imagination. Assyria, Babylon, the mighty Persian Empire… these civilizations had gone down in the annals as the great antagonists to ancient Greece and ancient Israel. What did these “bad guys” of Western history have to say for themselves? What were their values, their rituals, their understandings of their place in the universe? What was it like simply to be human at the dawn of recorded history?
Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher the script that would enable humans to peer farther back into our history than ever before. From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, let The Mesopotamian Riddle whisk you off on “an epic intellectual adventure” (The Wall Street Journal) through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand where we came from—and where we perhaps might go.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Hammer follows up The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu with another dazzling archival adventure. By the 1850s, several scholars claimed to have decoded cuneiform, an ancient Mesopotamian script that had first been discovered several decades earlier. But, as Hammer explains, the public was skeptical, considering all claims of cuneiform "decipherment" to be "hoaxes." William Henry Fox Talbot, a wealthy inventor (known as "the father of photography" alongside Louis Daguerre), had produced his own decipherment and, eager to prove to judgmental friends that his new pursuit wasn't "quackery," proposed an experiment: four different scholars who claimed to have decoded cuneiform would turn in their translations of the same text to the Royal Asiatic Society; if the translations matched, it would prove decipherment was possible. Hammer delves into the backstories of the scholars who participated alongside Talbot, detailing how each came to their all-consuming passion for decoding cuneiform: Austen Henry Layard, the son of a civil servant, who abandoned the strictures of Victorian society for the Ottoman empire, where he cavorted with rebels, spied for the British, and eventually got into archaeology; Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, the less accomplished son of a famous intellectual family who joined the East India Company to get away from home and found himself stationed in Persia by happenstance; and Edward Hincks, an Irish country parson who suffered from severe anxiety and rarely left his desk. Novelistic and immersive, this historical saga astounds.
