The birth of Assyriology : fieldwork and the start of decipherments

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Who founded Assyriology? For Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, who was Chief Curator of West Asian Antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924, there's no doubt: the credit goes to the English, and the founder of Assyriology is Sir Henry Rawlinson. Yet the latterhimselfunderlinedtheeminent role of Jules Oppert, a French citizen of German origin, in his inaugural address to the Second International Congress of Orientalists in London in September 1874: "If anyone has the right to claim the paternity of Assyrian science as it now exists, it is certainly this eminent scholar..." Rawlinson was then sixty-four; Oppert only forty-nine, and he had been appointed Professor at the Collège de France just a few months earlier. So what was the story behind this apparent Franco-British rivalry? That's what we saw in the first two lectures.

However, we had to start by going back quite far in time. First there were the accounts of travellers who described certain important sites, such as Benjamin de Tudèle, a rabbi who in the 12th^centurysurveyed the ruins facing Mosul on the eastern bank of the Tigris, and correctly identified them as those of Nineveh. Pietro della Valle, in 1614-1626, was the first Westerner to bring back cuneiform inscriptions; in Iran, at Persepolis, he copied a few writing signs. Later, more complete copies of the Persepolis inscriptions were made, the most important being by Carsten Niebhur, who published them in 1778. The first decipherments have often been described in retrospect as fanciful. It wasn't until 1802 thatGrotefend's work put us on morereliable ground.Taking up the idea that the inscriptions copied at Persepolis were those of Achaemenid kings of the ^6th to 4th^centuriesBC, whose names and succession were knownfrom Greek sources, he also considered that their titulature should be more or less thesame as that of their Sassanid successors. From then on, it was just a matter of logic and Combinatorics to crack the Persepolitan cuneiform script. Grotefend succeeded in finding the value of twelve signs and deciphering the following passages in two inscriptions: "Darius, great king, king of kings, son of Hystaspes" and "Xerxes, great king, king of kings, son of Darius, king of kings". Progress continued until Christian Lassen's 1836 book. Then came the Englishman Rawlinson. He copied trilingual inscriptions in Iran: first those on Mount Alvand near Hamadan, then the rock inscriptions of Behistun (or Bisutun), near Persepolis, of considerable size. In both cases, we were dealing with three different versions: we now know that they are Old Persian (as for the inscriptions deciphered by Grotefend), Elamite and Babylonian. It was the Old Persian versionof Behistun that was published by Rawlinson in 1837.

Shortly afterwards, an event occurred which, for many authors, constitutes the starting point of Assyriology proper: the beginning of excavations in Assyria in 1842. Paul-Émile Botta, French vice-consul in Mosul, began exploring the mounds opposite the city, which were known to contain the ruins of Nineveh. Not obtaining very convincing results, he quickly moved eighteen kilometers away: the villagers of Khorsabad had indeed informed him of the existence of interesting ruins there. Indeed, the palace of Sargon II, with its magnificent bas-reliefs, was soon to emerge from the ground. Some of them were transported to Paris: they arrived at the Louvre in February 1847, and shortly afterwards King Louis-Philippe inaugurated the "Assyrian Museum". Botta himself had copied the inscriptions engraved on the bas-reliefs he unearthed. The publication in 1843 of the first inscriptions discovered, and then in 1849 of all of them, aroused immense interest, reinforced in 1851 by the publication of the inscriptions that the Englishman Layard had discovered in two other Assyrian capitals, at Nimrud and Nineveh. In 1851, Victor Place took over the excavations at Khorsabad, while an expedition led by Fulgence Fresnel focused on the ruins of Babylon; he was assisted by the architect Félix Thomas and the philologist Jules Oppert, then aged twenty-seven. The public response to all these discoveries was considerable, so much so that one could speak of Assyromania: it was highly developed in Victorian England, but also affected France. Unfortunately, the year 1855 was marked by the "Gournah disaster": some of Place's discoveries, and especially those of Fresnel, were swallowed up in the Tigris. It was also in this year, on his return to England, that Rawlinson gave up his fieldwork.