4. The deciphering of cuneiform
4.1. Paul-Émile Botta (1802–1870)
One of the first to take an interest in the strange mounds that dominated the Iraqi desert was Paul-Émile Botta, while serving as consular agent in Mosul (1840) and, although he was not an archaeologist, he had a knowledge of the local languages which, together with immense energy, qualified him for the task ahead. He had neither plan nor hypothesis — only the longing to discover something he could not yet quite name. He took an interest in the origin of every ancient object that crossed his path and in the clay tablets covered with strange inscriptions.
His questions about the origin of all those antiquities went unanswered, so he resolved to investigate them himself.
He set to work on the first mound that came his way, near Kuyunjik. He was not able to find anything; it was a failure — and yet there was a palace of Ashurbanipal there, which would be discovered later.
His next excavations brought Botta only fragments of bricks covered with undecipherable inscriptions. The work took him a whole year.
Then came information through a talkative Arab — to whom at first he paid little attention after the countless disappointments he had suffered — that at Khorsabad there were a great many inscriptions on the bricks the locals were using for their buildings.
That was the high point of Botta's exploration and the one that made him immortal in the history of archaeology. He was the first to bring to light the first remains of a culture that had developed over almost two thousand years and had lain buried and forgotten for more than two thousand five hundred.
The next excavations laid bare walls, inscriptions, reliefs, sculptures of fabulous animals and other marvels. The fabulous city of Nineveh had been rediscovered.
Excavations went on from 1843 to 1846, in spite of the climate, the locals and the Turkish pasha — the Ottoman representative in the country — who believed that all Botta's efforts amounted only to a quest for gold. But Botta, unperturbed, continued his work and went on bringing the palace to light in all its grandeur.
A few months later the first Assyrian sculptures were on display at the Louvre.
In 1849–1850 Paul-Émile Botta published the five volumes of Monuments de Ninive découverts et décrits par Botta, mesurés et dessinés par Flandin. The first two cover plates on architecture and sculpture; the third and fourth, the collection of inscriptions; and the fifth, the descriptions.
4.2. The forerunners
Botta, however, was unaware that scientists had for years possessed the key to deciphering cuneiform but needed new inscriptions to advance their work.
In the meantime, Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894) was excavating Nineveh with such enthusiasm that, within just ten years, the archaeological material he gathered had given mid-nineteenth-century scholars everything they needed for their work.
In 1802 the first ten letters had already been deciphered by an assistant master at the secondary school of Göttingen, Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775–1853); but the existence of cuneiform writing had been known since the seventeenth century, discovered by the Italian Pietro della Valle (1586–1652).
While in 1693, Aston published in the Philosophical Transactions a few lines of cuneiform reproduced by an East India Company agent in Persia named Flower, the most extraordinary news was spread by Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815). Between 1760 and 1767 he travelled through the Near East and at the same time wrote the book that Napoleon took with him on his journey to Egypt: Description of a travel through Arabia and the bordering countries.
Even in the eighteenth century, however, there were reservations about whether cuneiform was indeed writing and not mere ornament, according to the interpretation of the famous orientalist Thomas Hyde (1636–1703).
Almost all these specimens came from ruins near Shiraz (Persia). It was a vast heap of rubble that Niebuhr judged to be the remains of Persepolis. Time would prove him right.