Category:

But what about Edward Hincks? The churchman's fraught relationship with Henry Rawlinson had been marked by backstabbing, filched notebooks, accusations of stolen credit, withering reviews, infuriating discrepancies, and a snub by the British Museum that had cost Hincks a good part of his livelihood. Carrying a perennial chip on his shoulder, Hincks could be cantankerous and sharp-tongued, especially if he felt he wasn't being treated with sufficient respect. Determined to give the man his due, Edwin Norris recommended that the society dispatch lithographs of the texts at once to the reclusive pastor at his rectory in the village of Killyleagh, south of Belfast. It would be impolite to leave him out.

And so, after a decades-long saga of global adventures, near-death experiences, and eureka moments, the hour of reckoning was at hand. Now Rawlinson, Hincks, Talbot, Oppert, and eager bystanders—philologists, historians, theologians, literary editors, and other enthusiasts from London to Paris to New York—would discover whether the secrets of the most powerful ancient empire could be verifiably understood. And yet what the four would be undertaking wasn't any ordinary race to the finish line. To convince the public that their translations weren't hoaxes, they'd all have to be right. Each still hoped to be the most right, but each knew that his competitors couldn't be far behind, or his brilliance would be laughed off as a scam.

The stakes, they knew, were huge: A positive outcome had the potential not only to silence doubters and immortalize their names in the field of linguistic archaeology but also to confirm their insights into the thoughts, myths, preoccupations, calculations, and achievements of some of the first literate human beings in history. Failure would leave the scholars humiliated before their peers, their government—Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, was a principal patron of the Royal Asiatic Society—and a global public. They would have to accept that they'd been fooling themselves for years—in Rawlinson's case, for decades. Deciphering these characters had become his life.

Now that two more decipherers had been added to the challenge, Norris proposed a deadline for all the submissions two months away, at which point a panel of judges "whose names it was thought would command general respect" would compare the four translations. Norris fixed another meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society for Wednesday, May 20, when the four sealed packets would be opened before witnesses and the "literary inquest" could take place.

The game was on.

CHAPTER ONE

RAWLINSON

On an early July day in 1827, dozens of cadets stood on the deck of the Neptune in Portsmouth Harbour, excited and, in many cases, filled with trepidation about the voyage that lay ahead. Resplendent in red jackets with golden-tasseled epaulets and white trousers, the young men took the measure of one another and of the ship that would be their home for the next four months: a six-gun, three-mast, triple-deck East Indiaman merchant vessel chartered by the East India Company. Each had come with a steamer trunk packed with the requisite items for his new life, including black silk neckerchiefs; kid gloves; merino jackets; dressing gowns; a sword with a sword bag; toothbrushes and powder; a telescope; and a copy of John Doyle's Military Catechism for the Use of Young Officers and Serjeants of Infantry. And each had come with his own motives for traveling to a distant and potentially dangerous land: the promise of adventure, the pride of sharing in a patriotic enterprise, the prospect of making a fortune. Most had never left home before. None could be certain he would see England again.

Standing on a dock at the edge of the harbor, Henry Creswicke Rawlinson waited for the launch that would carry him to the Neptune. Seventeen years old, broad-shouldered, with long brown hair, dark eyes, and a pointed chin, the man who would become known as one of history's greatest scholar-adventurers scanned the dozen ships moored offshore. Rawlinson had spent the previous day at a racetrack in the Cotswolds, cheering on his father's Thoroughbreds, before receiving word from a messenger that the Neptune had embarked early from London and was on its way down the Thames to make a short stop at Portsmouth. With little time to spare, Rawlinson had ridden first to London for some last-minute provisioning, then galloped much of the ninety-six miles from London to the coast. He had arrived hours before the ship was to set sail. Now, as the reality of the journey sank in, he was overcome by doubt and regret.

Rawlinson had rarely had much to worry about before. He had been born in April 1810 on a country estate in Chadlington, twenty miles north of Oxford, the seventh of eleven children of Abraham Tyack Rawlinson, a wealthy landowner descended from a political ally of King Charles II, and his wife, Eliza Eudocia Albinia Creswicke Rawlinson. Abraham Rawlinson bred racehorses, hunted with hounds, oversaw his seven-hundred-acre property, served as a magistrate, and kept watch over poorhouses and lunatic asylums. It was a life of power, privilege, and noblesse oblige. From the terrace of the family mansion "the eye ranged...across fields and copses and the Evenlode River to the smart slope beyond," wrote Henry's younger brother George, "crowned...by the extensive woodland of Wychwood forest."

At thirteen Rawlinson had entered the Great Ealing School in London, founded in 1698. He read Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides, wrote classical poetry, and excelled at cricket, football, and fives, a sort of handball played on a walled tennis court. Academic excellence came easy to him. Once he planted a dummy in his bed and snuck out with a classmate to attend an opera. The schoolmaster uncovered the scheme and sentenced the boys to memorize the Ars Poetica of Horace and recite it flawlessly within two weeks. The classmate failed and was expelled; Rawlinson succeeded and escaped punishment. Rawlinson "grew to be six feet high, broad chested, [and] strong-limbed... with a steady head, a clear sight, and a nerve that few of his co-mates equaled," his brother George wrote. His siblings, whom Rawlinson referred to as his "happy, happy, happy circle," admired his military bearing and called him "the General."