Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What François Champollion was to Egyptian hieroglyphics, Henry Rawlinson was to Babylonian cuneiform. In 1833 Rawlinson was a brash, courageous and talented young British military officer and amateur philologist posted in Persia. He eagerly—and at great personal risk—devoted himself to the first comprehensive study of the famed cuneiform inscriptions at Bisitun, which covered a remote cliff face as large as a football field, having been commissioned circa 515 B.C. by Darius I of Persia as a personal monument. Over the course of 30 years, punctuated by a breathless succession of military campaigns, political intrigue and instability during which he earned honor and fame, Rawlinson pursued with dogged serenity the deciphering of the cuneiform pictographs. He benefited from the similarly dedicated efforts of a small fraternity of like-minded scholars(though competitive rivalries would embitter the fraternity). Adkins, a British author of several books on archeology and antiquity, admits this biography is limited. Rawlinson the man never comes to life. What must have been a fascinating and even passionate pursuit is only dimly illuminated. Dedicated philologists may rejoice, but for readers seeking a more human story, the man who solved the enigma of cuneiform remains undeciphered. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW, 3 maps.
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From Booklist

The subject of this biography, Henry Rawlinson (1810-95), made some of the first translations of cuneiform script. When he first vowed to solve the script's mysteries, it was known only from inscriptions hewn in cliffs. Nineveh, with its library of clay tablets, had yet to be unearthed. Appropriately enough, Adkins starts her biography with Rawlinson clinging to a Persian precipice, an Indiana Jones-like predicament from which he escaped with his prize: a copy of a cuneiform memorial chiseled at the command of Darius I. Adkins relates other scrapes Rawlinson survived as a military and diplomatic officer of Britain's East India Company, but she homes in on the progress of his scholarly work and the acclaim it brought him. Clearly enunciating the challenges of translating cuneiform, such as the complexities of its several hundred symbols and its use in several different ancient languages, Adkins also provides accounts of Rawlinson's relationships with associates and rivals. An able portrait of a seminal figure in archaeological history. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (December 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312330022
• ISBN-13: 978-0312330026
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #807,813 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable story of a remarkable man, April 1, 2005

By	Roy Speed (Bethel, CT United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book tells the story of Henry Rawlinson -- British soldier, diplomat, and amateur linguist in the 1820s, '30s, and '40s. His stomping ground: Persia and what is now Iraq. His principal claim to fame is the decipherment of cuneiform, giving us the ability to read for the first time texts that were between 2500 and 4000 years old.

In this endeavor he was entirely self-taught, virtually cut off from potential colleagues in Britain and on the continent, and working under the most hostile conditions imaginable. To decipher cuneiform, he had to first acquire samples of ancient text -- which in one especially important instance meant clinging to a cliff-face hundreds of feet off the ground and laboriously copying the strange script into a notebook.

The book itself is well written, well illustrated with drawings and photographs, and filled with stories of Rawlinson's contemporaries -- including real heroes, like Henry Layard, who excavated Nineveh and Babylon, and not a few semi-villains. All in all, an amazing story and a terrific book.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Bit Too Much Minutia To Be Entertaining, April 22, 2006

By	Michael Lima (Fresno, California USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

At initial glance, any biography of Sir Henry Rawlinson would seem to be a ready made best-seller. Here was a man who found time to decipher three ancient languages over several decades, while still keeping his day job of fighting wars and conducting diplomacy. Thus, if a writer focused just on Rawlinson's life, the resulting biography should be both entertaining and informative. But, Adkins' real interest lies in archeology. Consequently, she can't resist spending extra time detailing the elements of cuneiform creation and decipherment. These details, while mildly interesting, can't compare to the better story of Rawlinson's life. As a result, it's hard for the non-archeologist reader to maintain enthusiasm through the book's non-biography portions.

It seems that Adkins the scientist was fighting with Adkins the would-be popular writer when this book was written, because it sometimes reads like two distinct books. The end result of this dichotomy is a story whose sum isn't greater than its parts. Empires of the Plain isn't bad. But, it would have been a better book had Adkins focused a bit less on the science and a bit more on the biography.