Sir Henry Rawlinson

Sir Henry Rawlinson
Henry Wyndham Phillips (1820-1868). Nota: en http://www.livius.org señalan a Tho · Public domain · source
Name	Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson
Birth date	11 April 1810
Birth place	Warminster, Wiltshire
Death date	5 March 1895
Death place	London
Nationality	British
Occupation	Army officer; diplomat; orientalist
Known for	Decipherment of cuneiform; transcription of the Behistun Inscription
Awards	KCB; GCB

Sir Henry Rawlinson

Sir Henry Rawlinson was a British army officer, diplomat and orientalist whose 19th-century fieldwork and philological analysis were pivotal to the decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions and the modern recovery of Mesopotamian history, notably Ancient Babylon. His transcription of the Behistun Inscription and comparative study of Akkadian texts helped establish the chronological and linguistic frameworks used in Babylonian studies.

Early life and career

Rawlinson was born into a military family in Warminster, Wiltshire in 1810 and was educated in Britain before entering service with the East India Company's military establishment. He served in British India and developed an early interest in Oriental languages and antiquities. During the 1830s and 1840s Rawlinson combined official duties with self-directed studies in Persian and Old Persian inscriptions, positioning him at the intersection of Victorian imperial administration and nascent Assyriology scholarship. His background in the British Army and with the Bombay Army facilitated travel and postings that later proved crucial to access archaeological sites and inscriptions.

Surveying and diplomatic work in Persia and Mesopotamia

Between the 1830s and 1850s Rawlinson undertook surveying and semi-official diplomacy in Persia (modern Iran) and the territories of the Ottoman Empire that encompassed parts of Mesopotamia. Posted at times to Kermanshah and other frontier towns, he conducted topographical surveys and compiled copies of monumental inscriptions. Rawlinson's work intersected with contemporaries such as Austin Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam who were conducting excavations in Nineveh and Babylon. His access to sites and the diplomatic protections afforded by British consular status allowed him to make extended copies of texts like the Behistun Inscription, which were otherwise difficult for European scholars to study in situ.

Decipherment of cuneiform and the Behistun Inscription

Rawlinson's most celebrated achievement was the progressive decipherment of the trilingual Behistun Inscription near Kermanshah, a monumental relief and text commissioned by the Achaemenid king Darius the Great (Darius I). Working from copies and squeezes, Rawlinson identified correspondences between the Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian/Akkadian columns, enabling him to propose values for signs and phonetic elements. He collaborated and competed with scholars such as Georg Friedrich Grotefend and Edward Hincks; his published readings of Behistun in the 1840s and 1850s were instrumental in opening cuneiform as a readable script for Europeans. This breakthrough directly enabled the reading of Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions recovered from sites like Nimrud and Khorsabad.

Contributions to understanding Ancient Babylonian history and language

By providing secure phonetic and lexical readings of Akkadian and Old Persian, Rawlinson laid foundations for reconstructing Babylonian chronology, royal titulary, and administrative texts. His work allowed historians to corroborate references found in Classical sources and the Hebrew Bible with native Mesopotamian records, refining knowledge about rulers such as Nebuchadnezzar II and events including the fall of Babylon to the Achaemenid Empire. Rawlinson's comparative philology advanced the study of Akkadian language grammar and lexicon, and his transcriptions of monumental inscriptions informed early reconstructions of Babylonian religion, law, and imperial administration. His influence is evident in subsequent corpus projects and in the ability of later excavators to contextualize artefacts from Babylon and surrounding sites.

Publications and scholarly influence

Rawlinson published a series of influential works, including editions and translations of the Behistun text and essays on Persian and Mesopotamian inscriptions. Notable publications include his translations of Old Persian inscriptions and contributions to periodicals and parliamentary reports that shaped British archaeological and Near Eastern policy. He engaged with scholarly societies such as the Royal Asiatic Society and the British Museum's curatorial community; his correspondence and rivalry with figures like Edward Hincks, Julius Oppert, and William Henry Fox Talbot illustrate the collaborative yet contested nature of 19th-century epigraphy. Rawlinson's methods—field copying, comparative sign lists and cross-language reconciliation—became standard practice in Assyriology and set precedents for later catalogues and grammars used by scholars of Babylonian literature.

Later life, honours, and legacy within Babylonian studies

After returning to Britain, Rawlinson served in Parliament and received high honours including knighthoods in the Order of the Bath. He was widely recognized by European academies and is commemorated in the histories of Near Eastern archaeology and philology. While later scholarship has refined and corrected some of his readings, the essential contribution of his Behistun work remains a cornerstone of modern Assyriology and Babylonian studies. Institutions such as the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and university departments that grew into modern Near Eastern studies trace methodological roots to his pioneering fieldwork. Rawlinson's legacy is also visible in the availability of primary cuneiform texts that enabled 20th- and 21st-century recoveries of Babylonian legal, literary and administrative traditions. Category:British orientalists Category:Assyriologists