Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid
speaker
840 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
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Exactly. Kineiform is the writing system, just like we use Latin script to write stuff in English, French, German. It's used for multiple languages with some variations. Same with Kineiform.
Basically, yes. He was an officer of the British East India Company. And he was originally sent to India. And then he went to Iran after that to help the Shah, I think, reorganize his army or something like that. And he fell in love with ancient Persian monuments and culture.
Bizarrely. A rare thing.
I feel like I should just maybe just get a cup of coffee or something. Thanks, Moody.
He actually exactly did that. Yeah, he and a bunch of other philologists basically looked for patterns in these trilingual inscriptions that were in various places in Iran, namely Persepolis, but also some big ones on Mount Alvand, and then the big kind of Rosetta Stone of Assyriology, which is the Behistun inscription.
They first found royal names, and then from there they found the word for of, kind of unexciting, but very important. Of? Of, yeah, Annam. Really? Yeah, that was like the first.
It really is, yeah. I mean, it appears so many times, so it kind of helps you orient words in relation to each other as well. So there's a pattern there. He was kind of played, in my view, a more minor role because a lot of work was already done by the time he got to the Behistun inscription by other philologists. Oh, really? A lot of copies were made. A lot of kind of words were decoded.
How dare you? I'm just saying what happened.
I think it became a more kind of famous and sensationalized one. And therefore it became kind of central to all the stories about decipherment that came out of this period of history. But a lot of work was already done by the time Behistun was decoded. So I would say it kind of helped confirm things.
Yeah, it's a trilingual inscription, but all using cuneiform. So it's three cuneiform inscriptions in these like almost like caption boxes, but they're different languages recorded. One of the languages was known, Old Persian. People knew how to read Old Persian from other texts that were not written in cuneiform. So they kind of knew what it might say.
And then they kind of overlaid that onto the cuneiform.
Of, yeah, there's of.
And Akkadian, yeah. He wants to cover all the bases, I guess. Make sure everyone could see what he did.
So he, I think, initially tried to, because it's very high up and it's not easily accessible. So they had to use pulleys and levers. Because it's up on like a rock.
Exactly. And very bright as well, because the sun sort of hits it as you're looking at it. And Rawlinson has been credited with scaling the rocks to make the drawings, but he actually sent a few boys to do it for him.
You there, boy! Yes, exactly. You climb this instead of me and make the copy, and then I will do the kind of intellectual work to decode it. And he ended up publishing that in 1847, and he was just 37 years old.
Yeah, I mean, there were a couple of others who worked on this at the same time, but I would say Edward Hinks is one of the unsung heroes of this entire story. He was an Irish, I don't know how to say this word, clergyman? Clergyman. Clergyman. This happened when I was recording my book. I was like, I can't pronounce anything.
I know what all these words mean and I've used them hundreds of times, but I can't actually say them out loud. So he was an Irish clergyman.
He did something really remarkable, which is he matched up the letters or the sorry, the characters that were used in the monumental inscriptions, which he called lapidary, which is a kind of formal font, let's say, to the characters used in the clay tablet, which is a little bit messier, which he called cursive. And that unlocked thousands and thousands more texts.
Pretty much, yeah. He complained when the British Museum hired Hinks for a period of time. I can't remember how long it was. Like a year or something, wasn't it? Yeah, exactly. He complained then, and he tried to suppress Hinks's work, which is not exactly in the spirit of sort of scholarly cooperation, but here we are.
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