Irving Finkel

I mean, I suppose it's conceivable that in the very modern world, something might have happened.

But as it was, it was done by sheer brainpower, by very, very clever persons just doing it.

And they cracked it.

The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too.

So it was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain.

And

And Henry Rawlinson, who was an upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plane thousands of feet up in the air and brought those back and they were used in the decipherment.

So it's very romantic.

No, I don't think he does.

He's called the father of Assyriology.

But I think he's the stepfather of Assyriology because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about it, which was almost entirely wrong.

And there was a clergyman in Northern Ireland called Edward Hinks, who lived in a place called Killer Lane, had five daughters and ran this church, who was possibly a card-carrying genius, if not jolly, jolly close.

And what happened with him was this.

There was an ongoing competition, well, an ongoing challenge to decipher hieroglyphic writing, which Champollion usually gets the credit for.

And Hinks was very interested in trying to decipher hieroglyphic ahead of the French.

And he ran into a sort of dead end at one stage, and he thought he'd have a look at cuneiform to see if it was helpful.

And at the same time, he cracked it.

He worked out how it worked.

He realized that one sign can have more than one value of sound and of meaning because they are multivalent signs.

I tried to shelter you from the horrible news, but it actually is not a walk in the park.