THE MESOPOTAMIAN RIDDLE

Three self-taught Victorians accomplish one of the most spectacular feats of 19th-century scholarship.

Readers who enjoyed the fictional adventures of Indiana Jones might imagine that real-life archeologists aren’t so exciting, but journalist Hammer, author of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, may change their minds. Over centuries, he writes, European travelers, soldiers, and diplomats puttered about ruins, dotting the deserts and mountains of the Middle East, puzzling at masses of wedge-shaped “cuneiform” script carved into bricks, clay tablets, relics, palace walls, cliffs, and mountainsides. Electrified by the 1820s’ deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the public clamored to learn what this even older writing revealed. Hammer’s heroes worked their magic from the 1830s to the 1850s. All (unlike Indiana) were amateurs: Austen Henry Layard, a bored law clerk who sought adventure and transformed himself into the world’s most celebrated archeologist; Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, a military officer in the East India Company with a flair for languages; and Edward Hincks, an overworked Irish country parson who never traveled east but became brilliant at translating ancient texts. With a generous cast of supporting characters, Hammer alternates between the crumbling Ottoman Empire’s lawless deserts and mountains, where Layard and Rawlinson unearthed monuments, palaces, and thousands of inscribed artifacts, and Europe, where scholars and enthusiasts (including Hammer’s three subjects) toiled, quarreled, theorized, and cheated to decipher not one but at least a dozen ancient scripts. As a bonus, Hammer delivers a modest but comprehensible primer on cuneiform linguistics. By 1860, to the cheers of an attentive media, the problems were largely solved; Layard and Rawlinson lived long and honored lives; Hincks merely lived long, although he seems to be undergoing long-delayed recognition.

An archeological triumph receives the history it deserves.