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Enlightenment: Ancient Scripts
The Search for Babylon
In the attempt to trace the origins and
development of civilizations, many people had attempted to uncover
the remains of ancient cities, in particular those mentioned in the
Bible. Europeans had visitied the ruins of the palaces of the
ancient Persian kings Darius and Xerxes at Persepolis in Iran since
the early seventeenth century. But the locations of the cities of
Babylon and Nineveh, which featured prominently in the Old
Testament, remained a mystery. New searches for these cities began
during the
Enlightenment.
These aimed not only to verify the Bible as a historical account,
but also to discover the origins of religion, language and
writing.
Early European
travellers and officials of the British government and the East
India Company played a key role in rediscovering the ancient
civilisations of the Near East. One of these, Claudius James Rich
(1786-1821), was the first person to correctly locate the ruins of
Babylon and to produce a plan of the ancient Assyrian capital at
Nineveh.
The monuments that
Rich and others discovered were covered with wedge-shaped marks,
which they began to recognize as writing, called
cuneiform.
The gradual decipherment of cuneiform led to the rediscovery of the
history of the ancient Near East.