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Concept
Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1st Baronet
Summary
Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, 1st Baronet, KLS (5 April 1810 – 5 March 1895) was a British East India Company army officer, politician and Orientalist, sometimes described as the Father of Assyriology. His son, also Henry, was to become a senior commander in the British Army during the First World War.
Rawlinson was born on 5 April 1810 at the place now known as Chadlington, Oxfordshire, England. He was the second son of Abram Tyack Rawlinson and elder brother of the historian George Rawlinson. In 1827, having become proficient in the Persian language, he was sent to Persia in company with other British officers to drill and reorganize the Shah's troops. Of course, England's betrayal in the secret pact with Tsarist Russia led to their departure from Iran Disagreements between the Persian court and the British government ended in the departure of the British officers.
Rawlinson began to study Persian inscriptions, more particularly those in the cuneiform character, which had been only partially deciphered by Grotefend and Saint-Martin. From 1836, he was in the vicinity of the great cuneiform inscription at Behistun, near the city of Kermanshah, in western Iran, for two years. He was the first Westerner to transcribe the Old Persian portion of the trilingual inscriptions in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian (a later form of Akkadian) written by Darius the Great sometime between his coronation as king of the Persian Empire in the summer of 522 BC and his death in autumn of 486 BC. Rawlinson was able to send a full and accurate transcription to Europe in 1847 and, with his knowledge of Old Persian, eventually deciphered the Elamite and Babylonian sections.
Rawlinson was appointed political agent at Kandahar in 1840. In that capacity, he served for three years,From the point of view of the colonial government of England his political labours being considered as meritorious as was his gallantry during various engagements in the course of the Afghan War, and he was rewarded by the distinction of Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1844.
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