Page 128 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ii4 GERTRUDE BELL
They left in 1821, to the cheers of the populace, and he went on to
Persia, to see Pcrsepolis and the tomb of Cyrus where he con-
tracted cholera while tending the victims of the disease and died,
leaving a fine collection of cylinder seals and clay tablets with
inscriptions in the wedge-shaped, or cuneiform, script for others
to decipher. He also left to others his formula for dealing with the
Turk: ‘Nothing but the most decisive conduct will do; any other
will increase the insolence of his disposition/ he wrote. Then came
Colonel Taylor, who was in Baghdad with the remarkable
missionary Anthony Groves at the outbreak of the plague
epidemic of 18 31. A hundred thousand people from a population
of a hundred and fifty thousand died, but Groves and Taylor
lived through it. Taylor was so good a scholar that Arab divines
were said to seek his advice on the translation and interpretation
of ancient manuscripts in their possession. He was the first to
investigate the pre-Babylonian sites of Sumer in the south. In
1843 came Henry Crcswicke Rawlinson, who by almost incredible
feats of physical bravery and mental application found the key
to the cuneiform language by comparing the Old Persian,
Elamite and Babylonian inscriptions dedicated to Darius, King of
Kings, on the massive rock of Behistan, and who sat in his ‘tree1
house on the Tigris, a home-made wheel splashing water over it
to keep him cool while he worked through the hot Mesopotamian
summers, translating the first legends of mankind written on
tablets of clay. He occupied the Residency with wild animals
that became his pets, including a leopard, a lion cub and a
mongoose, and it was said of him that he was so popular among
the people that even his pets commanded respectful attention,
and that when he appeared even the Shia and Sunni zealots
stopped fighting. After him came Henry Layard, supreme among
the archaeologists of the region, who in the wake of Rawlinson’s
achievements uncovered the treasures of Nineveh, the royal
library with its incomparable store of records, the palace of
Sennacherib at Kuyunjik. There were others, of course, not least
the French Consul at Mosul, Paul Emile Botta, who was the first
among the serious excavators of Mesopotamia, but the work of
the Britishers who came as soldiers and achieved near miracles of
scholarship and discovery is unparalleled in the annals of the
British Empire. Gertrude, as she trod the paths made by these
men, was more aware than most people of her day of the heritage
her predecessors had left behind, and the book in which she told