A narrow escape for Sir Henry Rawlinson at the Rock of Behistun

Nonclassified artists

Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (5 April 1810 – 5 March 1895) was a British East India Company army officer, politician and Orientalist, sometimes described as the Father of Assyriology.


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.

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 only been 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.