To the editors:
In this elegantly written essay, Edmund Richardson tells a story of human curiosity and determination in search of new knowledge. The story concerns Sir Henry Rawlinson, a British officer and scholar who is often considered the Father of Assyriology. By diligently copying the cuneiform inscribed on the cliffs of Behistun in the Kermanshah province of Iran, Rawlinson was able to get the most accurate transcription of a text written in three languages. It took him nearly two decades of painstaking work to decipher the text, which turned out to be a message from the renown Persian ruler Darius the Great, who reigned from 522 to 486 BCE. The Behistun Rock became to cuneiform and Assyriology what the Rosetta Stone was to hieroglyphics and Egyptology.
But there is much more to the story of this astounding discovery. It is also a story of empire and imperial rivalries. After all, Henry Rawlinson was a British officer in the service of the British East India Company. The 1830s was the beginning of the Great Game, a rivalry between British and Russian Empires for influence in the region stretching from the North Caucasus to Central Asia and Afghanistan.
It was in northern Iran that Rawlinson stumbled upon his Russian counterpart, Jan Witkiewicz, or Ivan Vitkevich in Russian. Born and educated in Lithuania, Witkiewicz was sent by St. Petersburg to be a political agent at the court of the Mohammad Shah Qajar of Iran. Like Rawlinson, Witkiewicz was well educated and a gifted linguist who spoke several local languages fluently. But unlike Rawlinson, who combined service to the British Empire with his personal interests in scholarship, Witkiewicz was solely at the disposal of the Russian state.
Richardson attributes too much significance to Rawlinson’s report about Witkiewicz’s presence in Iran and its immediate impact on the first Anglo-Afghan War. In fact, it took almost two years after Rawlinson’s first encounter with Witkiewicz before the British decided to counter Russian moves by sending troops to occupy Kabul.
Witkiewicz’s story is fascinating in its own right. Threatened by the British, the Russians recalled Witkiewicz to St. Petersburg, where he was scolded for exceeding his brief. A week later, he was found dead with a gun lying next to him. The case looked like a suicide, but rumors swirled. The Russians suggested he might have been assassinated by the British; others suggested he was a double agent and a Lithuanian patriot who tried to provoke the British-Russian conflict; yet others thought he was removed by the Russians to avoid any further embarrassment in the unfolding Great Game. The latter scenario would not be surprising because a tradition of political assassinations staged as suicides predates both the regime of Vladimir Putin and the Soviet Union.
In a larger context, this is a story of an encounter between a modern Western civilization and its distant Near Eastern antecedents and between empire and knowledge, which often intersected in curious and unpredictable ways. For without the Napoleonic France’s short-lived invasion of Egypt in 1798, there would have been no Egyptology, just as there would have been no Assyriology without the British East India Company and its political agents cum scholars in the Near East.
At a time when so much of the Western discourse is focused on the negative side of imperialism, perhaps it is useful to point out that these and other discoveries could not have been made without Western values, education, and thirst for knowledge. In the Near East, the British made sure that those who were sent to project Britain’s interests, such as Rawlinson, were also well trained in local languages and culture. Here, empire and knowledge went hand in hand. While there is no doubt that imperialism was based on dominance over others, the story of Rawlinson in Kermanshah clearly demonstrates that its Western representatives in the region were also on a mission to collect knowledge beyond the narrow interests of the state. By contrast, Russia’s scientific inquiries were mostly subservient to the geopolitical concerns of the Russian state.
It is particularly revealing that today’s Russia’s war against Ukraine is trying to achieve the opposite of the past imperial experiences. After all, Western discoveries of the ancient civilizations and languages together with the collection and classification of colonial knowledge contributed to creating historical, national, and territorial identities of new polities. By bombing Ukraine’s museums and cultural institutions, Moscow embarked on a deliberate policy of denying and erasing Ukrainian national identity. Instead of bringing modernity to Ukraine, it is attempting to pull it back from the world of modern democracies and to return Ukraine into the fold of the old and defunct Russian-Soviet empire.
