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How do we know what we know? And how do we recover lost knowledge? Joshua Hammer's The Mesopotamian Riddle focuses on the rediscovery and recovery of cuneiform literacy. Focused on the 19th century, Hammer alternates between the work of scholars at home as well as archeologists, diplomats, soldiers and adventurers at the frontiers of empire.

Hammer biographies three of the key figures, alluded to in the subtitle. Austen H Layard a law clerk adventurer, later a celebrated archeologist; joined by Henry Creswicke Rawlinson on a shared first journey. Rawlinson was a military officer in the employment of the East India Language, who also had a lifelong interest in languages and worked on learning and deciphering them in his limited free time. The third figure, is Edward Hickes an overworked and financial struggling Irish county parson with a talent for languages, who was able to translate many ancient texts.

Hammer links the overall attitudes of the populace and imperial ambitions with the small scale, day to day struggles of the featured three. There is also their very different personalities and the sometimes petty world of academia or mindsets of racial superiority.

As much of the work is focused on deciphering a forgotten language, Hammer reconstructs the intuitive process the translators used, reproducing many of the cuneiform characters and what was learned from their efforts.

Touching on the amateur to expert process and political tensions between a weakening Ottoman empire, it's peoples and European Powers.

Recommended to readers or researchers of linguistics, triumphs of empire or the roles of privilege in scholarship.

I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.