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The American newspaper The National Era, founded in 1847 by the abolitionist editor Gamaliel Bailey, suggested that the so-called experts were perpetrating a hoax to cover up their befuddlement: "[I]t has now come to a question whether this system of translations be not altogether arbitrary, or, in a word, no translation at all," the journal proclaimed. The French Academy in Paris, it reported, "laughs at all decipherments, and treats the so-called translations as pure quackery."

Some academics were convinced that the writing would never be cracked. History is filled with examples of dead scripts that couldn't be deciphered, leaving their creators a blank slate. The Phaistos Disc, a fired-clay plate from a Bronze Age palace in Crete, contains forty-five distinct pictograms—a plumed head, a bell, a building shaped like a beehive—in a 242-character text that spirals across the surface like the pattern of a nautilus. The inscription has mystified philologists for more than a century.

At least one hundred would-be decipherers have offered theories about the Indus script, created by a proto-Indo-European civilization in what is now Pakistan and northwest India around 2500 BCE. Some have linked the writing, found on stone seals and pottery, to the still-undeciphered rongorongo runes on Easter Island. The celebrated Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie surmised that the seals were the stamps of high officials. One, he claimed, meant "the agent of the registrar of timber," another "the agent of irrigated land." None of this proved to be anything more than wild conjecture, and the writing remains an enigma. Was cuneiform destined for the same fate?

* * *

In 1854, a unique opportunity presented itself. Austen Layard's protégé, Rassam, had discovered a relic buried beneath a temple in what was believed to be the oldest Assyrian capital, Ashur, in the semi-desert forty miles south of Rassam's hometown of Mosul. Nineteen inches tall and 2.5 inches wide, the octagonal column, known as a "prism," was inscribed with eight hundred lines of tiny cuneiform characters. It was believed to date to 1100 BCE—around the time that war was raging between the Trojans and the Greeks, and the prophet Samuel led the Israelites to victory against the Philistines. The mystifying cylinder was now in the custody of the British Museum. Rawlinson, who had close ties to the museum, was working on an official translation; the institution planned to publish it as soon as it was done.

As Rawlinson proceeded, a wealthy inventor with a passion for intellectual puzzles burst onto the scene. William Henry Fox Talbot had made his name two decades earlier by devising a method for fixing images from life onto chemically treated, light-sensitive paper. The breakthrough had earned him the title—shared with the Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre—the "father of photography." Talbot had lately devoted himself to a new enthusiasm: Assyro- Babylonian decipherment. He was pained to think that some of his peers were dismissing it as "quackery." Nearing sixty, he was determined to put doubts to rest about the passion that was consuming him in semi-retirement.

Talbot dispatched a letter—the letter that would change everything—to the Royal Asiatic Society, one of the leading research institutions of the day, offering to send in his own translation and have a panel of judges compare his with Rawlinson's. If the versions turned out to be identical or even close, he wrote from his estate, Lacock Abbey, a former nunnery 85 miles west of London that Henry VIII had confiscated and sold to one of Talbot's ancestors, "it must indicate that they have Truth for their basis." After a negotiation with Rawlinson and the British Museum, Talbot received a lithograph copy of the inscriptions in January 1857 and got to work.

Six weeks later, Talbot placed six notebooks in an envelope, sealed the package with wax, and dispatched it to the Royal Asiatic Society in Mayfair. To assure the public that he had prepared it "before the appearance of Sir H Rawlinson's translation," Talbot gave instructions to the society's secretary, Edwin Norris, to guard it. "Our next meeting is on the 21st...when I shall have much pleasure in presenting your sealed packet to the meeting of Council," Norris wrote back on March 13. "I will then lock it up in a strong box, of which I keep the key."

Eight days later, on March 21, two dozen members of the society converged on 5 New Burlington Street for their regular Saturday conclave. Hansom cabs clattered along the narrow lane, a few blocks east of Grosvenor Square, depositing the men before a three-story town house designed in the early eighteenth century by Nicholas Hawksmoor, a partner of Sir Christopher Wren. A discreet brass nameplate on the front door identified the building as the society's headquarters. They filed through the spacious interior, checked their topcoats and hats, and made their way to a ground-floor gallery.

Sitting in the room that afternoon was another man whose name would soon be linked to Rawlinson's and Talbot's by history: a thirty-one-year-old classicist and adventurer named Jules Oppert. Oppert was a descendant of Samuel Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish banker in Hamburg and the financier of the seventeenth-century Holy Roman emperor Leopold I. After being denied a position at German universities because of institutional antisemitism, Oppert had joined a three-year French archaeological expedition in Babylon and Northern Mesopotamia. Now his was a star on the rise. "His spontaneous wit, his extraordinary memory, and ready erudition...made companionship with him a delight," gushed a Times correspondent. The charming Parisian boulevardier asked if he could undertake a translation as well. "By affording three independent versions of the same document," he argued, an agreement among the decipherers could be even more persuasive.