xliv 



In SIR HENRY CRESWICKE RAWLINSON, Bart., G.C.B., England has 

 lost one of her most brilliant Oriental scholars, and one of her most 

 distinguished Anglo-Indian statesmen. He was born in the year 1810, 

 being the second son of Mr. Abratn Tysack Bawlinson, of Chadlington, 

 Oxfordshire, who was descended from an old Lancashire family, 

 members of which have represented both that connty and the borough 

 of Liverpool in Parliament. Having passed his school-days at 

 Wrington, Somerset, and at Ealing, he joined the service of the 

 East India Company, at Bombay, in 1827, being then about seventeen 

 years of age. He at once devoted himself with much energy to the 

 study of Oriental languages, and within a year of his arrival in India 

 was appointed interpreter to the 1st Bombay Grenadiers. While 

 serving in Bombay and Poonah he acquired great proficiency both in 

 Persian and Mahrattee, and in 1833 he was one of a number of 

 British officers sent by the Governor-General of India to aid the 

 Persian Government in reorganizing its army. It was here that he 

 first became acquainted with those archaeological remains to which 

 he ever after devoted so much attention. A rupture with Persia led 

 to his being withdrawn from that country, which he left in 1838. 

 He played an important part in the Afghan war, which soon followed, 

 having been appointed political agent at Kandahar in 1840. A.t the 

 conclusion of the war in 1843, Bawlinson became British Consul for 

 Bagdad, and subsequently Consul- General, an office which enabled 

 him to return to the stndy of those Persian and Assyrian antiquities 

 with which he had been fascinated. In 1856 he returned to England 

 and was made a K.C.B. and a Director of the East India Company 

 on the nomination of the Crown. In 1858 he became a member of 

 the Council of India, and in the following year was sent as envoy to 

 the Court of Teheran, a post he occupied for about a year. Of his 

 subsequent short career in Parliament and of' his political views with 

 regard to the encroachments of Russia in the East, it is hardly neces- 

 sary to speak. 



In recognition of his incessant labours and valuable discoveries 

 in connexion with Assyrian archaeology he was elected a Fellow of 

 the Royal Society in 1850. It was indeed in that year that his 

 " Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylonia and 

 Assyria " was published. 



Since that time 45 years have passed ; but it is now 60 years 

 since Rawlinson, in 1835, began to make copies of the inscribed 

 tablets of Elwend, so that he had already laboured 15 years in 

 what was then a field of absolute mystery. When once a science has 

 become thoroughly developed, we are always too apt to forget the 

 work of those who laid the foundations on which others have built, 

 and whatever may have been the labours of Grotefend, Nbrris, 

 Hincks, Westergaard, or Lassen, it is to Rawlinson that the merit is 



