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For the first time, too, museumgoers and newspaper readers could examine large samples of the vanished civilization's writing, which had predated Egyptian hieroglyphs by centuries. Assyrian and Babylonian scribes had ingeniously utilized the thick stem of a reed that grows in the wetlands of the Middle East, the Arundo donax, and split these stalks to create a trapezoidal tip. Then they pressed signs into damp clay and fired the inscribed tablets in a kiln, making them almost indestructible. Over time, scribes also carved the characters into copper and stone. 

Cuneiform (the term derives from the Latin cuneus, or "wedge," referring to the characters' distinctive shape) lacked the beauty of hieroglyphs. One jokester would say that the signs looked like "what you might get if a flock of birds with obsessive-compulsive disorder took a walk across wet clay." But the writing system had taken over the ancient world. From Mesopotamia, cuneiform had traveled east to the Kingdom of Elam, on the plains of Persia. The Kingdom of Urartu, southeast of the Black Sea and dominated by the biblical Mount Ararat (where Noah's ark came to rest after the flood), adopted the writing for its language isolate, as did the Hittite Empire, an Indo-European power in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) that had reached its zenith during the mid-fourteenth century BCE. A simplified form took hold in Ugarit, a prosperous city-state on the Mediterranean coast, and finally in the Persian-speaking Achaemenid Empire, which, under Kings Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, had ruled Central Asia and parts of Africa and Europe from the sixth century to the fourth century BCE.

The wedge-based script endured for some 2,500 years. But papyrus gradually supplanted clay, new scripts made cuneiform obsolete, and the fifteen languages that used it died out. (The last datable cuneiform tablet is an astronomical almanac predicting the appearances of stars, planets, and other heavenly bodies inscribed around 79 CE; it was found in the early 1900s in Southern Mesopotamia.) By the second century CE, knowledge of the phonetic values and meaning of the characters had faded away.

In the 1820s the Englishman Thomas Young and his rival, the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, had solved the riddle of the hieroglyphs. Scholars could now read the love poetry and funerary texts of the ancient Egyptians, study the military campaigns of the pharaohs, and learn how the dwellers along the Nile treated toothaches, performed surgeries, and measured time. With Layard's finds, the public now clamored for linguists to unravel the mysteries of cuneiform too. Believers were thrilled by the possibility that the royal annals of Nineveh, Nimrud (another destroyed Assyrian capital), and Babylon might corroborate tales from the Old Testament. The Hebrew Prophets had described Assyria's deportation of the ten Jewish tribes from Samaria in 721 BCE and the siege of Jerusalem twenty years later. Unfortunately, these accounts weren't corroborated by any other surviving records, which made them suspect to nineteenth-century historians. At a time when atheists, agnostics, and other skeptics were casting doubt on Scripture, the writing on the walls could turn out to be nothing less than proof of the veracity of the word of God.

Cuneiform also dangled the possibility of peering back even further in time. New excavations along the Euphrates River in Southern Mesopotamia had turned up tablets written in cuneiform that appeared to predate the finds at Nineveh by nearly 2,000 years, originating around 2500 BCE. The characters were familiar, but the language seemed different. If this far more ancient script were deciphered, it would offer insights into the very cradle of civilization—a place nearly as remote from the time of Assyria and Babylon as those city-states were from the Victorian era. In this flat, fertile zone humans established the first permanent communities, developed agriculture, scratched out pictures of objects that became writing, and slowly organized themselves into the types of complex hierarchical societies that remain recognizable today. Here also lay the supposed birthplace of Abraham, who had founded a new nation in the land of Canaan around 2100 BCE. Could it truly be possible to read records preserved from this distant time?

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After going down blind alleys and stumbling into dead ends for years, Rawlinson and Hincks both claimed by the 1850s to be making great progress understanding the "arrowhead script." Academics, literary journals, and the public marveled at their apparent insights. But there was a problem. The rival philologists concurred on one thing: the writing of Babylon and Assyria was bewilderingly complex. Its most striking characteristic was what was called polyphony: many characters, they maintained, could be read in six, seven, even eight different ways.

Critics reacted "with shouts of incredulity," wrote the Oxford historian A. H. Sayce. Under the supposed rules of the Assyrian and Babylonian script, the Dublin University Magazine declared, "[a] modern decipherer could...make out any proposed name whatever from any assigned group of [characters]." Charles Wall, a professor of Hebrew at Trinity College Dublin, analyzed the signs said to make up the name of the Babylonian king who had captured Jerusalem in 597 BCE and marched the Jews into captivity. "[T]he various values capable of being assigned to the eight characters which are supposed to form the name of Nebuchadnezzar," he had calculated, "are such that the word might be read 393,216 different ways."