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Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, living in the shadow of a rich and influential father and an accomplished older brother, had decided that he could carve out his own identity only in exile. As a twenty-three-year-old military officer of the East India Company, he found himself in Persia. There he demonstrated a flair for languages, a skill at scaling heights in search of millennia-old inscriptions, and a powerful yearning, he confided to his sister, to do something to attract the world's attention. In his early thirties, he deciphered the writing of the ancient Persian Empire. The achievement, considered as fantastic in his time as mapping mitochondrial DNA in ours, brought Rawlinson his first taste of fame. And more dead languages were waiting to be understood.

Finally, there was Edward Hincks, a country parson in a remote corner of Ireland: brilliant, tormented by crippling anxiety and the specter of financial ruin, hungry for peer recognition of his linguistic gifts, and principled to a fault. Huddled for endless hours over his desk in his rectory, Hincks had tested his formidable intellect and escaped his many troubles by translating obscure texts written in Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Hebrew. Eventually he set his sights on the most tantalizing prize of them all.

By 1856 the paths of these three men had converged in a sometimes friendly, often combustible pas de trois. Now, with Layard watching from a judicious distance, Hincks and Rawlinson were about to become the prime contestants in a challenge to determine, once and for all, whether the oldest writing system in the world could be deciphered. However esoteric this might sound, the question was the subject of intense public debate in capitals on both sides of the Atlantic. For mid-nineteenth-century Britons, proving that this elusive script could be understood meant pulling back the curtain on a distant, vanished, yet hauntingly familiar world, one that had given birth to humanity's modern mind.

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Until the 1840s, few people had known anything about the great civilizations that had begun their rise along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers about 2000 BCE and endured for more than 1500 years. Assyria and its vassal state (and sometime rival) Babylon had once dominated the Near East and beyond. Classical writers described Assyria, which reached its zenith about 700 BCE, as the first true empire; the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Babylon "surpasses in splendor any city in the known world." But a coalition of enemies had destroyed Assyria in the late seventh century BCE, and Babylon was neglected, ransacked, and left to die out five hundred years later. "Today the greatest world city of antiquity is a mound of desert earth," one theologian wrote. By the mid-1800s, these societies had been almost entirely forgotten. At the British Museum, the world's preeminent repository of antiquities, the relics of Assyria and Babylon, including writings inscribed on clay bricks and stone, filled one three-foot-by-three-foot-by-three-foot cabinet.

But the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the mid-1700s had inspired a new science: investigating antiquity by digging objects out of the earth. And Layard was its most spectacularly successful practitioner. Enduring lethal epidemics, stultifying heat, vermin-infested camps, and the hostility of Ottoman authorities, he made a series of remarkable discoveries beginning in the mid-1840s: 2,500-year-old Assyrian palaces paneled with exquisite alabaster bas-reliefs and guarded by stone gods and monsters. In vivid and often shocking detail, the friezes depicted corpse-covered battlefields, battering-ram-wielding soldiers breaking down city ramparts, archers in stallion-drawn chariots, lines of bedraggled captives, vassals bearing tributes, kings attended by a retinue of eunuchs, and royal lion hunts in the bush. Unreadable inscriptions swirled around the carvings. Layard and his protégé, a Christian Arab from Mosul named Hormuzd Rassam, had also recently unearthed thousands of inscribed clay tablets in the royal library of the burned Assyrian capital, Nineveh: the tablets seemed to be filled with information about astronomy, medicine, religion, politics, laws, and everyday life.

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The rediscovery of this lost civilization, which had controlled the Near East like no other empire before or since, seized the public's imagination. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the Crystal Palace in south London in 1854 to gaze at the "Nineveh Court," a fanciful reinvention of the royal palace, with lotus gardens, multicolored bas-reliefs, and blue-headed bull capitals perched atop Doric columns. Newspapers chronicled the arrival in England of giant winged lions and other stone colossi that testified to Assyria's artistic mastery and rich mythology. "The monuments [Layard] has sent home from the plains of Assyria...excited a livelier interest than anything else I saw in the Museum," proclaimed an American visitor in the Natchez Courier in Mississippi. "There they are, disinterred from the oblivion of ages, the last survivors, the sole historic monuments of Nineveh, her kings, and her people, and her glory!"