Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit.

Three and a half thousand BC, that's five and a half thousand years ago.

Humans began gathering in the world's first cities.

And as they did so, a scribe in the mud-brick metropolis of Uruk took up a reed stylus and pressed tiny wedge-shaped

symbols into soft clay. It was the start of cuneiform. For the next 3,000 years, that script would

chronicle military triumphs, scientific breakthroughs, the movements

of the stars through the heavens, epic tales, medical advice, and the daily routines of the

great Mesopotamian civilizations, Sumeria, Assyria, Babylon, and then later on, their

successor, the powerful empire of Persia. But then, that knowledge was lost. We humans forgot

how to read it. Fast forward thousands of years to London in 1857. An age enthralled by accounts of human

advancement, ever quicker journeys across the Atlantic, the ability to communicate over unimaginable

distances, scientific understanding. And the field of archaeology

was right up there with engineering and science as a place where exciting breakthroughs were

closely followed by huge public interest. In Mesopotamia, the ruins of ancient palaces

emerged from desert sands and they fired the imaginations of people

all over the world. But the little tablets found within those palaces covered in strange

markings, well, they proved elusive. They proved stubbornly unreadable, even to Europe's brightest

minds. And this is the story of the unlikely trio who unlocked the secrets of ancient Babylon,

Syria, Sumeria. A dashing archaeologist, a polished British officer turned diplomat and a reclusive,

grouchy, Irish clergyman. They set out to find Mesopotamia and then crack the code of

cuneiform. Unlock a long-lost, vital chapter of human history. And friends, they succeeded.

It tells us all about it is Joshua Hammer. He's a freelance journalist who writes the New York

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