Rihla (The Journey) – was the short title of a 14th Century (1355 CE) book
written in Fez by the Islamic legal scholar Ibn Jazayy al-Kalbi of Granada who
recorded and then transcribed the dictated travelogue of the Tangerian, Ibn
Battuta. The book’s full title was A Gift
to Those who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling
and somehow the title of Ibn Jazayy's book captures the ethos of many of the
city and country journeys I have been lucky to take in past years.
This rihla is about the town of Killyleagh on the
western shore of Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland.
A few
years ago while travelling back southwards from participating in a golfing
competition at Royal Portrush GC on the North Antrim coast I decided to make to
make a non-golfing pilgrimage to Killyleagh on the western shores of Strangford
Lough. Killyleagh had been home (the birthplace of one and the residence and final
resting place of the other) to Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and the Rev Edward
Hincks (1792-1866), two of the most brilliant Irish minds of the Enlightenment
and for a long time I had wanted to see this small town, which had influenced
such inclusive scholars.
St John the Evangelist COI Killyleagh
Killyleagh
is a small, pretty town, and coming in from the Lisburn direction on the
western side of the town you arrive at a small green in front of Killyleagh
Castle, the oldest inhabited castle in Ireland. Built in a French Loire chateaux-style
it hosts concerts (famously by Van Morrison) and offers accommodation in the
turreted towers. Travelling directly east from the castle along Dufferin Place
you cross the A22 and gently rise up Church Hill to the gates of St John the Evangelist,
Church of Ireland on the apex of a hill that overlooks the harbour, Sir Hans
Sloan Square, and Strangford Lough below. Attached to the church, is Church
Hill House, the former rectory built on land given to the church 1733. The
current building, where Edward Hincks and his family resided, was erected in
1812. Within the church graveyard are the tombs of Edward Hincks’ father Thomas
Dix Hincks as well as Edward’s and also the gravestones of two of Hans Sloan’s
infant brothers Henry and John. On the day I was there autumn gales were
howling and it had an almost Brontesque feel to the place.
Sir Hans
Sloane in addition to becoming President of the Royal College of Physicians in
1712 and Physician to King George II in 1727 also, in the same year, succeeded
Sir Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society. He had been an avid
collector since childhood and had built up a large library and unique cabinet
of curiosities of his own as well as inheriting or acquiring the natural
history collections of many others. He bequeathed on his death in 1753 all of
these to the nation, for a nominal sum to his heirs, and combined with the
library of George II, and the Harley and Cotton collections, his bequest formed
the basis for the foundation of the British Museum by means of a lottery (British
Museum Act 1753 [26 G 2c 22]).
In his
will of 1739 Sloane had stated,
“Whereas from my youth I have been a great observer
and admirer of the wonderful power, wisdom and contrivance of the Almighty God,
appearing in the works of his Creation; and have gathered together many things
in my own travels or voyages, or had them from others, especially my ever
honoured, late friend William Courten, Esq; who spent the greatest part of his
life and estate in collecting such things, in and from most parts of the earth,
which he left me at his death . . . And whereas I have made great additions of
late years as well to my books, both printed as manuscript, and to my
collections of natural and artificial curiosities, precious stones, books of
dryed samples of plants, miniatures, drawings, prints, medals, and the like,
with some paintings concerning them. . . . Now desiring very much that these
things tending many ways to the manifestation of the glory of God, the
confutation of atheism and its consequences, the use and improvement of physic,
and other arts and sciences, and benefit of mankind, may remain together and
not be separated, . . . where they may by the great confluence of people be of
most use.”
In a codicil to the will in 1751 he reiterated,
“And I do hereby declare, that it is my desire and
intention, that my said musaeum or collection be preserved and kept . . . and
that the same may be, from time to time, visited and seen by all persons
desirous of seeing and viewing the same, under such statutes, directions,
rules, and orders, as shall be made, from time to time, by the said trustees .
. . that the same may be rendered as useful as possible, as will towards
satisfying the desire of the curious, as for the improvement, knowledge and
information of all persons. . . .”
Sloane
also introduced drinking chocolate to England from Jamaica and established the
Chelsea Physic Garden. He was the first medical practitioner to be given a
hereditary peerage and although his personal scholarship was limited in terms
of scientific output (A Voyage to the
Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the Natural
History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects,
Reptiles, &c. of the Last of Those Islands, 2 vols. [London: 1707, 1725])
it was his altruistic foresight that allowed many following after him to
flourish.
Growing up in Cork I was always fascinated by the somber-looking but
disused Unitarian Church recessed behind wrought iron gating on Prince’s Street
– until the 1750’s the street was known as Presbyterian Meeting House Lane – in
the city. The church and attached residence was the birthplace of one of
Ireland’s most brilliant scholars, Edward Hincks. Educated firstly at home by
his father Thomas Dix Hincks – a future Professor of Hebrew and Oriental
Languages in Belfast – he then attended Middleton School and entered Trinity
College, Dublin at the age of 15. Ordained an Anglican clergyman he left the
University in 1819 to become rector of Ardtrea in Armagh ( a church living that
was a sinecure of Trinity College). At that stage he was already recognized as
an accomplished expert in Semitic and Oriental languages (Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic
and Sandscrit) in addition to German and French. In 1826 he moved to become
Rector of Killyleagh, Co. Down, Northern Ireland and from his house at 14
Church Hill became one of the world’s leading, if not the most accomplished,
philologist of all time.
Behistun Inscription
Kermanshah, Iran.
In the space of 34 years Hincks first
published in 1832 on Hebrew and then in 1833 the decipherment of the demotic
language of ancient Egypt. He then partially turned his attention to Old
Persian cuneiform and with Rawlinson and others was to be responsible for the
understanding of the ancient texts. He also turned his attention with
considerable accomplishment to the decipherment and understanding of Elamite,
Akkadian and Uratarian cuneiform languages. One of his greatest accomplishments
was establishing that cuneiform was developed by the non-Semitic Sumerians but
was adopted by Semitic Akkadians around 2000 BCE. Even up to his death Hincks
spent time studying and understanding agglutinative Mongolian and Hungarian
languages to try and establish the origin of the Sumerian cuneiform scripts.
The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone
can bring about enlightenment among men.
Immanuel Kant
November 1784
Berlinische Monatsschrift
Edward Hincks like Hans Sloane, and perhaps
this is the true gift of Killyleagh, was the ideal embodiment of everything the
Enlightenment hoped to achieve, at both a personal and societal level. He remained
eternally generous with his talents with other scholars and even contributed
across the religious academic divide in Ireland to the Catholic University’s
The Atlantis journal.
His ‘decipherment’ conflict with Sir Henry Creswicke
Rawlinson, initially over the primacy of the latter's Behistun inscriptions in deciphering
Old Persian and Akkadian is now well documented (see: Lesley Adkins’ Empire of
the Plain & Kevin J. Cathcart’s Correspondence of Edward Hincks). Ironically
the dispute was to culminate in the very institution that former Killyleagh
parishioner Sir Hans Sloane’s will provided for: the British Museum. Rawlinson
objected to Hincks being contracted by the Trustees of the Museum to catalog
and decipher their cuneiform collection and in late 1854 attempted to block
further access by Hincks to the inscriptions of the Museum.
Not exactly what Hans Sloane had in mind or
what his will had mandated when the museum was established!
Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson
In fairness to Rawlinson, he had put in a huge
amount of exploratory and physical work in the field and he, in very much the Empire
spirit of the times, felt this ‘physicality of discovery’ somehow granted him a
sense of proprietorship over the subsequent decipherment. Victorian ‘adventurer
archeologists’, until the advent of Flinders Petrie, held onto what they
had. Theirs was a concept of finding a
moment frozen in time and to get it moving again. That was the way of Empire.
Following Edward Hincks death in December
1866 Rawlinson however, to his credit, was one of the signatories on a petition
to Lord Derby to try and obtain a pension for Edward’s widow Jane. In due
course she was provided for and perhaps in the end the Killyleagh Enlightenment
Principle shone through.
A couple of years later, while standing in
front of Darius’ Behistun (Bagastan – Place of God) inscription in Kermanshah,
Iran, I thought of the sweat and tears of Rawlinson crawling over the rock to
take his imprints of the carvings while back in Killyleagh, in a land despoiled
by the Great Irish Famine, a man who had never felt the desert air hunched over
similar cuneiform inscriptions from Persepolis and already had solved the
puzzle.
