In the 1830s, British officer Henry Rawlinson was shown an enormous stele with inscriptions in cuneiform (rediscovered in 1618 by the Spanish ambassador to Persia), Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. He enlisted a Kurdish boy to hang the giant stele and copy the entire text, letter by letter, before sending it to Europe and deciphering it. For the first time, doors opened to lost kingdoms of millennia past: Sumerian bazaars, Assyrian kings, Babylonian bureaucrats. The local populations had always had this script at least three millennia old before their eyes, but no one, as far as we know, had ever bothered to try to decipher it. According to Yuval Noah Harari, the difference is one of approach: Western culture (which would spread throughout the world in the late 20th century) is based on the assumption of ignorance, which pushes toward conquest and discovery, while most previous cultures are based on the assumption of wisdom.
