EMPIRES OF THE PLAIN: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon, by Lesley Adkins, is reviewed by Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley in the Financial Times. (You may not be able to access the review outside the U.K. without a subscription.) She says that Rawlinson cultivated a scholarly reputation greater than he deserved and that Adkins accepted his claims uncritically. Excerpt:

Lesley Adkins constructs Rawlinson's life by inter-weaving his successes in the East India Company with his scholarly pursuits. She seems uncritical of her subject's own version of events, however. While including much evidence refuting his claims as a decipherer, she leaves the reader with the impression that Rawlinson's scholarly rivals were jealous and mean-spirited, and that he deserves the reputation he cultivated.

In fact, Rawlinson shame-lessly failed to acknowledge that George Grotefend and other scholars had deciphered the Old Persian language and its script (essentially simple and alphabetic) to a rudimentary stage. This basic breakthrough was made years before the Bisitun text became available. On two occasions Rawlinson delayed sending work to be printed until he received the work of others, which he was glad to find coincided with his own after a few modifications. His contributions, though undoubted, were of secondary importance.

Perhaps only a cuneiformist is able to assess where credit should lie as far as the Babylonian script and language are concerned, for Adkins has listed the relevant refutations in her bibliography without making good use of them. They come from the recent work of three separate scholars, all of whom know how Babylonian cuneiform works. It is an extremely complex system, much more so than Egyptian hieroglyphs or Old Persian cuneiform.

The man whose scholarship is now generally recognised as formative was Edward Hincks, a poor clergyman from Ireland.

His brilliance in discovering that Babylonian signs could have more than one syllabic value or could stand for a whole word, and who worked out many problems of grammar and lexicography, left Rawlinson struggling to find small details to criticise and correct.

I've blogged on Rawlinson and this book a few times before. Run "Rawlinson" through the search engine to find the references.