The Progress of Ethnology An Account of Recent Archaeological, Philological and Geographical Researches in Various Parts of the Globe, Tending to Elucidate the Physical — Reading Companion

Decipherment as Detective Work

The account of Grotefend's breakthrough at Persepolis reads like a procedural narrative. Bartlett explains that over doorways and in other parts of the edifice, portraits of kings bore inscriptions that were natural to suppose related to the person represented. The key was a repeated group of characters. Grotefend eliminated Cyrus and Cambyses because the names do not begin with the same letter, and Artaxerxes as too long, leaving only Darius and Xerxes. He then turned to the ancient Zend, preserved in the Zendavesta, to recover the original Persian forms: Dareush and Kshershe. The method is explicitly analogical—borrowing from De Sacy's work on Pehlvi inscriptions—and relies on a chain of assumptions about royal titulary and bas-relief chronology. Bartlett presents this not as a settled triumph but as a fragile edifice of inference, noting that the alphabet was only partially formed by 1833.

Earthworks Without a Rosetta Stone

In contrast to the Persepolitan philology, the North American sections describe mounds and earthworks in Ohio, Mississippi, and Louisiana that yield no decipherable script. Bartlett reports Mr. Jomard's essay on the Grave Creek tablet, but the tablet itself remains an enigma—a physical object without a linguistic key. The asymmetry is instructive: while Grotefend could test his hypotheses against known historical names, the mound builders left no such anchors. Bartlett's text registers this disparity without resolving it, cataloguing excavations that produce pottery, bones, and earthworks but no equivalent of the Zendavesta. The reader is left to ponder whether the physical history of man can be elucidated solely through material culture, or whether philology holds a privileged position. The excerpts do not reveal Bartlett's own conclusion, but the structure of the book—giving philology the first detailed case study—suggests a hierarchy.

The Geography of Knowledge

Bartlett's global scope—from Greenland to Madagascar, from the Caucasus to Australia—creates a map of ethnographic authority that is unevenly distributed. The African section lists multiple expeditions: Mr. Thomson's journey from Sierra Leone, Mr. Duncan's northward from Dahomey, Mr. Richardson's into the Sahara, and the French expedition up the Senegal under Mr. Raffenel. Yet these are presented as attempts, not achievements; the interior remains largely unknown. By contrast, the Persian and Lycian discoveries are narrated with confidence in their results. This geographical gradient of certainty mirrors the methodological one: where written records exist, knowledge advances; where they do not, exploration remains tentative. Bartlett's catalog of projects—including the proposed expedition for penetrating the country from the eastern side of Africa—reads as a plea for more data, more travelers, more spades. The book itself becomes a progress report on the progress of ethnology, incomplete by design.

Bartlett's compilation resists easy synthesis. The reader is better served by attending to the specific arguments—how Grotefend eliminated candidate names, how Jomard approached the Grave Creek tablet—than by seeking a unified theory of human origins. The work rewards those who compare the evidentiary standards applied to different regions: what counts as proof in Persia may not hold in Ohio. Approach each chapter as a separate case study in the history of science, noting where Bartlett endorses a method and where he merely reports. The gaps between discoveries are as instructive as the discoveries themselves.

Holding this 1847 survey, I thought of my grandfather’s shelves, where distant lands felt like quiet promises. The archaeology here—patient, earthy—mirrors how I once felt reading Woman's Life in Colonial Days — Reading Notes: both books unearth lives through fragments, leaving me with the gentle ache of time’s passing, not excitement, but a settled wonder.