There are neighborhoods in New York and Toronto and London where you suddenly feel as if you are standing on the topmost floor of the Tower of Babel. Unfamiliar languages with their twittering intonations and unexpected emphases surround you – Urdu or Tagalog, Portuguese or Albanian, Creole or Swahili. I can identify some of the tongues I hear, if not by understanding them, then by a particular signature sound, the gutturals of Israeli Hebrew or the prolonged “aw” sound of Farsi, but I particularly enjoy letting exotic syllables wash over my ears, as though speech had been distilled into nothing but music. Is this how dogs and cats feel when we address them, catching the melody of our commands but not the sense? We define ourselves by speech; when we’re deprived of it, the experience can be both exhilarating and frightening.

The original Tower of Babel was populated, of course, by scores of languages that are now dead – Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Egyptian – but I sometimes wonder whether their ghostly echoes don’t still linger in the air of out-of-the-way places. The 6,000 or 7,000 languages spoken today are only a fraction of the world’s linguistic patrimony. It can make you dizzy to think of those lost vernaculars, and of the multiplicity of worlds they made articulate. In one of his aphoristic reversals of a biblical story, Kafka wrote, “We are digging the Pit of Babel.” In that polyglot pit, human language is almost infinitely stratified; and you must go down into the earth, rather than climb toward heaven, to seek its roots.

To get some sense of the linguistic wealth that lay buried for millennia, turn to “The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages” (Cambridge University Press, 1,162 pages; $150), edited by the classicist Roger D. Woodard. This hefty, but beautifully produced, tome begins with Sumerian, probably the first written language (with texts attested from 3200 B.C.), and proceeds through some 43 other tongues, including Elamite, Urartian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hittite, Greek and Latin, Sanskrit, Avestan, Etruscan, and Old Tamil, to conclude with Mayan and Olmec.(Not all the languages are dead, of course: Chinese not only survives but flourishes with some 900 million speakers, and Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek evolve apace.)

Each language is described in concise and vivid detail, and some of the descriptions are fairly technical. After reading the chapter on Elamite, for example, I’m still scratching my head; all I can gather is that it is a long-dead Iranian vernacular, apparently unrelated to any other. It is not much better understood today than in the 1840s when Henry Rawlinson, copied the monu mental cuneiform inscriptions in Old Persian, Akkadian, and Elamite at Behistun in Iran.

Rawlinson’s feat was heroic. To copy the trilingual inscription, carved at the command of Darius the Great, the Achaemenid king who built Persepolis in 522 B.C., Rawlinson had to scale a sheer rock face and balance on a narrow ledge some 200 feet above the ground. Once, when his crude ladder collapsed, he clung by his fingers to the rock awaiting rescue. He knew that such a trilingual sample was the key to deciphering all three languages (much as Champollion a few years earlier had been able to unlock Egyptian hieroglyphic through the Rosetta stone).

Rawlinson was one of those extraordinary Englishmen who thrived in the “Great Game” played out in India and Afghanistan in the 19th century. He was a truly exceptional figure, a man of action as well as a profound scholar in the best tradition of the English amateur (his excellent translation of Herodotus is still in print). A military officer – he took part in the first disastrous Anglo-Afghan War in 1840, narrowly escaping with his skin – he also mastered numerous languages, not only Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, and Kurdish but numerous local dialects. He combined a wholehearted devotion to British imperial aims – though he railed at the ignorance and stupidity of many of his superiors – with a sympathy for and intuitive grasp of the alien cultures he moved among. He described himself as “indolent,” but he worked with fierce tenacity to understand the mystifying inscriptions, all in cuneiform – literally, the “wedge shaped” script. In the end he succeeded in giving the first systematic decipherment of Old Persian, Akkadian, and that ever-puzzling Elamite.

His exploits are recounted “Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon” (Thomas Dunne Books, 424 pages, $29.95), by the English popular historian Lesley Adkins. The book is bit too ambitious, trying to provide a running narrative of British campaigns in Afghanistan, India, Iran, and Iraq (all of which involved Rawlinson) and getting bogged down. Still, Ms. Adkins’s description of Rawlinson’s dogged struggles with the cuneiform inscriptions makes compelling reading. He wasn’t alone; other scholars – such as G.F. Grotefend, Eugene Burnouf, and the discoverer of Nineveh, Austen Henry Layard – made crucial advances too, and Ms. Adkins is very good at conveying the excitement of this shared quest, at once competitive and oddly chummy.

What must it have felt like to decode the long-forgotten words of some ancient ruler? The Behistun inscription, in all its vainglory, begins, “I am Darius, the great king, the king of kings, the king of Persia, king of countries, son of Hystaspes, the grandson of Arsames, an Achaemenian.” To us, two and a half millennia later, sifting the dust of these grandiose phrases, Darius seems a perfect Ozymandias, over whom “the lone and level sands stretch far away,” and we may feel, for a moment, the smugness of survivors. And yet, when Rawlinson first puzzled out the name, piece by jigsaw piece – not “Darius” but daa-ra-ya-va-u-sha in the syllabic script – he quite literally dusted the old king off and gave him breath again.

eormsby@nysun.com