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 he became personally known to the governor-general, led to his being appointed, at his own desire, as political agent in Turkish Arabia; thus he was enabled to settle in Bagdad, where he devoted much time to the cuneiform studies which attracted him. He was now able, under considerable difficulties and with no small personal risk, to make a complete transcript of the Behistun inscription, which he was also successful in deciphering and interpreting. Having collected a large amount of invaluable information on this and kindred topics, in addition to much geographical knowledge gained in the prosecution of various explorations (including visits with Layard to the ruins of Nineveh), he returned to England on leave of absence in 1849. He remained at home for two years, published in 1851 his memoir on the Behistun inscription, and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He disposed of his valuable collection of Babylonian, Sabaean, and Sassanian antiquities to the trustees of the British Museum, who also made him a considerable grant to enable him to carry on the Assyrian and Babylonian excavations initiated by Layard. In 1851 he returned to Bagdad. The excavations were carried on under his direction with valuable results, among the most important being the discovery of material that greatly contributed to the final decipherment and interpretation of the cuneiform character. An accident with which he met in 1855 hastened his determination to return to England, and in that year he resigned his post in the East India Company. On his return to England the distinction of K.C.B. was conferred upon him, and he was appointed a crown director of the East India Company. The remaining forty years of his life were full of activity—political, diplomatic, and scientific—and were mainly spent in London. In 1858 he was appointed a member of the first India Council, but resigned in 1859 on being sent to Persia as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. The latter post he held only for a year, owing to his dissatisfaction with circumstances connected with his official position there. Previously he had sat in Parliament as M.P. for Reigate from February to September 1858; he sat again as M.P. for Frome, 1865–68. He was appointed to the Council of India again in 1868, and continued to serve upon it until his death. He was a strong advocate of the forward policy in Afghanistan, and counselled the retention of Kandahar. His views were more particularly expressed in England and Russia in the East, 1875. He was a trustee of the British Museum from 1876 till his death. He was created G.C.B. in 1889, and a Baronet in 1891; was president of the Geographical Society from 1874 to 1875, and of the Asiatic Society from 1878 to 1881; and received honorary degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh. He married, in September 1862, Louisa Caroline Harcourt Seymour, who bore him two sons and died in 1889. He died in London on the 5th of March 1895. His published works include (apart from minor contributions to the publications of learned societies) four volumes of cuneiform inscriptions, published under his direction between 1870 and 1884 by the trustees of the British Museum; The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Behistun, 1846–51, and Outline of the History of Assyria, 1852, both reprinted from the Asiatic Society’s journals; A Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria, 1850; Notes on the Early History of Babylonia, 1854; England and Russia in the East, 1875. He contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th edition) the articles on Bagdad, the Euphrates and Kurdistan, and several other articles dealing with the East; and assisted in editing a translation of Herodotus by his brother, Canon George Rawlinson.

 RAWLINSON, RICHARD (1690–1755), English antiquary and divine, was a younger son of Sir Thomas Rawlinson (1647–1708), lord mayor of London in 1705–6, and a brother of Thomas Rawlinson (1681–1725), the bibliophile. Born on the 3rd of January 1690, he was educated at St Paul’s school, at Eton, and at St John’s College, Oxford. In 1716 he was ordained, but as he was a nonjuror and a Jacobite the ceremony was performed by a nonjuring bishop, Jeremy Collier. Rawlinson then travelled in England and on the continent of Europe, where he passed several years, making collections of manuscripts, coins and curiosities. In 1728 he became a bishop among the nonjurors, but he hardly ever appears to have discharged episcopal functions, preferring to pass his time in collecting books and manuscripts, pictures and curiosities. He died at Islington on the 6th of April 1755. Rawlinson left his manuscripts, his curiosities, and some other property to the Bodleian Library; he endowed a professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and was a benefactor to St John’s College.

 RAWLINSON, SIR ROBERT (1810–1898), English engineer and sanitarian, was born at Bristol on the 28th of February 1810. His father was apmason and builder at Chorley, Lancashire, and he himself began his engineering education by working in a stonemason’s yard. In 1831 he obtained employment under Jesse Hartley in the engineer’s office at the Liverpool docks, and for four years from 1836 he was engaged under Robert Stephenson as assistant resident engineer for the Blisworth section of what is now the London & North-Western main line from London to the North. Returning to Liverpool, he spent some years as assistant-surveyor to the corporation, and then in 1844 accepted an engineering post on the Bridgewater Canal. Three years later he returned to Liverpool, to superintend the design and construction of the famous brick-arched ceiling in the St George’s Hall, in succession to. his friend H. L. Elmes. During this period Rawlinson’s reputation as a sanitarian had been growing, and when the Public Health Act was passed in 1848 he was appointed one of the first inspectors under it. He inspected many of the chief towns of England, and his reports on the sanitary conditions he found brought him in many cases into great unpopularity with the municipal rulers. Early in 1855 popular feeling was so aroused by the waste of life that was going on among the British troops in the Crimea through disease, and by the mismanagement of the campaign, that the Aberdeen ministry was forced to resign. Lord Palmerston, who then became prime minister, sent a sanitary commission, consisting of Rawlinson and two medical members (Dr John Sutherland and Dr H. Gavin), with full powers from the War Office, to do whatever it thought would lead to better hygienic conditions in camp and hospital. The commission reached Constantinople in March, and, by insisting on what now seem the most obvious precautions, succeeded within a few weeks’ in reducing the death-rate in the Levantine hospitals from 42 to 2%. Passing on to the Crimea, it effected a similar improvement there, and by the end of the year the health of the whole British army in the field was even better than it enjoyed at home. Rawlinson’s next great public service, for which he was made C.B. in 1865, was in connexion with the distress caused in Lancashire by the collapse of the cotton manufacturing industry consequent on the American Civil War. In 1863 it was suggested that, in order to provide employment for the starving operatives, the government should start works of “utility, profit and ornament,” and Rawlinson being sent to make an official investigation into the question, reported, after visiting nearly 100 towns, that 1 million sterling might be advantageously expended in providing water-supply and drainage, forming streets, &c., in those places. The result was that the Treasury was authorized to advance £1,200,000 the amount was afterwards increased) at 3% for carrying out such works, which proved of enormous public benefit. In 1866 he acted as chairman of the Royal Commission on the Pollution of Rivers, and a few years later was appointed chief engineering inspector to the Local Government Board; on retiring from this position in 1888 he was promoted to be K.C.B. In 1894 he served as president of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He died in London on the 31st of May 1898.

 RAWMARSH, an urban district in the Rotherham parliamentary division of the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, 7 m. N.E. of Sheffield by the Midland railway. Pop. (1891) 11,983; (1901) 14,587. It is situated on the ridge of a hill above the valley of the Don. The church of St Lawrence was rebuilt