Writing this book has called upon philology, archaeology, psychology, ethnography, boat-building, mathematics, theology, textual exegesis and art history. All this will lead us into an adventurous expedition of our own. What is this ancient cuneiform script? And can we sense what these Babylonians who wrote in it were really like? I will clarify exactly what the Simmonds tablet has to say and how it compares with the flood story texts that are already known, and then look at how, after all, the story of the flood passed from Babylonian cuneiform to alphabetic Hebrew and came to be incorporated within the text of the Book of Genesis.
This is a book strongly dependent on ancient inscriptions and what they have to tell us. Most of them are written in the said cuneiform, the world’s oldest – and most interesting – kind of writing. It has seemed important not only to say what we know but to explain how we know it, and also to make it clear when some word or line is persistently obscure, or open to more than one interpretation. I have tried to keep Assyriological philology to a minimum; some has perforce crept in, but not to the point, I hope, that the true Flood Story detective will be put off. For this is certainly a detective story. I had no idea when I started reading that tablet and writing this book where it was all going to lead me, but it has certainly been an adventure. I found myself facing many unanticipated questions that now had to be answered. To a cuneiform scholar the Ark Tablet, if not breathtakingly beautiful, will always be a thing of wonder. I hope that anybody else who reads this book will reach the same verdict.
2
The Wedge between Us
Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform
And tell you ev’ry detail of Caractacus’s uniform
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General
W. S. Gilbert
The ancient Babylonians believed in Fate, and I suppose it must have been Fate that made me become an Assyriologist in the first place; it certainly seems to have played a hand in the writing of this book. I had decided by the age of nine that I wanted to work in the British Museum. This unswerving ambition was probably not uninfluenced by the curious upbringing to which the five of us children were subjected, for we used to visit the Bloomsbury galleries when it wasn’t even raining and there was no glass case in the building against which my nose had never been pressed. At the same time I had a long-running interest in dead and ‘difficult’ writing, far more interesting than any schoolwork, and vacillated regularly in the weighty choice between ancient Chinese and ancient Egyptian.
When I went off to university in 1969 with my copy of Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar held proudly under my arm it was then that Fate intervened properly for the first time. The Egyptologist at Birmingham was T. Rundle Clark, a sedate and well-rounded scholar of cinematic eccentricity who delivered but a single introductory lecture before peremptorily expiring and leaving the department, noisy with new students, bereft in Egyptology. The worried head, Professor F. J. Tritsch, called me into his study to explain that it would take months to procure a new teacher of hieroglyphs and, since I liked such things, why didn’t I do a bit of cuneiform or wedge-writing in the interim with Lambert down the hall? Lambert was known not to have much truck with beginners as a rule but, the head thought, might be persuaded to take me on under the circumstances. I and three young women accordingly found ourselves waiting expectantly outside the cuneiform door two days later. It was in this completely accidental way that the Assyriologist W. G. Lambert became my teacher, although at that stage I had no conception of how great a scholar he was, nor of the unclimbed mountains that lay ahead. I had just turned eighteen.
Our new professor hardly said good morning and showed no interest in what our names might be, but chalked three Babylonian words on the blackboard: iprus, niptarrasu, purussû, and asked the four of us if we noticed anything about them. There was silence. After boyhood Hebrew it was obvious that the words shared a common ‘root’ of three consonants, p, r and s. I suggested that. There was a slight nod, and I and the young ladies were then handed two sheets of cuneiform signs which we had to ‘learn for Monday’, and that, thanks to Fate, was it. The moment we started reading our first Babylonian words in cuneiform writing, ‘If a man …’ in Hammurabi’s Law Code, I knew that I was going to be doing Assyriology for good. It was one of those absolutely life-changing instances. No one else in the room knew the fateful inner turmoil that was in progress. But that is what happened to me. Lambert soon proved to be an austere and unforgiving teacher with a tendency to ironic acerbity: one had to take an unspoken vow of dedication and, one by one, the young ladies, unaffected by epiphanies, quietly gave up; before long I was alone with, if I may put it this way, destiny.
Cuneiform! The world’s oldest and hardest writing, older by far than any alphabet, written by long-dead Sumerians and Babylonians over more than three thousand years, and as extinct by the time of the Romans as any dinosaur. What a challenge! What an adventure!
I suppose it is in some way a remarkable matter to sit day by day over the dusty writings of the ancient kings of Mesopotamia within a mile or two of Birmingham’s Bull Ring and surrounded by useful university departments like French or Mechanical Engineering, but the oddness of it never struck me. Extinct languages that have been deciphered can be learned from grammar books in a classroom like any other, for the I do, you do, he does paradigm that comes with Latin, Greek or Hebrew also works for Sumerian and Babylonian.
Apprenticeship in cuneiform, as I soon discovered, actually involves two mountainous challenges: the signs and the languages. In normal walks of life it is counter-intuitive to separate language from script, for speakers and writers never think in such terms, but a language and its script are as much separate entities as a body and its clothing. Historically, Hebrew language, for example, has often been written in Arabic script, Aramaic occasionally rendered in Chinese characters, and, if necessary, Sanskrit could be carved in runes. Learning a new dead language in a new dead script is what some people might call a double whammy. With cuneiform, it is several degrees worse. Cuneiform script was used (primarily) for two dead languages, Sumerian and Akkadian, and until you read a few words of a tablet you cannot tell which language it is written in. Sumerian, the older language, has no known relative. Akkadian, of which Assyrian and Babylonian are northern and southern dialects, belongs to the Semitic language family and is helpfully related to Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, much as Latin is related to Italian and French and Spanish. Sumerian and Akkadian existed side by side in ancient Mesopotamian society and a properly educated scribe had to master both, a principle that still held vigorous sway in Lambert’s classroom.
The thing is, too, that these were real languages. The Akkadian verb was fluent and complex, capable of expressing humour, irony, satire and double-entendre just like English. Vocabulary, also, was rich in every direction: the miraculous, expensive and confusingly named Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, only recently completed and weighing in at five feet of shelving, has tried to document all Akkadian words in American. In 1969, when I began my studies, most of the available grammars and dictionaries were in German. The Akkadisches Handwörterbuch, for example, grey and monotonous in double columns of small print, was more or less affordable and indispensable, but dependence on it for me meant that I often ended up knowing what an Akkadian word was in German without remembering what the German meant in English. Fellow students reading history or physics seemed to me frankly to be on a cushy ride, and it was a source of only mixed satisfaction when even my friend Andrew Sutherland, who got an outstandingly good First in German, found himself quite unable to tell me what on earth Adam Falkenstein was talking about in his exposition of Sumerian grammar in the ‘helpful’ little book entitled das Sumerische.
Lambert favoured a Holmes-like exactitude in class where uncertainty or ignorance was exposed with a merciless needle. Cribs were forbidden: the naked text had to be in plain view on the table, read out lou
d, translated exactly, and the grammatical forms analysed. There was absolutely nowhere to hide. This was a school of Assyriology altogether different from that prevailing, say, in Oxford, where apparently even a tutor might rely on notes under the table to navigate through Assyrian royal inscriptions. Another thing they did there during the first weeks – according to my friend Jeremy Black – was to transliterate the opening chapter of Pride and Prejudice into syllabic cuneiform signs. This, it was felt, served to introduce students emphatically to the realities of cuneiform writing, for it clarified the impossibility of writing adjacent consonants in a syllabary and focused attention on the lack of ‘o’, ‘f’ or ‘j’ in cuneiform; this exercise resulted in a distilled product such as tu-ru-ut u-ni-we-er-sa-al-li ak-nu-le-eg-ge-ed.1 Lambert had no interest in such infantilia, nor did we ever try writing cuneiform with cross-cut lolly-sticks and Plasticine. One learned one’s signs, all of them, and that was that. Years and years later, starting off an experimental evening class in cuneiform at the Museum, I wrote on the blackboard the following inscription in cuneiform signs:
a-a a-am tu-u bi-i ma-ar-ri-id tu-ma-ar-ru.2
which sentence was literally true: I really wanted to leave early. It provoked the greatest excitement when the signs were identified in random order by the students from their list and called out one by one so that they could see the sentence finally emerge. I had to think up a completely different sentence, I am happy to say, for the same purpose, when I started another class some years later.
Cuneiform signs, which I think of as jewels in a bowl, full of meanings obvious and subtle, never seemed strange or alien to me, and I practised them endlessly. A red-letter day came when John Ruffle of the Birmingham City Museum gave me a copy of René Labat’s wonderful (and at that time utterly unobtainable) Manuel d’Épigraphie Akkadienne, in which three millennia of sign forms were clearly laid out across double pages in black ink and all you had to do was remember them. This was the only book I have ever possessed which fell to pieces through use.
Studying the world’s oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is, how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it. Writing, as I would define it, serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be ‘played back’ like a wax cylinder recording; the reader’s eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inert message springs into life.
As far as we know from archaeology, writing appeared for the first time in the world in ancient Mesopotamia. The most important point here is not the date, which was in or around 3500 BC, or all the trials and experiments before things really took off, but the unromantic fact that writing was bestowed on humanity by ancestors of the Inland Revenue service. The stimulus that set writing on its path was not the urge to create poetry or the desire to record history but the need to accommodate the demands of book-keepers. While the ultimate beginnings of it all remain irretrievable, the first documents which we encounter deal with the practical, large-scale administration of individuals, goods and wages, all carefully documented with names and numbers.
And their preferred medium from the outset was clay. Clay at first does seem a strange choice of writing support in a world where others employed wood, parchment, skin, leather or potsherds, but all of these are suitable for writing in ink and serve an entirely different mechanism. Riverside clay was liberally to hand; scribes always knew a source for the best quality requiring least preparation (hence, perhaps, the expression laughing all the way to the bank), and the essence of script was crucially intertwined with the quality of clay fabric from the outset. Ancient Mesopotamians, it must be said, knew clay like no one else. The medium lent a depth and sculptural quality to the writing; it is probable that, with a fluent scribe, both left and right hands moved subtly together in the creation of the signs. And what they wrote can last in the ground for ever. Since ancient inscriptions on organic materials tend to perish, we should be doubly appreciative that writing began that day in Mesopotamia on handfuls of beautiful clay and never swerved.
The earliest Sumerian signs, which we can represent in CAPITALS, used in these tablets resemble simple outlines drawn by a four-year-old child: ‘to stand’ is represented by the outline of a FOOT; a JUG represents ‘beer’. A large number of such picture signs came into being which, at first, functioned uncomplicatedly: each sign meant what it looked like. With a bagful of such signs and a handful of other symbols for numbers, it is possible to produce surprisingly complex records of ingoing or outgoing materials, but while the result was a recording system that might satisfy bureaucracy it could scarcely do justice to language. As long as matters were limited to monthly returns, things might have stopped there, but at a certain moment an outburst of explosive creativity meant that, before long, anything, including poetry and history, could be recorded too.
The primary revolution involved the idea that a given sign, representing some object graphically, could also convey the sound of that object’s name. For example, the very early sign for ‘barley’ was EAR-OF-BARLEY. The actual word ‘barley’ in Sumerian, was še, pronounced something like the syllable sheh. The EAR-OF-BARLEY sign now could be put to two different uses: to mean ‘barley’, or to express the sound of the syllable sheh to spell another word or part of a word, where the meaning ‘barley’ had no relevance, as if writing the beginning of the English word ‘shellfish’. The conception that a graphic sign could convey sound isolated from meaning is the Great Leap, for it meant that real and full writing could become possible. A whole system of signs was engendered that in combination could record words, speech, grammar and ultimately narrative literature in Sumerian and Akkadian – as well as other ancient Middle Eastern languages – with all their subtle and complex demands.
Even today we can visualise something of the important issues that must have arisen, such as having to agree on a new sign that hadn’t been needed before, or finding a sign to write something that cannot be drawn. No one beyond Lewis Carroll could envision drawing an ‘it’, for example, but a sign was needed for such an essential word. The solution was to employ an underworked sign that already existed and give that a new meaning. The Sumerian sign JUG was first used to write ‘beer’ (pronounced kaš) but otherwise had no other use than for jugs. It was this sign that was recruited to write bi. So it came about that the JUG sign now had the values kash, meaning ‘beer’, and bi, meaning ‘it’.
The Sumerian sign KA represents ‘mouth’, by means of a man’s head with the salient part emphasised. The same sign can also be used to write the words DUG4, ‘to speak’, ZÚ, ‘tooth’, KIR4, ‘nose’, INIM, ‘word’, and meaning and pronunciation come from context. This sign, KA, could also function as a box in which a smaller sign inside gives new meanings and new sounds. The small sign, NINDA, meaning ‘food’, was inserted inside KA to create a new sign, GU7, which means ‘to eat’, and A, ‘water’, was inserted inside KA to create NAG, ‘to drink’.
The very early signs before 3000 BC were drawn in firm as-yet-undried clay with a pointed tool much as we use a pencil on paper. Eventually these more or less realistic and often curved drawings were reduced to combinations of straight lines impressed with a specially cut reed or stylus that looked something like a chopstick. In addition, the orientation of the signs was changed and their uses and values considerably increased. The evolved cuneiform proper which resulted is written in signs made up of separate strokes impressed into the clay. Inscribing cuneiform on clay is, therefore, more akin to printing than writing. The characteristic wedge feature is a direct consequence of impressing the signs with a straight-edged writing tool in contrast to drawing with a point, and it is this that led the nineteenth-century decipherers to name the script cuneiform, derived from the Latin cuneus, ‘wedge’. Each application of the edge of the stylus-tip left a line ending in a wedge-head, be it the top of a vertical, the left end of a horizontal wedge,
or a diagonal produced by impressing the corner of the stylus. This feature was, perhaps, accidental, since the original plan was only to replace all sign elements with straight rather than curved lines. The reader’s eye sees the bottom of the triangular depression displaced by the stylus, which always appears like some kind of elongated wedge. Broadly speaking there are three primary strokes: horizontal, vertical and diagonal, and you can also find upward diagonal and downward diagonal wedges, but these are really modifications of the horizontal. With these five distinct shapes any cuneiform sign can be written. Neat individual strokes can be produced with a minimal movement of the right hand, ranging principally between due west to due north.
Cuneiform absolutely cannot be written with the left hand, and any school candidate who manifested that sinister tendency in antiquity would, no doubt, have it beaten out of him, as has often happened since in human history. I know from personal experience that it is impossible, having conducted countless museum workshops with schoolchildren, armed with clear sign drawings (and the lolly-stick and Plasticine bag). Children (unlike their parents or guardians) are always right on top of the complexities in minutes and dead keen to try it out, but every time about 70 per cent of them turn out to be left-handed. I always say, ‘You will have to do it with your right hand then’. The reply is usually, ‘I can’t write with my right hand,’ to which the correct riposte is, ‘How do you know you can’t write cuneiform with your right hand if you have never ever written cuneiform before?’
‘A good scribe,’ they said in Sumerian, ‘could follow the mouth’, which might mean the ability to write at dictation speed or just refer to accuracy. Some cuneiform signs consist of only a few ‘wedges’; complex signs can have many. Sign-shapes, structure and the sequence in which wedges should be impressed were fixed by convention, and youthful scribes had to learn them laboriously, much as Chinese characters have to be learned today.
The Ark Before Noah Page 2