The Ark Before Noah

by Irving Finkel

  Today we know a surprising amount about ancient Mesopotamia. In part this is, of course, due to archaeology, which can analyse graves and architecture and pots and pans, but a deeper understanding of a vanished culture depends inevitably on its written documents. It is from these that we can outline their history and populate it with characters and events; we can observe the populations at work in their daily lives, we can read their prayers and their literature and learn something of their natures. Those on the trail of ancient Mesopotamia through their documents are blessed in their choice of writing medium, for even unbaked tablets of clay can last intact in the ground for millennia.

  (The fortunate archaeologist who finds tablets on his excavation will encounter them wet to the touch if they are unbaked, but they will harden sufficiently in the warm, open air to be safely entrusted to the impatient epigrapher within a day or two. It is exciting beyond words to find one of these things actually in the ground, to harvest it like a potato and read it for the first time.)

  This survival factor means that the widest spread of documents survives, state and private, much of it ephemeral and never intended for eternity. Startlingly, most of the cuneiform tablets ever written – if not deliberately destroyed in antiquity and not as yet excavated – still wait for us in the ground of Iraq: all we have to do is dig them up one day, and read them.

  Digging actually started in the 1840s, and cuneiform tablets were soon forthcoming in great number, long before anyone could understand them. The motive behind the first expeditions was to excavate in the territory where the events of the Bible had been enacted, with the principal idea of substantiating Holy Writ. Excavations were carried out under permit from the Turkish Administration which at that time provided for the export of the finds to London. It was this reality that led to the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform and the development of the field of Assyriology. To any right-thinking individual the decipherment of cuneiform must rank among the great intellectual achievements of humanity and, in my view, should be commemorated on postage stamps and fridge magnets. The decipherment was only possible, much as with Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the help of parallel inscriptions in more than one language. Just as the Greek translation on the Rosetta Stone allowed pioneer Egyptologists to unlock the version in Egyptian hieroglyphs, so an Old Persian cuneiform inscription at Bisutun in Iran enabled contemporary Babylonian cuneiform of around 500 BC, to be, gradually, understood. This was because the old Persian text was accompanied by a translation into Babylonian. In both cases the spelling of royal names, Cleopatra and Ptolemy in Egyptian, Dariawush (Darius) in Babylonian, provided the first glimmerings of understanding of how these ancient, essentially syllabic sign systems worked.

  Without some bilingual prompt of this kind, cuneiform would probably have remained impenetrable for ever. The first identified cuneiform signs, da-, ri- and so forth, coupled with the suspicion that Babylonian might be a Semitic tongue, meant that decipherment found itself on the right track from early on, and progress followed comparatively rapidly. Crucial brainboxes here were Georg Grotefend (1775–1853) and Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1864–1925) for the Old Persian version, and, most importantly, the Irish clergyman Edward Hincks (1792–1866), an unsung genius if ever there was one, who, marvellously, took up cuneiform studies in the hope that they would aid him in his serious work on Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hincks was the first person in the modern world to understand the nature and complexities of Babylonian cuneiform. One persistent cause of confusion was how to tell the difference between Sumerian and Akkadian since they were both written in one and the same script. Some scholars still believed right into the twentieth century that Sumerian was not a real language at all, but a sort of code made up by the scribes. There were cuneiform codes, as a matter of fact, but Sumerian was not one of them. Today we have full sign lists, advanced grammars and weighty dictionaries to help us read ancient Babylonian, and similar resources for Sumerian. With these extraordinary advantages created by generations of heroic scholars it is now possible to read the Ark Tablet and quite comfortably translate it into English.

  The venerable culture of this antique land is something extraordinary, the contributions of which to the modern world often go unnoticed. Every thinking child, for example, has at one time or another asked why minutes and hours are divided into sixtieths of all things instead of sensible tens, and why, worse yet, circles are divided into three hundred and sixtieths. The reason is the Mesopotamian preference for sexagesimal mathematics, which developed with the dawn of writing and persisted unthreatened by decimal counting. Counting in sixties was transmitted from Mesopotamians to us by serious-minded Greek mathematicians, who encountered Babylon and its records, thoroughly sexagesimal, still alive at the end of the first millennium BC, spotted their potential and promptly recycled them; the consequence is celebrated on everybody’s wrist today. Mesopotamia’s place on the archaeologist’s roll of honour will always be high: out of the ground have come the wheel and pottery, cities and palaces, bronze and gold, art and sculpture. But writing changed everything.

  From the earliest times, well before 3000 BC, nomads came to settle in Mesopotamia, attracted by abundance and blending amicably into the resident populations. Some of the newcomers spoke an early form of Akkadian, which, in its Assyrian and Babylonian forms, was to co-exist with Sumerian for more than a millennium until the latter subsided into a purely ‘bookish’ role, much like Latin in the Middle Ages. Akkadian survived as Mesopotamia’s main spoken language altogether for a good three thousand years, evolving as any language must over such a long period, until it was eventually knocked out for good by another Semitic tongue, Aramaic, at the end of the first millennium BC. By the second century AD, as the Pax Romana, or ‘Roman peace,’ prevailed and Hadrian was planning his wall, the last readers and writers of cuneiform were dying in Mesopotamia, and their distinguished and hallowed script became finally extinct until it was so brilliantly deciphered in the nineteenth century AD.

  Third-millennium Sumerian culture had seen the rise of powerful city-states that lived in uneasy collaboration; it took the political abilities of Sargon I, king of Akkad, in about 2300 BC to develop (to the delight of later historians) the first empire in history, stretching far beyond Mesopotamia proper into modern-day Iran, Asia Minor and Syria. His capital, Akkad, probably somewhere near the city of Babylon, gave rise to our modern term for his language and culture, Akkadian.

  The break-up of Sargon’s empire saw a Sumerian renaissance and the rise to prominence of the city of Ur, famous especially as the birthplace of Abraham. Here a succession of powerful kings like Naram-Sin, or Shulgi supported empires and trading of their own in about 2000 BC without ignoring the claims of music, literature and art, and even boasting of their accomplishments as literati, musicians and men of culture.

  Incursions of Semitic Amorite speakers from the west of Mesopotamia proper ushered in a succession of new dynasties, so power came to relocate from the city of Isin to nearby Larsa and ultimately to Babylon, where Hammurabi set up his iconic law-code in the eighteenth century BC, quoted in the previous chapter. The northern ‘Iraqi’ territory meanwhile saw Assyria establish her own far-flung empire. Assyrian armies, undeterred by hardship, hunted new terrain and tribute, with a string of famous kings like Sargon II, or Byron’s Sennacherib – the wolf on the fold – and Great Librarian Ashurbanipal. Babylon, rid of invader Kassites, could ultimately collaborate with the Medes in the East to destroy Assyria for ever; the fateful destruction of Nineveh in 612 BC changed the world for ever and paved the way for the Neo-Babylonian Empire under Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar the Magnificent, the latter of whom plays an important role in this book. Nabonidus, the last native Mesopotamian king, lost his throne to Cyrus the Achaemenid in 539, and then came Alexander, the Seleucid kings and, ultimately, the end of the ancient Mesopotamian world.

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  Once the script had achieved maturity and grown beyond book-keeping, writing was applied with increasin
g liberality and inventiveness. Key dictionary texts from the early third millennium BC were soon followed by the first Sumerian narrative literature and royal inscriptions; by the closing decades of that millennium private letters accompany the unrelenting flow of administrative record-keeping. Semitic Akkadian texts remain rare before 2000 BC, but before long comes a richer literature in both Sumerian and Akkadian, with the first magical and medical texts and a wide sweep of omen or fortune-telling documents, and an increasing waterfall of economic and official documents, themselves now put in context by codified sets of laws.

  We can be sure that from very remote times favourite narratives about gods and men were transmitted orally, but after 2000 BC such works were increasingly committed to writing. As the old Sumerian tongue became hazy or obscure, many classical texts came to be translated word for word into Akkadian with the help of the lexical texts. Bilingual or two-language versions of hymns, spells and stories led the most gifted ancient scholars in the peace of their academies to undertake sophisticated grammatical studies in which the linguistically unrelated Sumerian and Akkadian were analytically compared. Some of the most revealing texts are round, currant-bun school exercises from Old Babylonian times, which give an open window on the curriculum that was designed to instil cuneiform literacy and ability in practical mathematics, offering us at the same time a glimpse of uncommitted pupils and the liberal use of the stick.

  Archives of merchant or banking families are often scattered far and wide due to ‘informal’ excavation in the nineteenth century, but working in collaboration, scholars today can reconstruct awe-inspiring details of marriages, births, deaths and the price of goods in the market. Those record-keepers would be utterly astonished if they knew what we get up to today. In the first millennium we even have, most wonderful of all, cuneiform libraries, where orderly housekeeping by real librarians meant that tablets were stored on end in alcoves according to the system. As both Babylonian language and script began to wind down in some quarters at the end of the first millennium BC, disciplines such as astrology and astronomy generated increasingly complex literature in traditional wedge-shaped form.

  Cuneiform tablets that are so precious to us now were usually just dumped in antiquity or recycled as building fill; only seldom are they discovered nicely sealed in a datable destruction level for the benefit of the archaeologist. Tablets in general become more plentiful with the passage of time, but Assyriological assessments of distribution or rarity are seldom significant; data usually reflect nothing more than the accident of survival.

  The most famous cuneiform library belonged to Assurbanipal (668–627 BC), the last great king of Assyria, who had a bookish mind. The royal librarian was always on the hunt for old and new tablets for his state-of-the-art Royal Library at Nineveh; his plan was to collect the entire inherited resources. His holdings, now the pride and joy of the British Museum tablet collection, were one of the real wonders of antiquity (far surpassing gardens or lighthouses), and we can still read Assurbanipal’s written orders to certain ‘literary’ agents who were despatched down south to Babylonia to borrow, purloin or simply commandeer anything interesting that was not already included on the royal shelves:

  Order of the king to Shadunu: I am well – let your heart be at ease!

  The day you read (this) my tablet, get hold of Shumaya son of Shuma-ukin, Bel-etir, his brother, Aplaya, son of Arkat-ili and the scholars from Borsippa whom you know and collect whatever tablets are in their houses, and whatever tablets as are stored in the temple Ezida; tablets (including): those for amulets for the king; those for the purifying rivers for Nisannu [month I]; the amulet for the rivers for the month Tashritu [month VII]; for the House-of-Water-Sprinkling (ritual); the amulet concerning the rivers of the Sun’s decisions; four amulets for the head of the king’s bed and the feet of the king’s bed; the Cedar Weapon for the head of the king’s bed; the incantation ‘May Ea and Asalluhi combine their collected wisdom’; the series ‘Battle’, whatever there might be, together with their extra, single-column tablets; for ‘No arrow should come near a man in battle’; ‘Walking in Open Country’, ‘Entering the Palace’, the instructions for ‘Hand-Lifting’; the inscriptions for stones and … which are good for the kingship; ‘Purification of a Village’; ‘Giddiness’, ‘Out of Concern’, and whatever is needed for the Palace, whatever there is, and rare tablets that are known to you do not exist in Assyria. Search them out and bring them to me! I have just written to the temple-steward and the governor; in the houses where you set your hand no one can withhold a tablet from you! And, should you find any tablet or ritual instruction that I have not written to you about that is good for the Palace, take that as well and send it to me.

  The king regarded Babylonian handwriting with disfavour, and so a roomful of trained calligraphers at the capital worked around the clock to produce perfect Assyrian copies of the incoming acquisitions for him. In time the Nineveh libraries grew to contain the richest tablet resources ever put together under one Mesopotamian roof, anticipating, in some measure, the ideas behind the library at Alexandria.

  What it would be to spend a week in Assurbanipal’s library! The prime fantasy element for the cuneiform reader is that all the individual documents and multi-tablet compositions would have been complete on the shelves; Gilgamesh I–XII all in a row: none of the library tablets would have been tolerated in broken condition, and, if something untoward happened, they would be recopied. Everything was available in full. This is truly the stuff of dreams, for it is seldom indeed that a perfect cuneiform tablet comes to light, and Assyriologists are conditioned to live with broken fragments and damaged signs, never ‘knowing the end of the story’. In Assurbanipal’s day scholars who wanted to talk over the interpretation of a thorny phrase occurring in a letter to the king about some ominous occurrence could pull down from the shelves (1) the standard version – complete; (2) a variant edition from Babylon or Uruk in the south – complete; (3) a highly ‘unorthodox’ or provincial version from some obscure place that still ought to be consulted – complete; and (4) any number of explanatory commentaries, where learned diviners had already recorded their own bright ideas which might bring insight – complete. Perhaps they might also have to hand some really venerable tablet, valued even if fragmentary and accorded special care, although the administrators would always be on the lookout for a better copy. Today we can muster bits of all this range of library writings, and it takes a huge leap of imagination to envisage a situation where the only problem for a tablet reader might be to understand the sense of the signs or the meaning of the words. The king’s effort at completion in assembling top-quality clay manuscripts meant that the first resources seen by Western decipherers in the middle of the nineteenth century were both the fullest and most easily legible of any that could possibly have been dug up for them.

  Nineveh’s destruction in 612 BC at the hands of the Medes and Babylonians saw the palatial buildings sacked and burnt, but fire to a clay librarian was not the disaster that it was to Eratosthenes, the keeper of the scrolls. When Assurbanipal’s tablets were discovered in the nineteenth century, as deliciously described by Henry Layard, the thousands of broken pieces were mostly in fine condition, fired to crisp terracotta, awaiting decipherment and ‘re-joining’ by generations of patient Assyriologists over the centuries to come. Fortunately many of Assurbanipal’s literary treasures existed in several duplicating copies, so that today the wording can sometimes be recovered in full even when none of the source tablets is itself complete. It was this library that contained the Assyrian pieces of Atrahasīs and the Epic of Gilgamesh, which George Smith was the first to identify and translate.

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  Given what lies in the world’s museums and collections it will be a long time before there is a shortage of cuneiform material to work on and there is always a shortage of workers. In the nineteenth century, after decipherment had been achieved, standards for scholarship were set very high. The true giants – usuall
y hot-house trained in Germany – knew their Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopic, Syriac and Aramaic before they even looked at Babylonian. On top of that they stood tall in other ways and it is astonishing how fast-acquired and deep was their understanding. When I first started work at Chicago in 1976 Erica Reiner, then editor of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, mentioned one day that her predecessors Benno Landsberger and Leo Oppenheim (later examples of these giants) had both read every cuneiform text published since it all began in 1850 (and, what is more, remembered every line). Today, when cuneiform books, articles and texts are published uninterruptedly, this feat would be beyond anyone’s abilities. One consequence of this is that modern scholars tend to limit themselves to one or other language and one or other period with increasingly narrowing perspectives. In Lambert’s classroom this nail-buffing, I-am-a-specialist idea that we sometimes encountered in visiting scholars was heavily frowned upon and later subjected to derision, for a real cuneiformist was expected to read anything and everything in either language, and quickly too. This model stood me in good stead when I got to the British Museum, for that is what has to be done.