A History of the World in 100 Objects (15 page)

While experts are still working hard on the early history of Mesopotamian script some points are already very apparent, and many of them are visible in this oblong of baked clay. You can see clearly how a reed stylus has pressed the marks into the soft clay, which has then been baked hard so that it is now a handsome orange. If you tap it, you can hear that this tablet is very tough indeed – that’s why it has survived. But even baked clay doesn’t last for ever, especially if it has been exposed to damp. One of our challenges in the British Museum is that we often have to re-bake the tablets in a special kiln in order to consolidate the surface and preserve the information inscribed on the clay.

Our little beer-rationing tablet is divided into three rows of four boxes each, and in each box the signs – typically for this date – are read from top to bottom, moving right to left, before you move on to the next box. The signs are pictographs, drawings of items which stand just for that item or something closely related to it. So the symbol for beer is an upright jar with a pointed base – a picture of the vessel that was actually used to store the beer rations. The word for ‘ration’ itself is conveyed graphically by a human head, juxtaposed with a bowl, from which it appears to be drinking; the signs in each of the boxes are accompanied by circular and semicircular marks which represent the number of rations recorded.

You could say that this script isn’t really writing in the strict sense, that it’s more a kind of mnemonic, a repertoire of signs that can be used to carry quite complex messages. The crucial breakthrough to real writing came when it was first understood that a graphic symbol, like the one for beer on the tablet, could be used to mean not just the thing it showed, but what the word for the thing sounded like. At this point writing became phonetic, and then all kinds of new communication became possible.

When the earliest cities and states grew up in the world’s fertile river valleys around 5,000 years ago, one of the challenges for leaders was how to govern these new societies. How do you impose your will not just on a couple of hundred villagers, but on tens of thousands of city dwellers? Nearly all these new rulers discovered that, as well as using military force and official ideology, if you want to control populations on this scale you need to write things down.

We tend to think of writing as being about poetry or fiction or history, what we might call literature. But early literature was in fact oral – learnt by heart and then recited or sung. People wrote down what they could not learn by heart, what they couldn’t turn into verse. So pretty well everywhere early writing seems to have been about record-keeping, bean-counting or, as in the case of this little tablet, beer-counting. Beer was the staple drink in Mesopotamia and was issued as rations to workers. Money, laws, trade, employment: this is the stuff of early writing, and it’s writing like that on this tablet that ultimately changes the nature of state control and state power. Only later does writing move from rations to emotions; the accountants got there long before the poets. It’s all thoroughly bureaucratic stuff. I asked Sir Gus O’Donnell, the head of the British civil service, for his view:

The tablet is a first sign of writing; but it also tells you about the growth of the early beginnings of the state. You’ve got a civil service here, starting to come into place in order to record what’s going on. Here, very clearly, is the state paying some workers for some work that’s been done. They need to keep a track of the public finances, they need to know how much has been paid: it needs to be fair.

By 3000
BC
the people who had to run the various city-states of Mesopotamia were discovering how to use written records for all kinds of day-to-day administration, keeping large temples running or tracking the movement and storage of goods. Most of the early clay tablets in the British Museum collection, like this one, come from the city of Uruk, roughly halfway between modern Baghdad and Basra. Uruk was just one of the large, rich city-states of Mesopotamia that had grown too big and too complex for anyone to be able to run them just by word of mouth. Gus O’Donnell elaborates:

This is a society where the economy is in its first stages – there is no money, and no currency. How do they get around that? The symbols tell us that they’ve used beer. No liquidity crisis here; they are coming up with a different way of getting around the problem of the absence of a currency and, at the same time, sorting out how to have a functioning state. As this society develops, you can see that this will become more and more important. And the ability to keep track, to write things down, which is a crucial element of the modern state – to know how much money you’re spending, and to know what you’re getting for it – is starting to emerge. This tablet for me is the first ever equivalent of the cabinet secretary’s notebook – it’s that important.

When writing in the full sense was developing, with phonetic symbols replacing pictograms, life as a scribe must have been very exciting. The creation of new sound signs was probably quite a fast-moving process, and as they developed, the signs would have had to be listed – the earliest dictionaries if you like – beginning an intellectual process of categorizing words, things and the relationships between them that has never stopped since. Our little beer-ration tablet leads, directly and swiftly, to the possibility of thinking quite differently about ourselves and about the world that surrounds us.

John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, describes what happens to the human mind when writing becomes part of culture:

Writing is essential for the creation of what we think of as human civilization. It has a creative capacity that may not even have been intended. I think you don’t understand the full import of the revolution brought by writing if you think of it just as preserving information into the future. There are two areas where it makes an absolutely decisive difference to the whole history of the human species. One is complex thought. There’s a limit to what you can do with the spoken word. You cannot really do higher mathematics or even more complex forms of philosophical argument unless you have some way of writing it down and scanning it. So it’s not adequate to think of writing just as a way of recording, for the future, facts about the past and the present. On the contrary, it is immensely creative. But there’s a second thing about writing which is just as important: when you write down you don’t just record what already exists, you create new entities – money, corporations, governments, complex forms of society. Writing is essential for all of them.

Writing seems to have emerged independently in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Central America – all of them expanding population centres – but there’s fierce debate and much rivalry about who wrote first. At the moment, the Mesopotamians seem to be in the lead, but that may simply be because their evidence – being in clay – has survived.

As we have seen, rulers trying to control their subjects in the new populous cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia initially used military force to coerce them. But in writing, they found an even more powerful weapon of social control. Even a reed pen turned out to be mightier than the sword.

The biblical story of Noah, his ark and the Great Flood has become so much part of our language that any child in Britain can tell you that the animals went in two by two. But the story of a Great Flood is one that goes back far beyond the Bible to many other societies. Which leads to a big question: we know about the Flood now because somebody long ago wrote the story down – but when did the very idea of writing down a story begin?

Locals from Bloomsbury often drop in to the British Museum. Just over 140 years ago, one of those locals, a regular lunchtime visitor, was a man called George Smith. He was an apprentice to a printing firm not far from the Museum, and he had become fascinated by the collection of ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets. He became so engrossed by these that he taught himself to read the wedge-shaped, cuneiform script in which they were written, and in due course he became one of the leading cuneiform scholars of his day. In 1872 Smith studied a particular tablet from Nineveh (in modern Iraq), and that’s what I want to look at now.

The library where we keep the clay tablets from Mesopotamia – there are about 130,000 of them – is a room filled with shelves from floor to ceiling, with a narrow wooden tray on each shelf with up to a dozen clay tablets in it – most of them fragments. The piece that in 1872 particularly interested George Smith is about 15 centimetres (just under 6 inches) high and made of dark brown clay, and it’s covered with densely written text organized into two close columns. From a distance, it looks a bit like the small-ads column of an old-fashioned newspaper. It would originally have been rectangular, but sections have broken off in the past. But this fragment, once George Smith had grasped what it actually was, was going to shake the foundations of one of the great stories of the Old Testament, and raise big questions about the role of scripture and its relationship to truth.

Our tablet is about a flood – about a man who is told by his god to build a boat and to load it with his family and animals, because a deluge is about to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth. The tale on the tablet was startlingly familiar to George Smith because, as he read and deciphered, it became clear that what he had in front of him was an ancient myth that paralleled and – most importantly – predated the story of Noah and his ark. Just to remind you, here are a few snippets of the Noah story from the Bible (Genesis 6:14–7:4):

Make thee an ark … and of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring unto the ark … I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

And here’s a snippet of what George Smith read on the clay tablet:

demolish the house, and build a boat! Abandon wealth and seek survival. Spurn property, save life. Take on board all living things’ seed! The boat you will build, her dimensions all shall be equal: her length and breadth shall be the same. Cover her with a roof, like the ocean below, and he will send you a rain of plenty.

That a Hebrew biblical story should already have been told on a Mesopotamian clay tablet was an astounding discovery – and Smith knew it, as a contemporary account tells us:

Smith took the tablet and began to read over the lines which the conservator who had cleaned the tablet had brought to light; and when he saw that they contained the portion of the legend he had hoped to find there, he said, ‘I am the first man to read that after 2,000 years of oblivion.’ Setting the tablet on the table, he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself!

This really was a discovery worth taking your clothes off for. The tablet, now universally known as the Flood Tablet, had been written down in what is now Iraq in the seventh century
BC
, roughly 400 years before the oldest surviving version of the Bible narrative. Was it thinkable that the Bible narrative, far from being a specially privileged revelation, was merely part of a common stock of legend that was shared by the whole Middle East?

It was one of the great moments in the nineteenth century’s radical rewriting of world history. George Smith published the tablet only twelve years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
. And, in doing so, he opened a religious Pandora’s box. Professor David Damrosch, from Columbia University, gauges the Flood Tablet’s seismic impact: