The library also housed maps, plans, dictionaries, books of grammar and mundane tax forms, everyday ‘to do’ lists and legal records. There were a few ‘weirdo’ things, also, Finkel told me. ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘Well, you know, strange dramas: there is one about a relationship between a god and his mother-in-law that was probably performed as a play in Babylon.’
The king ordered every temple in Babylonia, in the south, to give him a copy of every piece of literature they owned. In some cases, pieces of writing had to be commandeered for the royal library.
Every piece of clay writing in the library is written in exactly the same style of cuneiform. The king employed a roomful of scribes to read every single thing that went into the library and copy it out into perfect Assyrian cuneiform writing, ‘like BBC English,’ Finkel suggests. Important things were baked to terracotta, so that they would survive for a long time, and less important things were simply laid out in the sun to dry.
The cuneiform on one particular clay tablet looks completely different to the rest. It has really big, childish writing on it and looks totally out of place. Finkel picked it up and began reading, tracing his finger across the clay tablet in his hands.
Turn your faces to the petition manifest in my raised hands. May your fierce hearts rest, May your reins be appeased, grant me reconciliation That I may sing your praises without forgetting to the widespread people.
It’s an incantation, written in a child’s hand, with letters a centimetre high which aren’t joined up. It was written by King Ashurbanipal when he was a child and learning to write. This is his school exercise book. Just as you might still have a school exercise book or two at home, to remind you of when you were learning to write, the king must have decided to keep this clay tablet as a souvenir of his childhood, a marker of the days when his love of literature was formed.
The tablet begins, ‘Ea, Shamash, and Marduk, what are my iniquities?’ and continues with an incantation to the gods to forgive the writer and release him from sickness. The prayer is written to appease the wrath of a god who has stricken him down with illness.
In the young king’s case, at the time, he was more than likely copying the incantation out as an exercise.
‘How old do you think he was when he wrote this?’ I asked Finkel.
‘About 12?’ he replied. ‘We don’t know for sure.’ There is only one tablet in the world of which scholars feel sure about the age of the scribe. That is because the scribe bit his tablet. Thousands of years later, the American curator who looked after it saw the teeth marks, slipped the tablet in his pocket and took it to his dentist. The dentist said that the marks were made by the teeth of a seven-year-old boy who lived over two millennia ago.
The boy who copied out the incantation grew up, became king, ruled for 39 years and, over that time, built up an epic library. Two and a half thousand years ago, the clay tablets were stored upright on shelves, like we store books – except for a few things, such as love letters, which were kept in baskets.
The fact that the library has survived is something of a miracle. Towards the end of King Ashurbanipal’s reign, the city of Nineveh was ransacked and destroyed by the Medes and the Babylonians. They set the king’s precious library on fire. A whole upper floor came crashing down to the ground, and the tablets were smashed into pieces; the city was left in ruins. Bizarrely, this devastation saved the library from destruction. The fire baked the library’s clay tablets into terracotta, which survived for thousands of years inside the earth.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s first archaeologists started digging around what was once Nineveh and found these pieces of baked, smashed-up clay with strange writing upon them. Some pieces that had been caught in the fire were black; others, which the fire had missed, were damp after millennia inside the earth. Fortunately some of these were still intact. All the archaeologists had to do was lay them out in the sun to dry, just as the scribes had done when they were creating the library back in the sixth century BC.
Thanks to the archaeological permit, the pieces were brought to England to the British Museum. Over time, the meaning of the writing was worked out. The Babylonians unwittingly left a code for the nineteenth century scholars who had discovered them.
The cuneiform tablets in the library are written either in Sumerian, which is unlike any language we have today, or in Akkadian, which is related to modern Semitic languages and easier to make sense of. The Babylonians also wrote bilinguals, with a line of Sumerian translated into a line of Akkadian. ‘The bilinguals are gold dust,’ said Finkel. ‘This was code-cracking with a crib from the codemaker.’ In the nineteenth century, the decipherers of Akkadian began with words like ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘tree’, and with numbers, then began to recognize prefixes and suffixes and slowly worked out the shape of the language. Once they’d worked out how to read Akkadian, they used the bilinguals to work out Sumerian.
Ever since then, curators have been gluing fragments of the clay tablets back together. ‘This is the greatest jigsaw of all time,’ Finkel explained. Each time a piece of clay is matched to another piece found smashed in the ground, a spell, an ancient recipe or a story comes back into the light.
Over the last three decades, Finkel has been slowly bringing more and more of ancient Nineveh into the twenty-first century. He loves the thrill of it: ‘There is nothing so satisfying as the moment when you rejoin two pieces of writing that have been separated for two and a half thousand years. Of course, the tablets are often broken at the most exciting moment, just when the hero finds the heroine, and says …’ Finding out the rest of the ancient story when you find the missing piece of clay tablet must be a sublime moment.
In many tablets that weren’t part of Ashurbanipal’s library, Finkel can recognize the work of different hands, just by looking at the shape of the calligraphy on different tablets; just as we all have different handwriting, each person who wrote on a clay tablet wrote in a slightly different way.
Almost all of the tablets, no matter what their size, are covered with writing, on the back and on the front. ‘If you write a postcard home to your auntie, you usually fill all the space up, don’t you?’, Finkel asked me. The scribes of Nineveh of 600 BC were no different.
They put a little more effort into their writing in one sense, though, by inventing right-justified text. If they couldn’t fill a line with text, they filled it with dots or drew a horizontal line. ‘It looks more authoritative. We do it sometimes, now that we have computers, but we don’t often make the effort, like they did, when we’re writing by hand.’ He pointed out the dots and lines on some clay tablets to me so I could see it for myself.
Finkel is a great host. He is able to make the Ancient Assyrian world come alive. When I left the Arched Room and walked into the public galleries of the British Museum, I found myself in Room 9, which is filled with reliefs from the king’s palace in Nineveh. Suddenly, everything in that room was shimmering with life. I now know that beyond the reliefs showing images of battle and war is a library filled with love letters, stories, poems, spells, recipes and a school exercise book of the last great king of Assyria.
Anyone can go to the Arched Room to take a look: ‘If you have the keys to treasure, as we do, it is unforgivable not to give people access to it. We’re very proud that anyone can come in here and read and see things they would like to see,’ Finkel explained. He often shows children the wonderful clay tablets and would love to persuade them to learn cuneiform and enjoy the rewards it brings. ‘There is still so much to do. We need students to study cuneiform and keep the giant jigsaw going.’
I had a look at his actual keys, the huge bunch of them he carries around each day. The biggest, oldest one is the key to the collection: it opens the Arched Room in which the tablets are stored. On it are the words ‘If lost, 20 shillings reward’ – not a generous reward then, considering the treasures the key can unlock for you.
[Irving Finkel in the Arched Room] Irving Finkel is assistant keeper