The earliest written tablets known were produced by the Sumerian civilisation of southern Mesopotamia, at the end of the fourth millennium BC. Their cuneiform script was later adopted by the Babylonians and Assyrians and spread further north. By allowing everything from debts and taxes to the will of the king to be permanently recorded, the written word supported the machinery and bureaucracy of ever-more complex cities, states and even empires. And, of course, with written records, history can begin. Archaeological remains can hint at what past cultures thought and believed, but words tell us directly.
Ashurbanipal’s library is the first systematic insight we have into the mental universe of an ancient civilisation. It contained thousands of texts from throughout his empire, which covered all of Mesopotamia and beyond, some of them copies of texts dating back to the third millennium BC. They range from receipts (for oxen, slaves, casks of wine) to prayers to legal documents, literature and medicine: essentially ‘the forerunners of everything’, says Jeanette Fincke, an expert in cuneiform texts who has catalogued the library’s Babylonian tablets at the British Museum. ‘And I honestly mean everything.’
What this archive reveals more than anything, though, is a society built around a fascination – if not an obsession – with the heavens. The tablets describe the movements of the sun, moon and planets as a divine script, carrying messages from the gods which shaped behaviour and decisions in every area of human life. ‘When in the month Ajaru, during the evening watch, the moon eclipses, the king will die,’ reads one tablet, part of a vast compendium of around 7,000 such omens called Enuma Anu Enlil. It’s the birth of an idea that has captivated humanity ever since: that our fate is written in the stars.
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The carvings in Ashurbanipal’s palace depict him as a bloodthirsty ruler; one relief shows him enjoying a picnic in his garden while the severed head of an enemy king hangs from a nearby tree. In 612 BC, a few years after Ashurbanipal’s death, Assyria’s enemies got their revenge. A coalition of former subjects, led by the Babylonians, conquered Nineveh and burned the palaces. The heat of the fire made the clay tablets inside bubble and warp, but also baked them hard enough to survive for thousands of years.
As well as the tablets that Rassam found, Layard unearthed crate-loads more in the palace that Ashurbanipal inherited from Sennacherib. Between them, the excavators shipped tens of thousands of clay fragments to the British Museum.2 Cuneiform tablets had been found before, but the huge scale of the Nineveh finds added urgency to the task of deciphering this strange script.
One of the pioneers was Rawlinson, the British consul. A few years earlier, he had risked his life scaling a cliff face in Persia to copy the mysterious wedge-shaped letters that were carved there as a message to the gods. Repeated in three different languages including the Babylonians’ Akkadian, it was a cuneiform version of the Rosetta Stone. By 1860, he and others had achieved a working knowledge of the complex symbols, and attempts to read the tablets from Nineveh began.
They reveal Ashurbanipal not just as a military leader but as an obsessive collector of texts who worked tirelessly to gather thousands of them from across his empire. He ‘wanted to collect the written knowledge and wisdom of the known world’, says Fincke. One tablet, for example, contains a message from the king to his agents: ‘The rare tablets that are known to you and are not in Assyria. Search for them and bring them to me!’ In particular, he targeted Babylonian texts, collecting more than 3,500 dating back 1,000 years. Although ruled by Assyria since around 900 BC, Babylonia had previously been a powerful empire in its own right. Its capital, Babylon, remained an important cultural and religious centre, and the Assyrians assimilated much of the Babylonian worldview.
One of the most famous finds from the library is the epic Gilgamesh, often described as the world’s first story. Thought to have been written in Babylon around 1700 BC but based on Sumerian poems centuries older, it describes a young, arrogant ruler – inspired by a real king of Uruk from the third millennium BC – who gains wisdom through a desperate, doomed search for immortality. Hailed today as a literary masterpiece, Gilgamesh caused a sensation when it was discovered because it includes a version of the biblical tale of Noah and the Flood, written centuries before the oldest copy of Genesis. (When assistant curator George Smith first deciphered this passage in the Reading Room of the British Museum in November 1872, he reportedly became so excited that he started taking off his clothes.) The poem is also full of celestial references. In one scene, the king has to outrun the sun. In another, he and his friend Enkidu defeat the Bull of Heaven – the constellation we now know as Taurus – set on them by the goddess Ishtar (associated with the planet Venus), and throw its severed thigh in her face. Some scholars think it’s a mythical explanation for why this constellation, by Mesopotamian times, had lost its hindquarters.
Another Babylonian epic from the library is Enuma Elish (‘When on High’). It’s less well known than Gilgamesh but arguably just as significant because it is one of the earliest known creation myths, the oldest surviving attempt to describe how the cosmos came about. It reached its definitive form around 1500 BC, but again was probably based on much older stories. The poem tells how Babylon’s patron god, Marduk (Jupiter), defeats the mother-goddess Tiamat and the forces of chaos. He tears her in half ‘like a dried fish’, and from the two pieces he creates the heavens and the Earth.
Marduk then brings order to the cosmos, setting the paths of the planets and stars and dividing the year into twelve months of thirty days, entrusting the night to the moon and the day to the sun. He unleashes the weather, and causes the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to run from Tiamat’s eyes. Then he builds himself a shrine in Babylon, and, with Ea, the god of water and wisdom, creates humankind. Like other early accounts of how people saw their cosmos, it’s a rich, epic vision, clearly more concerned with creating meaning than explaining facts. Archaeological evidence suggests that the people of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic saw events on the Earth and in the sky as intimately entwined. Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish, dating from the birth of civilisation, reveal a similarly holistic universe in which the terrestrial and celestial reflect and influence each other as two sides of the same coin.
Accordingly, Mesopotamian gods simultaneously inhabited both Earth and sky. Each major divinity existed as a statue in its own home city: Marduk, for example, lived in the Esagila temple in Babylon. Excavations show that the temple was 200 metres long, with huge courtyards leading to an inner shrine, and stood next to a ziggurat, or stepped tower. Priests at the temple attended to Marduk and his divine entourage (also statues), clothing, feeding and entertaining them, and carrying them around the city during religious processions. The twelve-day New Year’s festival was particularly important, during which, says the French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro, ‘the gods were exalted to not only renew time . . . but the universe itself’.
The gods also appeared in the heavens as celestial bodies, with the planets, including Marduk and Ishtar, accompanied by the moon god, Sin, and the sun, Shamash. They were thought capable of determining events on Earth, and through their celestial movements gave clues about what was to come. The priests of the Esagila temple, known as the ‘scribes of Enuma Anu Enlil’, were renowned for their ability to decode heavenly messages, with expertise dating back centuries. By interpreting the signs correctly and carrying out the appropriate rituals, it was possible to avoid any dire predicted consequences.
Ashurbanipal’s motivation in gathering these texts, then, wasn’t purely philosophical. He saw knowledge of the cosmos as vital for his very survival. By far the largest group of Babylonian texts in the king’s library concerns omens and divination, particularly relating to celestial events. His master plan, says Fincke, was ‘to collect as many tablets as possible with instructions for rituals and incantations that were vital to maintain him on his throne and in power’.
Watching the sky wasn’t the only form of divination: pretty much anything could yield messages from the gods, from sheep entrails, birthmarks, smoke or dice, to the call of a particular bird. To avert negative predictions, Babylonians had an arsenal of rituals called namburbi, a Sumerian word that means ‘loosening’ or ‘dispelling’; the evil could be untied like a knot. Like the residents of Çatalhöyük,