Full Moon over Noah's Ark

by Rick Antonson

  I narrowed in on the youngster, as his father did not mind. I took a photo, and turned the camera towards the boy, who closed his eyes rather than look at his portrait. His father poked his ribs, talking to him. When I played that shot his way though, I could see him look out of the corner of his eyes. I backed away, and then the boy invited my participation by having him film his father and me together. I recognized that this boy, not me, was a bridge builder.

  Each face I looked at looked back. No one averted eyes, and some made to speak directly to me. Glances and body language gave away that I was a topic of curious conversation, a novelty to be observed. The lack of one-to-one talking with me did not slow the evening nor did it make me feel anything but fully accepted. They were happy among themselves—pleased that I’d dropped in. The room never went silent. A heartfelt spirit filled the room with people making sure I had food or water or tea or that I knew I was being talked about, as though that conveyed their welcoming; it did.

  After the visitors had left, we watched a TV game show and a Kurdish comedy sketch called Habo Kurdish Komidi. The sitcom skits were about two men and a woman who were lost on a road to nowhere. Their mishaps in social and political situations brought laughter around the room. I could discern slapstick insincerity, but not the pointed parody. Canned laughter may be a Hollywood invention, but it has gone global.

  The next morning, I entered the front room to find Ali sitting alone, the string of beads in hand, his fingers mulling through them. It was still dark outside. He acknowledged my entrance with a happy face and slim smile. I sat across from him and voiced morning pleasantries, as did he. The exchange was about the tones of our voices, not our exact words.

  Even before I was settled in my chair, one of the sons entered the room with a tray for each of us. Apparently Ali had waited for my arrival before he would accept his pre-dawn tea. I wondered how long I’d delayed his morning ritual by sleeping in. There were several pieces of warm flatbread for me, along with honey for the bread and tea. And cheese, white and squared, to be eaten by hand. Ali received only tea.

  Time spent with Ali was like meditating with a guru. It was a privilege I almost overlooked, at first mistaking his quiet as discomfort, instead of recognizing it as his gift of shared solitude and uncommitted contemplation.

  Soon it was time for action. Dubba, Huner, Hemin, and I jumped into Hemin’s Toyota. Dubba had swapped his black shirt for a red one with bands of black and white. “Mr. Rick, today we drive far into the country, to the border with Iran, of course not crossing the border—or you would not see home again for quite a while!”

  On our route out of town was the Erbil Civilization Museum. We pulled in. To me it was an unexpected sight to see a large stone wheel there in the foreground, with all the clumsy, cartoonish character of the world’s first invention (well, if not “first,” it might trail right behind “fire” and be just ahead of “string”). It symbolized the dawn of civilization, in my mind. And yet, as I thought about it more, it made perfect sense to be displayed in a place like Erbil. This was Mesopotamia, which we know was a place of tradespeople, farming, grazing animals, developing governance. Fighting. The past was all assembled within Erbil’s museum; the displays were static, the statues clean and tall and chipped. There is a dearth of visitor “attractions” in Erbil, this being one near the top of a very short list.

  We left the city, heading east up a long incline, frequently slowing at police checkpoints. Only once did a guard approach us. Dubba rolled down his window, and we were flagged on.

  In an hour’s time we were far beyond the city’s outskirts and into winding, hilly roads twisting back upon one another. We came across villages, some of only a few people, the largest having no more than a thousand residents. Often we stopped, and one of my hosts would get out and go in a doorway and bring back a bag of peanuts or biscuits to keep me going, while they stayed true to Ramadan. When I said, “I too will fast,” Dubba said, “That is not necessary for you. We must. Here is a bottle of water for you. That, too, we do not have during daylight of fasting.”

  I had to prod about something, even if to be told no, because I needed to be certain there was not an angle I was overlooking, and so I asked, “Tomorrow, can we head west from Erbil?”

  “Not too far. It would not be good.”

  “To Mosul?”

  Huner shook his head. “No, Mr. Rick. Not to Mosul.” He spoke to Hemin and Dubba, who responded to him in Kurdish. Dubba turned to me. “Huner once military. He has much experience and many contacts and he says he would not go there, as it is a very dangerous place now.”

  “It is as I expected. But I hoped …”

  “Why?”

  “The Library of Nineveh. The ruins are there on the other side of the Tigris River, near Mosul. That is what I wish to visit.”

  “One day you will. Not this week, though; not this year, maybe not this decade.”

  * * *

  On the east bank of the Tigris River, in 700 BCE Assyria, stood the city of Nineveh, a great trading center three miles across, enough to straddle north-south trading routes while commanding east-west corridors at a propitious intersection. Its perimeter wall was over seven miles long. A river, the Khosr, flowed through Nineveh on its way to meet the Tigris.

  Sennacherib’s Palace, Kuyunjik, north-eastern façade and Grand Entrance. King Sennacherib made the minor town of Nineveh the magnificent capital of his Assyrian Empire and, for many years, the largest city in the world. His grandson King Ashurbanipal (reigning 668–627 BCE) constructed a new palace and library at Nineveh to house all of Mesopotamia’s written works. In 612, an alliance that included the Medes, Persians, and Babylonians destroyed much of Nineveh. British adventurer Austen Layard excavated the ruins in 1847, rediscovering Sennacherib’s seventy-one-room palace in 1849 and unearthing that library, including over 20,000 fragmented clay tablets in cuneiform.

  Nineveh began as a hamlet before Erbil existed, though its longevity of continuous use fades by comparison. The ruler Sennacherib is the one who gave Nineveh its architectural greatness, his palace said to have had seventy rooms or more, including a library of clay tablets he left when he died in 681 BCE.

  In archeological legend however, it is the name of a successor king who is remembered for a remarkable library. King Ashurbanipal of Assyria (668–627 BCE) also gave the “royal” designation to the library when he oversaw the gathering of thousands of works written in clay. Scribes were mandated to collect all the texts they could, and to copy every important chronicle they could borrow. These volumes recounted history and the sciences, including botany and chemistry, mathematics and geography, and more. There were correspondence and documents of legal and administrative nature, as well as accounting tallies and registers of people and goods. The Royal Library of Nineveh’s15 collection included stories of legends, myths, and magic.

  The ravages of war, the shifting of commercial routes, and the birth of newer cities such as Mosul eventually lessened Nineveh’s importance. Its demise came at the end of the Assyrian Empire; in 612 it was “razed to the ground.”

  Eroded and dissolved by centuries of winds and rainfall, the remaining walls of Nineveh’s buildings tumbled into muddy heaps, burying a trove of sculptures as well as the library. Covered by the sands of time, the collapsed city formed mounds, or “tells,” the most famous of which is Kuyunjik, which stands sixty-five feet above the desert floor. What survived of Nineveh would lie barely visible, largely hidden beneath twenty feet of sand until its first accurate survey by the Briton Claudius Rich, the father of Mesopotamian archeology, in 1820. Just as Sennacherib and his early Nineveh library is less well remembered today than the later Ashurbanipal collection, so too are Rich’s impressive efforts outshone today by the work conducted twenty-five years later by Austen Henry Layard and his colleague Hormuzd Rassam.

  Called “one of the great archaeological pioneers of the Victorian Age,” at the age of twenty-two Austen Henry Layard set out to travel o
verland from Europe to Ceylon to work in a completely different profession: law. Meandering to Mosul, he became intrigued with tells said to cover ancient ruins.

  Austen Henry Layard partnered with Hormuzd Rassam in exploring the ruins of Ashurbanipal’s library and making the discoveries that led to the “Flood Tablet.” Portrait © Simon Carr.

  Among the “tells,” one would become known as Nineveh (Kuyunjik) and the other as Nimrud, twenty miles south of Mosul.16 “As the sun went down, I saw for the first time the great conical mound of Nimrud rising against the clear evening sky. It was on the opposite side of the river and not very distant, and the impression that it made upon me was one never to be forgotten … my thought ran constantly upon the possibility of thoroughly exploring with the spade those great ruins.”

  Inspired, Layard abandoned the lure of Ceylon and instead ventured to Constantinople. It was 1842. There he met the British ambassador, who provided employment and eventual support for his further explorations. In 1845, he left for the rubble and remnants near Mosul that had so enchanted him. He wrote about these “mighty ruins in the midst of deserts, defying, by their very desolation and lack of definite form, the description of the traveller.”

  In 1847, Layard unearthed discoveries during excavations he could not have undertaken without the local knowledge and deft management of Rassam. Taking advantage of Rassam’s good relationship with local tribesmen, Layard’s exploration of the ruins would identify the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh. During excavation, Layard discovered “walls paneled with stone slabs”—part of the colossal palace. Further burrowing the revealed remains of a magnificent library thought to belong to Ashurbanipal, alternatively designated as the Library of Nineveh, though both are tags of convenience. Found were approximately 32,000 fragments, which after joining and aligning have become some 26,500 different inscribed clay tablets, although the process of fitting the pieces back together continues to this day and may reveal that some of the pieces fit together on single tablets.

  Layard knew the resulting cargo they shipped to London from Ottoman Iraq contained stories that were difficult, perhaps impossible, to decipher. The task of interpreting the tablets in the mid-1800s was hampered primarily by the lack of scholars conversant with cuneiform writing. Even expecting surprises, Layard would not have imagined how unbelievable one story concealed among the tablets would prove to be. For that alarming revelation, the archaeologist had to wait twenty-five years for the deciphering talents of the George Smith.

  George Smith was a slightly built thirty-two-year-old in 1872 when he earned his supercharged reputation. For the self-taught Assyriologist, his foray into the world of cuneiform interpretation was the start of a brief but exhilarating career.

  Smith’s early role at the British Museum, as a repairer, was working on the tablets shipped by Layard and Rassam. He was in a junior capacity, running errands and doing miscellaneous chores, his main tasks being cleaning, identifying, and joining fragments.

  Henry Rawlinson, Assyriologist extraordinaire and a public presence associated with the museum (though not on its staff), was told of this young man’s abilities with cuneiform, a notoriously difficult field of study and a writing form decoded, in part, under Rawlinson’s oversight. Smith was brought into Rawlinson’s sphere and later promoted to assistant, with increased responsibility for organizing and cataloging the broken clay cylinders and tablets.

  Smith became the Assyriology Department’s senior assistant by the early 1870s, and his responsibilities grew to include deciphering complicated texts. While studying a set of linked chapters in a book of tales told sequentially on small tablets of baked clay, he realized one tablet told of a flood, a boat, animals, and a landing—along with a hero figure. Smith realized he had discovered a Babylonian flood story that not only predated but possibly presaged the story of Noah’s Ark. His astonishment was in his observation. “I am the first man to read this text after two thousand years of oblivion.”

  Smith’s decipherment of The Epic of Gilgamesh is recognized in large part because of his work on the surprising eleventh chapter of that book, later designated the Flood Tablet. The tablet’s story startled and confused the public when it was announced as a predecessor to the Noah story, foreshadowing everything first written down a thousand years later in Hebrew texts. Here, in cuneiform writing, was everything from a god of wrath and a flood of unimaginable consequences to the building of a survival boat, the rescue vessel’s rendezvous with a mountain, and a prophetic rainbow. And a hero named Utnapishtim.

  In his monograph Discovering Gilgamesh, Vybarr Cregan-Reid portrays Smith’s years following the public announcement of his deciphering this story as exciting, lonely, productive, and ultimately tragic. The Telegraph’s hailing of the discovery’s importance ensured a standout crowd for Smith’s first public reading of the transliterated story at the Society of Biblical Archaeology on December 3, 1872. In the audience was British Prime Minister William Gladstone.

  Smith determined that a tablet fragment containing perhaps as much as seventeen lines of the flood epic was missing. He was set on visiting Mosul to explore the tells at Nineveh, believing the remainder of Gilgamesh’s eleventh chapter lay hidden there. Unearthing that remnant would bring the rest of the story to light.

  Funded for travel and exploration expenses by the Telegraph and other supporters, Smith took a leave of absence from the museum. In January 1873, he headed to Iraq to find the lost fragment of the Flood Tablet.

  Taha’s brother’s home was quiet when I woke on my third morning in Iraq, before sunrise. Others were up so a meal could be eaten and Ramadan respected. By mid-morning we were all off to visit Taha’s father and stepmother’s home, a few miles away. The entire family went along, though I rode over as part of the now-common gang of four. We were in Huner’s dark-blue Kia. Dubba, the only one of us to change his clothing each day, now wore a white over-shirt, trim black scarf, and billowing black pants (traditional Kurdish clothing called schawar). I liked his sense of fashion—nothing grand but always different. I’d describe it as “natty,” if outsized clothes can be.

  Taha’s father awaited our arrival in the forecourt garden of his home. He rose to acknowledge our entrance and welcomed me with a bend, not a bow. I was impressed with his Kurdish turban. He wore a suit befitting a clothier, the pants smartly pressed but without a pleat. Taha had told me of this man’s work life as a “self-taught tailor and stitcher.”

  “I am a friend of Taha’s,” I said to introduce myself.

  At mention of Taha’s name, he gave me a tight-lipped grin, clearly pleased with whatever I was trying to convey about his son who lived in a distant land.

  Taha and Ali’s step-mother, Iyshyeh Hamd, wore the weight of a country’s history and family’s ambitions on her beautiful face. When Saddam’s henchmen demanded she call her three Kurdish sons home from battling against Saddam, she said, “There are not three. I have four sons fighting for freedom. They’ll come home when they have won.”

  Taha and Ali’s father, the Kurdish tailor and patriarch shown here wearing his handsome turban (known as a jamadani), passed away, age 88, in 2015.

  Taha’s step-mother emerged to greet me, her slenderness accented by the baggy headscarf she wore and a draping one-piece black dress. Her face was lovely, storied and sincere, though not without despair. Its lines reflected eight long decades of life, but she smiled when one of her granddaughters danced behind me, letting loose as a youngster in a way her grandmother might not have experienced herself for seventy years.

  Both the elders had endured hard lives in a hard land; but there was food to share because of my visit. It was a generous display, more than morning tea—and set for my enjoyment alone. There was a discussion to the side of me; Ali spoke to Dubba, who turned to explain. “Dinner tonight is here, for you.”

  “Well …”

  “It is decided. Father says it is to be. Mother too.”

  I looked to Mother, whose eyes smiled a li
ttle, then brightened.

  “It is to be,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  With Huner driving, the four of us left the parents’ home and headed to the mountains. The highway signs showed Baghdad, which puzzled me.

  “Are we going to Baghdad?” I asked.

  “No. We head partway toward Kirkuk, where we will also not go,” Huner explained. “We will go to Sulimaniyah.”

  We eventually drove through Sulimaniyah and far into the hills, finding mountains. We stopped on a lonely patch of back road.

  “It is here that Taha and Gulie fought Saddam Hussein,” Dubba said.

  We got out of the car and viewed the mountains in reverence. We were far from any village.

  “Taha and Gulie were both in the Peshmerga,” said Dubba. “You have heard of Peshmerga?” Before I could answer, Dubba said, “They are fierce fighters. Kurdish. Peshmerga means ‘one who confronts death.’”

  We stood in silence for what seemed a long time. “It was resistance,” Dubba eventually said. “When you are home and see them, please tell Taha and Gulie we brought you here.”

  Dubba turned eastward. “Our fighters camped on the other side of those mountains. For many months we fought troops sent by Saddam. They had more weapons and more food. We had more resilience. The fighting, it seesawed over the hilltops. It took three nights of foot travel for a soldier to find food supplies and return for our army to eat. Battles were fierce. Villagers, at danger, helped us. Many Kurdish died.” He paused to recollect. “Hilabja is over other side of those mountains, not many miles away. Bloody Friday, it began as a sky-blue day.”

  Friday, March 16, 1988, saw over a dozen of Saddam’s bombing sorties target Hilabja’s public places and civilian homes for five hours. There had never been a bigger use of chemical weapons in an attack on civilians, let alone a leader’s fellow countrymen. One account claims the gas that wafted over the city was made to smell like oranges so people would breathe it in for the scent.