In some sense, it has sometimes seemed to me, cuneiform signs on clay don’t really exist, for all that one has to work with is depressions in a clay surface; the depth of each produces sufficient shadow to delineate it for the reader’s eye; an ant strolling microscopically across the surface of a tablet would encounter a minefield of spindly, angular ravines.
Unfortunately for the young apprentice, as the signs became stylised into cuneiform wedges their ‘realistic’ quality became much diminished, and after three millennia of daily use there were hardly any in which the ‘original’ graphic significance survived as a clue to meaning. One clear exception is EAR-OF-BARLEY, which is still recognisable for what it is in tablets of the first century AD.
King Hammurabi’s Law Code could have been written with first-year students, 3,750 years later, in mind. It is repetitive in structure, lots of the strange words recur, and before long you see that this is codified rational thinking expressed in real language by real people, who can talk to us even though they have been dead for so long:
If a man, some of whose property is lost, seizes his lost property in a man’s possession, if the man in whose hand the thing belonging to him is seized states, ‘A seller sold it to me; I bought it before witnesses’ and the owner of the lost property states: ‘I will produce witnesses who know my lost property,’ if the buyer produces the seller who sold it to him and the witnesses before whom he bought it and the owner of the lost property produces the witnesses who know the lost property, the judges shall examine their statements and the witnesses before whom the sale was made and the witnesses who know the lost property shall declare what they know before a god, the seller is a thief; he shall be put to death. The owner of the lost property shall take his lost property; the buyer shall take the money which he has paid from the house of the seller.
If the buyer does not produce the seller who sold it to him and the witnesses before whom he bought it but the owner of the lost property produces the witnesses who know his lost property, the buyer is a thief: he shall be put to death. The owner of the lost property shall take his lost property.
If the owner of the lost property does not produce witnesses who know his lost property, he is a felon since he has uttered slander; he shall be put to death.
Code of Hammurabi, Laws 9–12
This is a code that embodied legal principles that prevailed in the background: there is no evidence that judges quoted from it or followed it literally, nor would either guilty party here be facing a death sentence. Hammurabi’s masterpiece, like all attempts to tell people how to behave, was written in stone, and the cuneiform signs in which it was recorded were deliberately old-fashioned (in comparison with writing on contemporary, everyday tablets), in order to convey to a reader that the guiding principles and the dynasty that had codified them were eternal. This ‘archaising’ of type of signs, too, happens to be perfect for the beginner, because they are clear and elegant and often still preserve within themselves something of the remote ‘picture sign’ from which they evolved.
After about three years of round-the-clock effort, everything becomes clear to the long-suffering acolyte. Reading cuneiform becomes second nature and the wedge, at first painful, becomes a magic bridge to a long-dead world populated by recognisable fellow humans. I would go so far as to recommend Assyriology enthusiastically as a way of life to many, especially when certain points about it are borne in mind. One is the cheerful fact that almost any cuneiform sign can be used in up to four distinct ways:
• Logograms, which spell a complete Sumerian word, one sign per word, such as kaš = ‘beer’, or lugal = ‘king’.
• Syllabograms, which spell one syllable, such as BA or UG, which usually form part of a word.
• Phonetic complements, which are placed next to (or sometimes inside) other signs as a clue to their pronunciation.
• Determinatives, which stand in front of or behind words, without being pronounced, as a clue to their meaning, such as GIŠ = ‘wood’, or DINGIR = ‘god’.
For example, the sign AN, if pronounced ‘dingir’, is just the Sumerian noun ‘god’, meaning god; if pronounced ‘an’ it is a syllable sign to write the sound ‘an’; if it is a phonetic complement it appears after a word ending in -an, or if a determinative sign it indicates that the name of a god follows. The reader’s decision as to which usage or value applies depends on the context.
The Sumerian language is written partly with logograms (especially nouns), partly with syllabograms (especially verbs and other bits of grammar), and partly with determinatives. Phonetic complements in Sumerian texts occur mostly inside complex signs.
The Akkadian language is written predominantly with syllabograms, based on the premise that to spell words in a retrievable way for a reader of Jane Austen they must be sliced up like a cucumber into their constituent elements, which are expressed in syllabic signs:
ku-ku-um-be-er = cucumber.
Cuneiform signs express syllables, and the slices are ‘pushed back together’ in order to reconstitute the sound of the underlying cucumber. The majority of cuneiform signs are used for syllables like this. Most syllable signs are simple like AB, IG, EM or UL, or BA, GI, ME or LU, but there are many like DAB, SIG or TUR. Rarer logographic signs with a longer structure, such as BULUG or MUNSUB, can hardly ever be used to spell words syllabically. Spelling with syllables is perfectly comfortable once you have learned the signs, but Akkadian is not always written that way. There is a special Mesopotamian device whereby traditional Sumerian logograms can be liberally used when writing Akkadian, leaving readers to supply the Akkadian equivalent themselves in the correct grammatical form. We are familiar with this process today in the specific case of the sign $, for which the sound ‘dollar’ is instantly supplied by the reader, who is usually oblivious of (and quite unconcerned with) what the symbol actually means. This substitution technique is central to the writing of Akkadian and is often aided by the use of phonetic complements.
For example, in the Ark Tablet with which this book is concerned, the hero Atra-hasīs’s name is spelt µat-ra-am-ḫa-si-is, where the cuneiform sign for the number ‘1’ precedes the personal name as determinative, which we show as µ (short for ‘man’), with the other syllables expressed by six straightforward syllabic signs, at, ra- and so on.
In contrast the famous words ‘destroy (your) house, build a boat’ are written ú-bu-ut É bi-ni MÁ. É and MÁ are old Sumerian logograms, or word signs, for which the corresponding Akkadian words are to be supplied by the reader; these are bītam, ‘house’, and eleppam, ‘boat’, respectively, both in the accusative case. The other Akkadian words ubut, ‘destroy!’ and bini, ‘build!’ are spelled out syllabically.
In itself, syllabic writing is not a complicated matter. Minimal consonantal signs to express English would require a table of 210 signs, which would consist of AB and BA, EB and BE, IB and BI, OB and BO and UB and BU, and so on for the twenty-one non-vowel letters, with a few independent vowels thrown in to be helpful. The cuneiform script, however, was never concerned to achieve helpful simplicity. It is characterised by three idiosyncratic factors:
Idiosyncrasy 1
In cuneiform writing, it hardly ever occurs that for a given syllabic sound such as ‘ab’ or ‘du’, there is only one sign that has that value. For historical reasons, there are usually several signs; in some cases there are many. For example, the syllabic sound ‘sha’ can theoretically be written with any one of the following six signs, if not more:
Idiosyncrasy 1: Multiple signs with one sound
This situation does not mean that all these values were in regular use at any one time. For many signs, syllabic use is fortunately limited, either by period, or genre of text.
Idiosyncrasy 2
In addition, most individual signs have more than one sound value; some, again, have many. Furthermore, things can differ from Sumerian to Akkadian.
SPECIMEN SIGN:
In Sumerian, words:
; utu = ‘sun’
dingir utu, ‘the Sun God’
ud, ‘day’
babbar, ‘white, shining’
zalag, ‘pure’.
In Akkadian, sounds:
ud/ut/ut/utam/tam/ta/sa16 /tú/pir/par/laḫ/liḫ/ḫiš.
Idiosyncrasy 2: Multiple values for one sign
Idiosyncrasy 3
When writing conventions were evolving, the earliest scribes tended to draw a box around signs that belonged together to produce meaning and it was up to the reader to put them in order. Such a system is not always free of ambiguity. Later Mesopotamian scribes displayed a different characteristic: all signs in a line touched and they wrote with no gaps between the words. Generally speaking, developed cuneiform is right justified and if there are not enough signs to fill a whole line naturally, gaps appear within the line. Fancy calligraphers such as those in the royal Assyrian library at Nineveh liked to stretch out or distort certain signs to avoid empty space. The realisation that there are no gaps between words is hard to believe for the absolute beginner. One crumb of comfort is that a word could never be divided over two lines.
These cuneatic idiosyncrasies mean that reading involves first identifying a given sign, then understanding whether it is a logogram, syllabogram, phonetic complement or determinative, and finally choosing the correct sound reading if it is a syllabogram. Young scribes like young Assyriologists just had to accept that all cuneiform signs had more than one sound value and all sounds could be represented by more than one cuneiform sign, or, in other words, Polyvalence is All. In practice, traditions restricted the use of many signs. Since words are usually spelled in syllables, the eye quickly learns to select readings that produce harmony and correct grammar, discarding unlikely or impossible sequences.
From the very earliest stages Mesopotamian scribes found themselves making lists of words, for it was crucial to establish what the signs were as they developed and were agreed on, both to avoid confusion and to allow them to be taught. We find that mature cuneiform ended up as a fairly tidy set of some six hundred signs that was universally subscribed to by all Mesopotamian writers thereafter. Sign shapes were certainly streamlined, similar signs might coalesce and once in a while a new value was introduced, but one is hard put to point to major innovations or changes over that vast expanse of time once writing was standardised. Any unwieldy proliferation of invented signs at the outset was evidently reined in and controlled, evidently anticipating the chaos that would ensue if all Mesopotamia’s cities came up with their own local signs and insisted that they were ‘right’. It is hard to credit that this remarkable script discipline would have come about of its own accord. One might imagine a ‘summit’ at which those who were responsible for the use and dissemination of the new tool would agree between them on what was to be the sign list that everyone would use.
Wedge shape and calligraphic proportion did not remain static over three thousand years of use. Teachers of sign-writing in cuneiform school always promoted the accepted shapes with vigour, and personal style in handwriting had no place at all. Early cuneiform around 2900 BC has long, slim wedges; the first-millennium Assyrian librarians perfected a canon of proportions to such an extent that one library scribe can hardly be distinguished from another without micro-photography, while under the Seleucids in the fourth century BC cuneiform signs leaned so far backwards that they look like dominoes on the verge of collapse.
Some of the first lists to appear came to be copied and recopied by apprentices ever afterwards, such as the ‘Names and Professions List’, which gives all titles and activities and was still revered at the end of the first millennium BC, even if many of the words were completely out of date. Certain lists concentrated on the signs, arranging them in a learnable sequence by their shape, and analysing pronunciation, composition and ultimately meaning. Others were assembled by subject matter: anything made of wood; anything made of stone; animals, plants or gods. Cuneiform signs could only be brought together by graphic structure or meaning: our default system of alphabetic order would not be possible for another two thousand years. As the linguistic domination of Sumerian declined, Akkadian equivalents to or translations of all the Sumerian words were included. The lists grew, evolved, and were eventually edited into established or even ‘canonical’ series of texts, the perpetual bread and butter of the scribal colleges. As the centuries unfolded and dynasties rose and fell, the Mesopotamian cultural backbone bent and swayed with changes but the written tradition remained a stable entity. A solid continuum of scribal tradition saw to it that the inherited lore in Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform was preserved for ever. It was this unique Mesopotamian institution that made it possible for the same list of words to survive from 3000 to 300 BC. Tradition was consciously and deliberately safeguarded and passed on by a winding queue of dedicated scribes to whose hands the whole of knowledge, transmitted by the gods after Atra-hasīs’s Flood, was entrusted.
The scribe’s responsibility was to ensure anonymous transmission of this heritage without intervention or change. The older a particular tablet the more valued its contents. The core of this heritage was exemplified by the word lists. In them all the words and signs for everything were logically and retrievably stored.
While cuneiform script was used for the writing of the Sumerian and Akkadian languages for three thousand years it was often exported way beyond the home borders by itinerant Mesopotamian scribes, with the result that it came to be used to write Hittite, Hurrian, Elamite, Mitannian and other languages too, while in the second millennium BC Akkadian was widely used as an international language for correspondence, diplomacy and treaties. The flexibility and adaptability of the cuneiform script meant that the sounds, and therefore the grammar and vocabulary of languages completely unrelated to Sumerian or Akkadian, could likewise be reduced to writing and, in the same way, ultimately consigned to posterity. Despite its spiky appearance and undeniable complexities, cuneiform served the civilised world for an unimaginable length of time and, in the same breath, it is much more fun than any alphabet.
Reading those first laws of Hammurabi with Professor Lambert led to a thesis on Babylonian exorcistic incantations under the same teacher, and working for three years on the Dictionary in the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Then, to my great joy, I was appointed Assistant Keeper in what was then called the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum. Fate intervened at that point, too, for the intimidating Chairman of the interviewing board was Director David Wilson, a man who I later found referred to cuneiform writing as chicken scratches and favoured an attitude of apparent disdain for Assyriology as a way of life. During the interview, something prompted me to bring up my one dose of field experience at the University of Birmingham excavation in Orkney, where I had sat about on the edge of the trench for a month being sarcastic about illiterate civilisations but had happened to make the only real find of the season; a spot of desultory trowel work by me one morning accidentally laid bare a fine Viking sword in a ludicrously good state of preservation. All the other archaeologists present squirmed in unspeakable jealousy at the sight of my find, but as far as I was concerned the thing was uninscribed and therefore not that interesting. As I recounted this incident, David Wilson, unknown to me then as the international authority on the Vikings that he is, leaned forward in excitement to ask a technical question, and I have never quite got rid of the feeling that it was this archaeological fluke that got me the cuneiform job. After signing the Official Secrets Act, I was handed my heavy, passport-to-the-Nation’s-treasure key, which is soberly inscribed IF LOST 20/- REWARD.
The tablet collections in the British Museum defied and still defy belief. Cupboards full of shelves laden with Victorian glass-topped boxes house about a hundred and thirty thousand tablets of clay inscribed in cuneiform writing, with three thousand years of wonderful, wedge-shaped messages. Who could ask for more?
* * *
1 Truth universally acknowled
ged
2 I am to be married tomorrow
3
Words and People
How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?
Yes, and back again.
Anon
We ought, being plunged in at the deep end, to consider without delay which part of the world has provided our cuneiform tablets (for they do not, as I think my old professor secretly believed, grow in museums), and hunt for the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians who produced them. At the same time there is the important question of what the old Mesopotamians actually wrote.
The cuneiform homeland is identified under a single, resonant name that in the normal world usually lies buried somewhere at the back of the mind: Mesopotamia. Such a resonant name is due to Greek; meso means between, and potamus means river (hippopotamus, to the Greek mind, is a ‘river horse’). There was a period when junior-school teachers drew the rivers in question on blackboards for their pupils, Euphrates to the left and Tigris to the right, all the while happily reciting How many Miles to Babylon? Since the First World War, however, the once familiar name Mesopotamia has been altogether supplanted by that for the same territory today, modern Iraq. The very names of those rivers are half as old as time, recognisable in the unfolding sequence of languages that encapsulate Mesopotamia’s history: buranun and idigna in Sumerian, purattu and idiqlat in Babylonian, perat and hiddeqel in Hebrew, euphrátēs and tigris in Greek, and furāt and dijla in Arabic.
Like the Nile in Egypt, the twin rivers Euphrates and Tigris were the very lifeblood of ancient Mesopotamia. The fertility and wealth that they bestowed on the world’s most expert irrigators had far-reaching consequences, for ancient Iraq became a world stage for the interplay of discovery, invention, trade and politics. We do not know who got there first to harness the waters. Certainly the Sumerians – known best for the Royal Graves that Sir Leonard Woolley uncovered at their capital city, Ur – were early. It is they who, most probably, made the first moves towards writing well before 3000 BC, and it is their language, as we have seen, which was the first to be recorded in the developing cuneiform script. With the advent of Mesopotamian writing, prehistory came to an end and history – acknowledging events and depending on records – became a meaningful term.
The Ark Before Noah Page 3
