To attribute such an interpretation to the verb form that provides the ‘B’ half of all this If-data is, in fact, quite permissible, for there is undoubtedly a shortfall in the Akkadian verb with regard to modality. This means that, for example, the verb form iballuṭ, ‘he will live’, or ‘he will get better’, can sustain a range of nuances that in English are ‘he could/might/should/ought to get better’. In today’s world all predictions are hedged around with uncertainty or escape mechanisms. I do not see for a moment how things could have been different in ancient Mesopotamia.
There is one unique discussion of these matters in cuneiform by the top people who actually did this work and shouldered very real responsibility. It was published under the title ‘A Babylonian Diviner’s Manual’ by the Chicago scholar A. L. Oppenheim, and to some extent it comes to our rescue. The author quotes the first lines of fourteen completely unknown and rather strange tablets of terrestrial omens and eleven of equally unknown astral omens. He then writes paragraphs – as if responding to three questions from a persistent interviewer with a microphone (which is, I suppose, what we are) – as follows:
Q. How does your science work?
A. A sign that portends evil in the sky is also evil on earth; one that portends evil on earth is evil in the sky. When you look up a sign, be it one in the sky or one on earth and if that sign’s evil portent is confirmed then it has indeed occurred with regard to you in reference to an enemy or to a disease or to a famine. Check the date of that sign, and should no sign have occurred to counteract that sign, should no annulment have taken place, one cannot make it pass by, its evil consequence cannot be removed and it will happen. These are the things that you have to consider when you study the two collections … [He quotes the titles of the two terrestrial and astral series]. When you have identified the sign and when they ask you to save the city, the king and his subjects from enemy, pestilence and famine, what will you say? When they complain to you, how will you make the evil consequences bypass them?
Q. What have you given us in this document?
A. Altogether 24 tablets with signs occurring in the sky and on earth whose good and evil portents are in harmony(?). You will find in them every sign that has occurred in the sky and has been observed on earth.
Q. How do you make use of them?
A. This is the method to dispel them:
Twelve are the months of the year, 360 are its days. Study the length of the year and look in tablets for the timings of their disappearances, the visibilities and the first appearance of the stars, also the position of the Iku star at the beginning of the year, the first appearance of the sun and the moon in the months Addaru and Ulūlu, the risings and first appearance of the moon as observed each month; watch the opposition of the Pleiades and the moon and all this will give you the proper answer. Thus establish the months of the year and the days of the months, and do perfectly what you are doing. Should it happen to you that at the first visibility of the moon the weather should be cloudy, the water clock should be the means of computing it … [further details are given] Establish the length of the year and complete its intercalation. Pay attention and be not careless! [A helpful good and bad dates’ table concludes.]
This testimony, deriving from an expert in the hot seat, shows us explicitly several realities. On some level, ominous events mirror one another in heaven and earth. Several factors can have the effect of discounting an omen. Those that must be faced are dealt with, but the date is of extreme importance, and establishing the date in time of uncertainty crucial. There is here a great impression of very serious activity; it is full, however, of shifting criteria that allow, one might imagine, that many occurrences brought to the attention of the authorities could be safely ignored if need be.
I have the idea that the great lexical texts and sign lists between them were supposed to include every word in Sumerian and Akkadian and every cuneiform sign, so that they were meant to be encyclopaedic and comprehensive, in the same way that omens were meant to cover all eventualities. The idea of mūdû kalāma, ‘knowing everything’, is commonly mentioned. People often quibble as to whether, for example, the laborious amassing and cataloguing of systematic, logical and retrievable omen data over centuries in ancient Mesopotamia represents Science or not. Mixed up in this, I suppose, is the question of whether any of it ‘worked’. For the ancient Mesopotamian diviner there was a theoretical cosmic structure and endless methodical observational data to support it and that sounds a lot like science to me.
After-words
A handful of cuneiform tablets give us the highly unexpected. Among these are solitary political satire, or the bawdy text of a street-theatre portrayal of the god Marduk reviling his mother-in-law, as well as a smattering of precious ‘How-to’ instructions, such as the way to stain stones to look expensive, dye wool to undercut foreign imports, build a water clock for the diviners, or even play a board game.
And that reminds me. Odd things can happen in a museum. The Sumerians did have a board game, the so-called Royal Game of Ur, for which Woolley had found the type series of boards and equipment from about 2600 BC in his Ur cemetery. This classic board game lasted in the ancient Middle East for a good three thousand years, but in 177 BC, just before it went out of fashion, a well-known Babylonian astronomer wrote down the rules. His tablet had arrived in the British Museum in 1879, and for years lived in its box on a shelf in a tablet cupboard virtually opposite my desk. No one had ever deciphered the inscription, which made it first interesting, and after a while utterly compelling. I discovered (a ‘99 per cent perspiration’ job) that the game behind the rules was this old Sumerian game: the scribe likened the twelve playing squares up the middle of the board to the signs of the zodiac and the pieces to the planets moving through them.
I started hunting through the literature to find all the known archaeological examples, but in the heady first days after this breakthrough my colleague Dominique Collon came into my room one morning and said she had ‘discovered the Royal Game of Ur downstairs in one of our galleries’. Naturally I put this down to defensive satire, but she took me by the ear lobe and frogmarched me down the staircase to the pair of giant, human-headed bulls from Khorsabad, Sargon II’s royal capital, on the ground floor. She pointed triumphantly at the left bull and switched on the torch (which, oddly, she seemed to be carrying) and played the light across the worn marble plinth on which the bull was standing. The angle threw into sharp relief the scratched grid for the Royal Game of Ur which no one had ever noticed since the arrival of the sculptures in the 1850s. The grid had been recut with a dagger point several times, but the twenty-square design was unmistakable. A technical enquiry had come in from America, she said, about how Assyrian craftsmen carved the feet of the bulls and how broad the toenails were, so she had come down to check with ruler and torch, for that gallery was always in shadowy half-light. In so doing, she became the first ever person to spot the graffiti game board, which she could hardly fail to do after all my Look at this! droning on about the subject. The sculptures had originally been set up in a major public gateway with a great arch vaulting between them; it is not hard to imagine eighth-century-BC guards, uncomfortable on the plinth, whiling away point-duty out of the eye of the sergeant-at-arms with pebbles and dice which could be swept away at a moment’s notice, like fly gamblers surprised by a police constable in a modern street market. Our second Assyrian bull, directly opposite, showed a much more worn board of the same type. Then Julian Reade, on a flying visit to the Louvre the following weekend, found a grid for the game on one of their Khorsabad bulls, and, eventually, an Iraqi colleague reported in that a re-excavated bull in Iraq also had a scratched game board in the equivalent spot. This is wonderful new evidence for everyday life and behaviour, and also proves that pure archaeological discovery can take place in a museum as well as in the ground!
Many other things happened when I started investigating that game, but that is for another book. (And there have been oth
er discoveries like that inside the walls of the British Musuem, now and again …)
What, then, is lacking in Mesopotamian cuneiform? Truly personal, spontaneous writing of any kind is exceptionally rare, acknowledged authorship of even the famous, classic compositions likewise. Complex and evolving history meant that many voices and hands contributed to the literature we have, their names vanished for ever. Ironically it is mostly mundane administrative tablets that name their scribes, although many of those who copied and transmitted literary or library texts – as opposed to authoring them – included their own name in a colophon. On top of that, the teaching of tablet craft seems to have instilled a clear sense of what could be done on clay, and what not. Cuneiform scribbles, jottings, drafts or other informal materials are rare beyond marginal calculations in administrative texts; even drawings on clay are rare, despite the fact that the few which have come down to us betray very considerable mastery.
Did any outsiders learn cuneiform in antiquity? In the second millennium BC trained scribes sometimes departed from the Mesopotamian heartland with expertise in their head and libraries in a bag to seek, as it were, their fortune abroad. The work of some of these individuals is known to us; for instance, at the Syrian site of Meskene, exporting cuneiform know-how so that schoolboys from a different world would find themselves carefully copying lexical texts with ancient words or names that could never have meaning for them. At the same time, as Akkadian cuneiform swelled out to become the international means of communication across the Middle East, all petty kings would want a cuneiformist on their staff to handle their international correspondence, even if that meant laboriously dictating in native Mitannian to one’s Babylonian staff writer, the tablet then to be run to Egypt, where some other ex-pat Babylonian text-reader would read it and translate into Egyptian, perhaps adding a diplomatic touch, for the Pharaoh.
The widespread dissemination of cuneiform had other unanticipated consequences. At Ugarit in the fifteenth century BC new forces were at play in the history of writing. These led to the development of the first version of what is effectively an alphabet, in which thirty-one signs (including a word divider! Sissies!) sufficed to spell and record the Semitic Ugaritic language. The odd thing is that the signs in this new alphabet were also cuneiform, wedge-shapes written on clay in traditional fashion, but as simple as possible and quite unconnected with the Mesopotamian sign forms that had inspired them. It is as if the concept that writing had to be wedges on clay was too strong to allow a completely independent start. This Ugaritic script flourished in a context of a busy Bronze Age Mediterranean port, where the resident merchants no doubt spoke an abundance of languages and never lost a chance to do a bit of business, but it fell out of use after the city was destroyed in the early twelfth century BC, and the alphabet had to be invented all over again two hundred or so years later.
The invention of the alphabet with all its practical advantages did not directly affect the status of cuneiform writing for many centuries, and writing ink on parchment or leather with twenty-two letters was slow to displace wedge-writing altogether, although our picture of the use of Aramaic writing in the second half of the first millennium BC is hampered by the probability that it was extensively written on such perishable materials. The two systems certainly long overlapped, while the vastness of the resources in cuneiform coupled with the Mesopotamian sense of tradition and a very human reluctance to change meant that cuneiform was continuously kept alive in certain quarters long after Aramaic alphabetic script and language was in widespread use. The last users were, as far as we can see, astronomers and record keepers, who continued patiently doing what they had always done until the last heroic exponent laid down his stylus one day in the second century AD and expired.
Babylonian into Greek
How hard was it for motivated foreigners encountering cuneiform when it was still in use to make headway with it? Specifically, how could astronomical, mathematical and medical knowledge cross the immense divide from cuneiform Babylonian into alphabetic Greek, as we know it did from the use of sexigesimal calculations at the beginning of this chapter?
An astonishing fragment of Greek papyrus dated to the first century AD contains in one column a sequence of inked numbers that occur in a standard work of Late Babylonian astronomy referred to by scholars today as ‘System B’. The identification was made on the spot by Otto Neugebauer when the papyrus was shown to him, somewhat bashfully, by its present owner, who had purchased it as a schoolboy many decades earlier from a second-hand bookshop that always had a tantalising box of ‘old bits of writing’ on the counter.
Babylonian System B numbers: tabulated records of astronomical observations.
(picture acknowledgement 3.3)
Babylonian into Greek: System B numbers understood and copied in inked Greek script.
(picture acknowledgement 3.4)
Babylonian System B is an astronomical table (or ephemeris) that records the movements of the moon for 104–102 BC. As is evident from the photograph – even to the would-be Assyriologist – it consists exclusively of columns of cuneiform numbers. Cuneiform numbers from 1 to 60 work very simply, in fact any child could understand them and an interested, numerate Greek would have them down in about four minutes. What is more interesting is that to read this and most of the many other astronomical tablets found in the classic work Late Babylonian Astronomical Tablets from top to bottom, to control their contents and do it all into Greek, it is only necessary to master the following groups of signs:
Task 1. The numbers 1–60:
Task 2. The twelve month names:
Task 3. Twelve signs of the zodiac:
Task 4. The names of the planets:
In addition, a handful of simple ideograms such as ‘to be bright’ or ‘to be dark’.
Any Greek who was sufficiently motivated to get himself from Athens to Babylon, lured by the fabled shelves of astronomical observations and armed with relatively minimal starting knowledge, would be able to unlock cuneiform treasure in abundance. With this approach, learning bit by bit what common signs were and what they meant, texts with much more than numbers could be accessed. Astronomical, mathematical or medical texts are increasingly more complicated, but in fact these too could become accessible by learning limited numbers of new signs or sign sequences, mostly Sumerian ideograms. This smattering would give any medic a head start:
DIŠ NA If a man
Ú plant name follows
GIŠ wood name follows
NA4 stone name follows
ina-eš he should recover
TI he should recover
KI.MIN ditto
(Some verbs)
(Some nouns)
ÉN spell
Babylonian doctors had descriptive lists of plants and fresh or dried specimens to hand: a lot of mutually profitable ground could be covered.
There was no necessity with all this to think of learning language or script proper, for no one was going to expect the visitors to read Atrahasis, or explain the complications of Sumerian on the basis of Akkadian lexicography. A few extraordinary tablets survive from this late period with Babylonian school cuneiform exercises on one side and the cuneiform signs transliterated into Greek letters on the other. It seems to me that these can only be the product of Greeks learning Babylonian beyond the level of numbers, and it is tempting to see reflected in them a kind of beginner’s desperation as to whether it will ever be possible to remember the damned signs.
It is not trite to point out that this was a world altogether different before modern commerce, copyright and licences, and it is probable that there was warm collaboration within a small MIT-type group of talented Graeco-Babylonian individuals; I cannot see but that the Babylonians would be stimulated by the contact with new thinkers and keen to communicate. In this basic way a huge tranche of empirical knowledge, mathematical, astronomical, astrological and even medical, could pass with relative simplicity from complex cuneiform to graceful Greek: the i
nherited intellectual product of ancient Mesopotamian culture could be shipped out wholesale in a carpet-bag full of papyri.
Such a process is crucial to the humanities as a whole. There are many pointers that Babylonian ideas and data found their way into Greek learning, but the mechanism that enabled this has remained undiscussed and unexplained. In all likelihood it was simple. Intrinsic to it is that it was a two-way process. Most important is the realisation that essential intellectual achievement can be transmitted from a great but dying culture to renaissance within a younger and expanding culture, thanks to no more than a handful of intrepid and curious border-crossing individuals.
There is no reason either to assume that incoming Greek ideas fell on deaf ears. Two outstanding documents suggest this, one a medical text from the city of Uruk that attributes human diseases to one of four seats in the body – a wholly un-Babylonian proposition – the other the tablet of game rules already mentioned, again unlikely to be a wholly Babylonian conceit. It is probable, too, that the Greeks were bemused by the characteristic anonymity of Babylonian scholarship. Later, many Greeks put their names to inventions which had long been familiar to the old cuneiformists between the rivers and I have an idea that the Hellenes have got away with quite a lot in that direction.
Finally, let us return to the idea about the Babylonians (and all the others) being like us: easy to propose, complex to demonstrate, impossible to prove; and what exactly does ‘like’ mean, and what are ‘we’ like anyway …?
The Ark Before Noah Page 8
