Page 108 - The Secret Museum

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