Page 109 - The Secret Museum

of King Ashurbanipal’s reign, the city of Nineveh was ransacked and destroyed by

the Medes and the Babylonians. They set the king’s precious library on fire. A whole
upper floor came crashing down to the ground, and the tablets were smashed into
pieces; the city was left in ruins. Bizarrely, this devastation saved the library from
destruction. The fire baked the library’s clay tablets into terracotta, which survived
for thousands of years inside the earth.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s first archaeologists started digging
around what was once Nineveh and found these pieces of baked, smashed-up clay
with strange writing upon them. Some pieces that had been caught in the fire were

black; others, which the fire had missed, were damp after millennia inside the earth.
Fortunately some of these were still intact. All the archaeologists had to do was lay
them out in the sun to dry, just as the scribes had done when they were creating the
library back in the sixth century BC.

Thanks to the archaeological permit, the pieces were brought to England to the
British Museum. Over time, the meaning of the writing was worked out. The
Babylonians unwittingly left a code for the nineteenth century scholars who had
discovered them.

The cuneiform tablets in the library are written either in Sumerian, which is unlike

any language we have today, or in Akkadian, which is related to modern Semitic
languages and easier to make sense of. The Babylonians also wrote bilinguals, with a
line of Sumerian translated into a line of Akkadian. ‘The bilinguals are gold dust,’
said Finkel. ‘This was code-cracking with a crib from the codemaker.’ In the
nineteenth century, the decipherers of Akkadian began with words like ‘mother’,
‘father’ and ‘tree’, and with numbers, then began to recognize prefixes and suffixes
and slowly worked out the shape of the language. Once they’d worked out how to

read Akkadian, they used the bilinguals to work out Sumerian.

Ever since then, curators have been gluing fragments of the clay tablets back
together. ‘This is the greatest jigsaw of all time,’ Finkel explained. Each time a piece
of clay is matched to another piece found smashed in the ground, a spell, an ancient
recipe or a story comes back into the light.

Over the last three decades, Finkel has been slowly bringing more and more of
ancient Nineveh into the twenty-first century. He loves the thrill of it: ‘There is
nothing so satisfying as the moment when you rejoin two pieces of writing that have
been separated for two and a half thousand years. Of course, the tablets are often

broken at the most exciting moment, just when the hero finds the heroine, and says …’
Finding out the rest of the ancient story when you find the missing piece of clay tablet
must be a sublime moment.

In many tablets that weren’t part of Ashurbanipal’s library, Finkel can recognize
the work of different hands, just by looking at the shape of the calligraphy on different
tablets; just as we all have different handwriting, each person who wrote on a clay
tablet wrote in a slightly different way.