The Flood Tablet / The Gilgamesh Tablet / Library of Ashurbanipal at the British Museum
Minimalist Week. Day 1.
A series in which I prove how clever, right or the genuine article I am in short and topical writings.
A shout-out to artificial intelligence! Thanks to a computer algorithm we might be able to have a more complete original tellings of the Assyrian myths soon. What a joy to wake up to.
I forget shouting away my drowsiness at the radio, that they’ve already all gone bloody home!† when Pedro Siza Vieira, the Portuguese minister of economy urges former emigrants to become immigrants again and return†, when my ears prick up properly at the word Ashurbanipal. Aside from it being the name of my phone (I name all my gadgets, because I am too old to keep a tablet apart from a laptop and it would all soon become, “Where is my thingummyjig?”), Ashurbanipal was an Assyrian king who compiled a monumental library, alas now in shards.
I am proud to be proven clever once again to have set my alarm at 8:49 and not on the dot of 9 am, when guaranteed you are going to wake up to the misery of the world. On this carefully chosen minute of the hour I get to be welcomed back to earth more often than not, by Lawrence Pollard (photo).
The benefits of sliding back in before the news are not necessarily derived from the lighter breakfast for thought he may bring to you over the airwaves, for he most certainly tackles many a troubling item each broadcast anew; but no matter what kind of sticky situations his interviewees are in, or how much they would like to rule the world, he can muster it all with a cheerful, diplomatic and playful soul that is a tonic to the heart. No better way to start the day than by a shining example. Count the number of people he has “met” with all their subjective interests, selflessly and with attention for each individual human plight and measure the calibre of his soul. Goes to show there hides a healer (wholemaker/unifier) of sorts in the most unsuspecting corners: even in a broadcaster/journalist, allowing people to voice their missions.
2.500 year old tablets
Today, an eloquent Assyriologist Enrique Jiminez (who also speaks a fair word of German!) explains the challenge of reassembling 30.000 pieces of clay tablets written between 700 and 600 BC found in the library of Ashurbanipal (in Iraq). We are talking here of “pieces of biscuits” that make up the biggest jigsaw puzzle in the world. They have to contain the socio-literary culture of Nineveh, but this could include anything from the more mundane - or as Lawrence delicately words - “fascinating laundry lists” to something more exciting for the reader of myth: amongst the fragments are the literary texts of the epic of Gilgamesh, the story of the Flood, the poem of Creation, the poem of the Righteous Sufferer.
With the lettering looking like the footprints of a bird - or to cite the truly enthused Lawrence unable to make out even which way goes up: it looks as if a crow has walked over the tablet - it becomes the "most amazing project. . . like four dimensional chess" to make sense of these smashed up fragments.
The sports' commentator chips in, how it is underselling it to even compare it to piecing the world's largest puzzle together, for you must realise there isn't a picture on the cover, we don't know how many puzzles there are, or how many pieces are missing from each puzzle! Quite frankly: man has to call it quits at this point.
It is not humanly possible.
But making the impossible possible is what life on Earth for man seems to be about and hey presto, we now have a computer which has already used bio-informatics to match sequences of DNA that can do the job. It puts the fragments of text through a database of known combinations to lend the isolated biscuit-crumb pieces a cohesive meaning. Thank god we didn't throw them away as unintelligible claw marks, of which one chunky attractively shaped example in a museum would otherwise have sufficed.
So far, the most exciting discovery made has been new phrases out of the Hymn to the god Marduk, the main god for the city of Babylon. This was a hymn schoolboys had to copy out, and it is their exercises which now lie amongst these pieces of cuneiform helping us to complete sacred texts.
May all you schoolboys and girls be inspired to do more homework. One day it might really matter! Parents, three cheers for Assyriologists and may they inspire your offspring to rush off and write more essays on their tablets (or other thingummies)!
-You can listen to the interview with the leader of this project at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with Lawrence on the BBC World Radio Service here - item starts at 48 minutes into the recording.
footnote
† I am not angry just disappointed at not receiving a single word from my Portuguese colleague since she decided to “retire” for good (which is not the same moment as her return to Portugal itself, and totally unplanned, and not conducive to receiving the prophecy. And what else is there to do in retirement?)