Our First Words, Written in Clay, in an Accountant's Hand

April 20, 2003

By ALBERTO MANGUEL

MONDION, France - In 1989, two years before the gulf war, I

traveled to Baghdad to write an article on the Hanging

Gardens of Babylon, which the Iraqi Ministry of Culture

planned to have rebuilt. The project never materialized,

but I was able to explore Baghdad and its intricate

labyrinth. One experience was memorable above all: the

discovery, in the National Museum of Iraq, of two small

clay tablets from the fourth millennium B.C. that had

recently been unearthed in Syria.

Each tablet was the size of the palm of my hand and bore a

few simple marks: a small indentation near the top, as if a

finger had been stuck into the clay, and below it a

stick-drawn animal, meant to represent a goat on one

tablet, and on the other, perhaps a sheep. Standing in the

museum and staring at these ancient tablets, I tried to

imagine how, on an unimaginably remote afternoon, a

brilliant and anonymous ancestor recorded a transaction of

livestock by drawing signs on clumps of dirt, and in doing

so invented for all future times the magical art of

writing. Writing, I realized, much to a reader's chagrin,

was the invention not of a poet but of an accountant.

The hand that made those first signs has long turned to

dust; but the tablets themselves survived until last week,

when they disappeared in the looting of the museum. When I

first saw them, in their dusty display case, I was overcome

by a vertiginous sense of witnessing the moment of my

beginning. Historians tell us that other magicians in China

and Central America also invented, at different times,

systems of writing. But for me, this was the starting

point.

The act that made it possible for a shepherd to carry,

locked in a piece of clay, the memory of a precise number

of goats and sheep, foreshadowed the vast universal

libraries in which the memory of humankind is held; the

dialogue with a writer 6,000 years old is the model for my

own "converse with the mighty dead," as the poet James

Thomson described the act of reading.

In those two lost tablets were all future writings: the

Book of Job, Superman comics, King Lear, the Sherlock

Holmes stories, all mathematical and scientific treatises,

Sappho and Whitman.

The tablets in the National Museum, the volumes in the

National Library and in the National Archives, the

exquisite collection of Korans kept at the Ministry of

Religious Endowment have practically all now disappeared.

Lost are the manuscripts lovingly penned by the great Arab

calligraphers, for whom the beauty of the script must

mirror the beauty of the contents. Vanished are collections

of tales, like "The Arabian Nights," which the 10th-century

Iraqi bookdealer Ibn al-Nadim called "evening stories"

because one was not supposed to waste the hours of the day

reading trivial entertainment.

The official documents that chronicled the Baghdad's

Ottoman rulers have joined the ashes of their masters. Gone

at last are the books that survived the Mongol conquest of

1258, when the invaders threw the libraries' contents into

the Tigris to build a bridge of paper that turned the

waters black with ink. No one will follow again the years

of correspondence that described voyages and cities caught

in time. And no one will ever consult these particular

copies of certain great reference works like "Dawn for the

Night-Blind" by the 14th-century Egyptian scholar

al-Qalqashandi, who, in one of its 14 volumes, explained in

great detail how each of the letters of Arabic script

should be formed, since he believed that what is written

will never perish.

Trust in the survival of the word, as well as the urge to

destroy it, is as old as the first clay tablets. To hold

and transmit memory, to teach through the experience of

others, to share the knowledge of the world and of

ourselves are some of the powers (and dangers) of books,

and the reasons why we both treasure and fear them.

And even from among the ruins, the written word calls out

to us. Four thousand years ago, our ancestors in

Mesopotamia already knew this. The Code of Hammurabi, a

collection of laws inscribed on a tall dark stone stele by

King Hammurabi of Babylon in the 18th century B.C. and

preserved today at the Louvre, states this in its epilogue:

"In order to prevent the powerful from oppressing the weak,

in order to give justice to the orphans and widows . . . I

have inscribed on my stele my precious words . . . . If one

is sufficiently wise to be capable of maintaining order in

the land, may he heed the words I have written on this

stele . . . . Let the oppressed citizen . . . have the

inscriptions read out . . . . The stele will show him his

case. And as he will understand what to expect, his heart

will be set at ease."

Alberto Manguel is the author of A History of

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/weekinreview/20MANG.html?ex=1051935232&ei=1&en=7050dc591c16027b