Alberto Manguel

The precious core of civilisation

In 1989, two years before the Gulf war, I travelled to Baghdad to write an article on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon which the Iraqi Ministry of Culture then planned to have rebuilt. The project never materialised, but instead I was able to explore Baghdad and its intricate labyrinth. One experience was memorable above all: the discovery, in the National Museum, of two small clay tablets which had recently been unearthed in Syria, and dated back to the fourth millennium BC. 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 on one tablet a goat, on the other perhaps a sheep. Standing in the museum and staring at these ancient pieces of clay, I tried to picture how, on an unimaginably remote afternoon, a brilliant and anonymous ancestor thought of recording 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 realised, much to the reader’s chagrin, was not the invention of a poet but of an accountant.

The hand that made those first signs has long turned to dust; the tablets themselves, however, survived until a few months ago, when they disappeared in the looting of the museum. When I first saw them, in their grimy display case, I was overcome by the 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, and yet, 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 of our collective memories; the dialogue with a writer 6,000 years old is the model for my own ‘converse with the mighty dead’, as James Thomson once described the act of reading.

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