The Return of the Flood: How ISIS is Destroying Iraq’s Literary Heritage

Paul M.M. Cooper assesses the damage done to Iraqi literature and heritage by ISIS’s destruction of thousands of undeciphered cuneiform tablets.

ISIS continues to shock the world with calculated acts of cultural vandalism: taking sledgehammers and electric drills to the millennia-old pieces of art held at Mosul Museum, bulldozing the archaeological sites of Nimrud and Dur-Sharrukin, and most recently releasing a video showing the destruction of artefacts at Hatra. While the predictable images of gleeful vandalism circulate on social media, archaeologists took stock of the antiquities destroyed: statues of the kings of Hatra that form “the finest of all the sculptures unearthed” in the region, several enormous winged bulls with human heads known as lamassu, and assorted irreplaceable relics of the Babylonian, Persian and Roman Empires.

ISIS’s goals are clear: to destroy anything that hints at the region’s pluralistic past, and to strike a blow full of impotent cruelty against the Iraqi government and international organisations such as the UN and UNESCO. Against this backdrop and coupled with the stunning callousness of the group’s ongoing humanitarian atrocities, it has been easy to overlook another loss, one felt particularly acutely by lovers of international literature the world over: that of the still-undeciphered cuneiform tablets caught up in ISIS’s frenzy of destruction.

Cuneiform is one of the oldest known written alphabets, recognisable by the wedge-shaped marks that make up its symbols (indeed, the name cuneiform itself comes from the Latin for “wedge shaped”). This distinctive character is due to how it was written: scribes in ancient Babylon, Assyria, and empires across Mesopotamia wrote by pressing a wedge-shaped stick or reed into soft clay tablets before baking them for permanence. These tablets are sometimes flat, but can also be cylindrical or square, with every surface of the three-dimensional object acting as page.

We owe a lot to this mode of writing. The Epic of Gilgamesh, arguably the first great work of literature, was found on twelve cuneiform tablets in the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, incidentally the heart of ISIS’s Iraqi stronghold in Mosul on the banks of the Tigris. Gilgamesh was discovered by Victorian excavators and shipped back to the British Museum among an enormous pile of undeciphered fragments. The translation of the epic transformed our understanding of human history and storytelling, and has since inspired everything from literature and theatre to Iraqi heavy metal and episodes of Star Trek. If such a discovery comprises only twelve tablets, then the possibility of losing thousands or even tens of thousands of similar pieces in Mosul is a self-evident tragedy.

While the Egyptians presided over millennia of flourishing civilisation on the banks of the Nile, their predilection for parchment made of the reed-like papyrus plant means that we have little of their records, their letters, their accounts of the times in which they lived, other than that which survived in the driest parts of Egypt, or they thought important enough to carve or paint on their walls. But the sprawling Mesopotamian empires of Assyria, Sumer and Babylon, like the Romans after them, were assiduous record keepers, and the hardiness of clay tablets has meant that many of them are as easy to read today as on the day they were first pressed into the clay.

Historians now have an unparalleled amount of historical detail about this region. Contracts, letters, messages to kings, creation myths, laws, school books and epic poems, in languages as varied as Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Hittite, Persian, Hurrian, Elamite, and Ugaritic: all of this has climbed to us up the tower of history thanks to only a few hundred scholars and translators around the world, toiling away at an alphabet that contains neither vowels nor punctuation, and often exists on partially fractured or erased tablets. To give some sense of the wealth that has survived, the British Museum alone has 130,000 fragments in its collection, spanning over 3,000 years – almost 100,000 of which remain undeciphered. It is thought that of the entire world’s 300,000 or so cuneiform fragments, only one-tenth have been read even once in modern times.

What’s striking about this enormous corpus of threatened literature, even that small amount that we are now able to read, is what it tells us about our shared human nature. Some of these voices are not just remarkable for their antiquity but also their humanity and familiarity.

One stunning example is a letter from a spoiled son named Iddin Sin to his mother, complaining that all the other boys at his boarding school have better clothes than him.

“From year to year, the clothes of the young gentlemen here become better, but you let my clothes get worse. Indeed, you persist in making my clothes poorer. At a time when in our house wool is used up like bread, you have sent me poor-quality clothes. The son of Adad-iddinam, whose father is only an assistant to my father, has two new sets of clothes while you fuss even about a single set of clothes for me. In spite of the fact that you gave birth to me and his mother only adopted him, his mother loves him, while you, you do not love me!”

(Oppenheim, A. Leo. Letters from Assyria. 1967)

It’s hard to bear in mind that the voice of Iddin Sin was written 4,400 years ago. For perspective, that’s almost 2,000 years before the completion of the Parthenon in Athens. Another letter dated almost a century before that, from a servant to his master, could have been taken from the script of a screwball comedy, and should strike a note with anyone who has ever suffered a pest control problem.

“A short time ago,” laments the underling named Yakim-Addu, “I wrote to my lord as follows: ‘A lion was caught in the loft of a house in Akkaka. My lord should write me whether this lion should remain in that same loft until the arrival of my lord, or whether I should have it brought to my lord.’ But letters from my lord were slow in coming and the lion has been in the loft for five days. Although they threw him a dog and a pig, he refused to eat them. I was worrying: ‘Heaven forbid that this lion get hungry.‘ I became scared, but eventually I got the lion into a wooden cage and loaded it on a boat to have it brought to my lord.”

(Oppenheim, A. Leo. Letters from Assyria. 1967)

Many of the most valuable texts we have were likely never fired, as they were designed for schoolchildren to use again and again. Researchers believe Mesopotamians learned to write principally by copying literary texts of increasing difficulty, so if we assume that the penmanship of the calligrapher is an indicator of the educational level of the person who wrote it, we can infer which texts formed the school syllabus of the ancient world, the ground-rock of an educated Assyrian or Babylonian’s literary development. We can also see notes passed between schoolchildren, and, of course, caricatures of disliked teachers scrawled on the backs of tablets.

Some of the most remarkable finds are a number of widespread cautionary tales apparently taught to schoolchildren of the time. One well-known example depicts two brothers, the younger of whom is suffering from an ill-advised bout of literary rebellion:

“Son of the tablet-house, what shall we write today after the tablet?” the older brother asks.

“Today in grammar we will not write out individual dialects,” the younger replies. “I’m resolved to write something of my own; [today] I’ll give the orders.”

His older brother proceeds to ridicule and upbraid him for his presumptuousness:

“Me, I was raised on Sumerian, I am the son of a scribe. But you are a bungler, a windbag. When you try to shape a tablet, you can’t even smooth the clay!”

Eventually a teacher figure appears and rather excessively disciplines the young upstart, threatening to beat him and put him in chains, to the presumed satisfaction of his older brother.

The remarkable wealth of cuneiform tablets even gave us the world’s first lullaby:

“May the wife be your support,
May the son be your lot,
May the winnowed barley be your bride,
May Ashnan the goddess be your ally,
May you have an eloquent guardian angel,
May you achieve a reign of happy days,
May the feasts make bright your forehead.”

It’s in this landscape of human stories, feeling and nuance that ISIS waded with their sledgehammers and pneumatic drills and dynamite. Of course, it would be a disservice to history to suggest that ISIS are the only ones responsible for the piecemeal erasure of Iraq’s heritage. In April 2003, the US-led coalition stood by and watched as thieves looted the Iraqi national Museum, making off with priceless artefacts and cuneiform tablets, only half of which were ever recovered.

General Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called this at the time “a matter of priorities”. When United States forces built a military base on the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon, to the horror of Iraqi and international archaeologists, they used bricks stamped with ancient cuneiform to fill their sandbags. But while coalition forces allowed Iraq’s heritage to dissolve like mud bricks in rain through apathy and ignorance, ISIS’s wilful destruction is something new in this tragic story.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many tablets or fragments might have been caught up in this most modern of floods, and what proportion of those had yet to be deciphered. Spokespeople I talked to at the British Museum are understandably cagey about making estimates. But whatever the true cost to Iraqi heritage and the literature of the world, the international community must now come together to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, and ensure that the stories and human voices of Iraq, which have survived longer than the pyramids, aren’t extinguished in our lifetimes.

 *****

Anyone interested in helping preserve the heritage of Iraq can visit Project Mosul, an international effort to reconstruct the lost artefacts of Mosul Museum through photographs and 3D-imaging. Help by donating photographs, assist with building the web platform or just spread the word.

Paul M.M. Cooper is a novelist from Cardiff in the UK. His debut novel, River of Ink, is forthcoming spring 2016 from Bloomsbury Books. He grew up in Cardiff and studied on the Prose Fiction MA at the UEA. He has written for magazines, websites and also worked as an archivist, manuscript assessor and journalist. He now lives in central London. He tweets at @PaulMMCooper and you can find his personal website here.