The discovery of written sources from the world’s first civilisation is one of the most significant ever in the field of archeological – and the stories these tablets reveal are still unfolding, says Assyriologist Selena Wisnom

Though famed in antiquity for its wealth and sophistication, and remembered in the Bible as the home of Abraham, the tower of Babel, and the whore of Babylon, for millennia Mesopotamia remained as distant as myth. All that people knew of this ancient civilisation came from garbled references by classical authors, passed across continents and down through time like Chinese whispers, and from polemical biblical writers with an axe to grind against the Assyrian and Babylonian kings who had conquered them.

After two thousand years of silence, Mesopotamia emerged again in the nineteenth century AD to speak with its own voice. Sensational archaeological discoveries in the Middle East uncovered the cities of Assyrian kings with their magnificent palaces and extraordinary sculptures and reliefs, which were brought back to the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris. Babylon itself was excavated by German archaeologists and its dazzling gate of blue-glazed bricks reconstructed in Berlin. For the first time, readers of the Bible could look upon the faces of the conquerors who appeared in its pages, such as Shalmaneser III and Sennacherib. Even more exciting were the written sources that were discovered.

The decipherment of the cuneiform writing system in 1857 finally allowed us access to the conquest of Judah from Sennacherib’s perspective, Nebuchadnezzar’s boasting in his own words, and a Babylonian flood story strikingly similar to the one described in Genesis. Later identified as the Epic of Gilgamesh that would captivate me as a young adult, the Babylonian account of the deluge caused such a stir that the Daily Telegraph funded an expedition to search for the missing pieces of the tablet.

It was like looking for a needle in a haystack – small pieces of clay in a site containing thousands – but extraordinarily, another version of the same story was indeed found. George Smith, a self-taught scholar of modest origins, who identified it, was so excited when he read the description of a ship resting on a mountain top and sending out a dove to look for dry land – so uncanny in its echoes of the Bible – that he is said to have started undressing himself and running around the British Museum study room in elation. This story is recorded by E. A. Wallis Budge, a curator who had a long-standing dislike for Smith. Most likely intended to mock him, it had the opposite effect, not only because it is such an eccentric thing to do but for its capturing of the exhilaration of those early days of discovery.

The field of scholarship that covers all this is called ‘Assyriology’. The name is misleading, since it encompasses not only Assyrian culture but everything from Sumerian literature to Babylonian economics. The term was coined when the Assyrian palaces were discovered in the nineteenth century, and remained even when excavations continued to unearth older and older states and cultures.

As it became clear that the excavators had only scratched the surface of Mesopotamian history, further sub-categorisation developed. The Assyrians were renamed the ‘Neo-Assyrians’. There were also Old Assyrians and Middle Assyrians, as well as Old, Middle, Neo-, and Late Babylonians, not to mention the earlier Sumerians and Akkadians. But by then the name ‘Assyriology’ had stuck.

What had begun as a kind of biblical archaeology seeking to establish the veracity of the Old Testament quickly became an independent field of interest in its own right, with sources reaching much further back in time than any biblical writings. Scholars struggled to keep up as these sources continued to be unearthed at an incredible rate. Many tablets discovered in this era still languish in museum storerooms waiting to be transcribed and published, while archaeologists continue to add new artefacts from fresh excavations.

Put simply, too few people are trained to read cuneiform for us to be able to cope with the demand, simply because not enough people are aware it is possible to study it at university.

This is an extract from The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History (Penguin) by Selena Wisnom. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

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