A Reading Room Filed Under the Wrong Millennium
The Bureau’s Mesopotamian desk has spent most of a season on a claim it can neither corroborate nor entirely put down: that somewhere between the accession of Nabopolassar and the arrival of Xerxes, the temple precinct of Esagila at Babylon operated a reading room in which no reading was done. A patron presented himself at the fourteenth chamber off the northern colonnade, surrendered a fee in barley, was fitted with an apparatus, and thereafter consulted the collection with his eyes shut. The first of them named in the account is a high priest, Enlil-Ban, who is credited with the remark that the future would be carved not in clay but in light, and who is credited with nothing else whatsoever.
Esagila itself is not in dispute. It stood south of the ziggurat Etemenanki, it belonged to Marduk, and a surveyor’s tablet copied about 229 BC gives its outer court as roughly forty metres by seventy, enclosing a smaller court of some twenty-five by forty. Esarhaddon rebuilt it from the foundation to the battlements; Nebuchadnezzar II cased the whole thing in a final shell and took the credit. What is in dispute is the fourteenth chamber, which appears on no plan, in no inventory and in no excavation report, and which our correspondent describes to the centimetre.
The Tablets of the Heavens
The collection, we are told, ran to eleven pieces. They were not written but grown: sapphire lozenges the length of a forearm, cut from a seam the priests declined to name, each seated on its own gold plinth in the chamber’s inner wall and each holding what the account calls a summa — a whole series, complete, with its commentaries. The Fourth Shard is said to have carried the entire celestial corpus. The Ninth held law. The Eleventh, by every version of the story, held nothing at all and was kept for the look of the thing.
Set that beside a Mesopotamian library that has actually been dug up. At Sippar, in 1986, excavators clearing spoil that Rassam had left behind in the E-Babbar temple opened a room he had walked past: some four hundred tablets, stored in ten ranks of niches seventeen centimetres by thirty, four rows deep. That is what a library looked like — a wall of pigeonholes and a great deal of dust. It is difficult to improve upon as an image, and impossible to improve upon as evidence.
The Headsets, and the Manner of Entering
The apparatus is the part of the account our correspondent is happiest to discuss. A crown of gold filigree, weighted at the back with lead so that it sat without a strap; two crystals over the eyes and a third at the crown of the skull, which the priests held to be the point at which the god entered; a chin bar of ivory to keep the jaw from working, the readers having a persistent habit of reading aloud to nobody. Three of these were kept. Two were in use at any hour, the third being under repair, permanently.
The house rule was two lamps. A reader might remain under the crown for as long as it took two oil lamps of standard measure to burn out, and no longer, and an attendant of the temple sat in the doorway with a tally board to enforce it. The stated reason was reverence. The reason recorded in the entrance ledger, in a different and much later hand, is that readers who went past three lamps came out unable to say what day it was, and one of them walked into the Abzu.
Two Tutorials: the Sky and the Body
The astronomy course is the one the account describes at length, and it is also the one on which the real record is least accommodating, because Babylon’s astronomers were doing perfectly well without a headset. MUL.APIN, compiled around 1000 BC and copied for the next seven centuries, lists sixty-six stars and constellations with their risings, their settings and their culminations, together with the rule for slipping in an intercalary month. The Enūma Anu Enlil runs to sixty-eight tablets, or seventy depending on the recension, and somewhere between six and seven thousand omens. The observational diaries were kept, month by month, from the seventh century BC to the first — weather, river levels, the price of cress, and the sky.
The anatomy course is another matter. Our correspondent has the student walking around a rotating figure of a man rendered in gold wire, opening him at the sternum and lifting out the organs one at a time. The Babylonian medical corpus does not work that way and never did. The Sakikkū, assembled in forty tablets by Esagil-kin-apli for Adad-apla-iddina in the eleventh century BC, proceeds head to toe by what can be seen and felt from the outside: the omens met on the way to the sick man’s house, then the fevers, the lesions, the seizures, the obstetrics. There is no dissection in it anywhere. The gold wireframe man is the single object in the whole account with no antecedent whatsoever, and it is the object the correspondent is proudest of.
What the Ground Actually Yields
The awkward part of the story is not that nothing has been found. It is that Mesopotamia is the one place on earth where everything is found. Somewhere between five hundred thousand and two million cuneiform tablets have come out of the ground in modern times, of which perhaps thirty to a hundred thousand have been read — the shortage is of specialists, not of material. The Library of Ashurbanipal alone yielded over thirty thousand pieces at Nineveh, and it yielded them because the palace burned in 612 BC and the fire baked the clay hard. Destruction is the standard preservation method in this region.
Against that, the Esagila account offers eleven shards, none extant, and three crowns, none extant, and a chamber that no surveyor has ever stood in. The Bureau sets the two records side by side and lets the reader do the arithmetic.
The Account Against the Record
What our correspondent reports at Esagila, set beside what has been taken out of the ground.
| Reported at Esagila | Excavated in Mesopotamia | |
|---|---|---|
| Medium | Eleven sapphire shards, weight unrecorded | Clay tablets: 500,000 to 2,000,000 excavated |
| Shelving | Gold plinths set in the inner wall | Niches 17 by 30 cm, ten ranks four rows deep, at Sippar |
| Largest holding | The whole celestial corpus, on one shard | Over 30,000 pieces at Nineveh, perhaps 10,000 texts |
| Preserved by | Enchantment, method unspecified | A palace fire in 612 BC, which baked the clay |
| Catalogued | Consulted from within; no index kept | Roughly 30,000 to 100,000 tablets read or published |
| Readable now | No apparatus survives to test it | Yes — the last dated tablet is AD 79/80 |
There is a final asymmetry worth setting down. Cuneiform was written for three millennia and the last dated tablet is from Uruk in AD 79 or 80; the clay is still legible under a lamp. The Domesday Book of 1086 can be read today, while the BBC’s laserdisc edition of it, issued in 1986, had to be rescued from its own hardware sixteen years later. NASA sat on the Viking Mars tapes for a decade and then discovered that the format was undocumented and the men who wrote it had died or left the agency.
The Bureau wrote back to its correspondent asking for a shelfmark. One was supplied by return — north colonnade, fourth rank, ninth niche — with the note that the niche would be found empty, the shard having been withdrawn for cleaning in the reign of Darius and not yet returned.
Plates: the Esagila Chamber
Three plates from the correspondent's file. The Bureau prints them without endorsement.
