The Assyrian Read Free Page A

of
the king’s armies. He would cry if one of the royal pigeons died,
but that sweet little boy, like all the rest of us, dreamed of his
sword dripping with the blood of Elamites and Medes.
    “I hate writing,” he would whisper to me as
we hunched over our tablets, copying out the characters of an
incantation to the god Nabu we were to learn by rote. “This is for
scribes and priests, not for men of valor. It is hopeless. I will
never remember the tenth part of all this.”
    It was true that the mystery of which Nabu
was the patron was no simple business but an art of the highest
refinement. We wrote on tablets of wet clay that when baked would
last, they told us, until the end of the world, so we must be
wonderfully careful to scratch in the long tapering lines that made
up a character, the least part of a word, so they would not form
unsightly ridges in the smooth surface. And characters there were
in their hundreds beyond counting, and a true scribe wrote not in
the Akkadian of common men but in an old dialect not spoken in the
Land of Ashur since the days of the heroes. And then there was
Sumerian to learn, the sacred tongue, written with the same
characters but with different meanings and sounds, a tongue to tie
one’s brains into knots, such as no men could ever have spoken with
comfort, not even in the most ancient times, but such as was
pleasing to the gods’ ears.
    Esarhaddon held the flat sided stylus in his
thick fingers, copying out the daggerlike strokes of our text,
hating each one of them as they passed through his mind like water
through a sieve, hating the old scribe who taught us, with his
white hair and his beardless face and his mighty fear of the king’s
wrath. All this was for Esarhaddon the torment of his youth, for
his mother, who could not form the symbols even of her own name,
was most anxious about his progress. And Naq’ia, it seemed, had
eyes everywhere.
    “Mother, can you write?”
    Merope looked at me as if she expected the
gods to turn me to salt for my impertinence, and sighed, and ran
her hand through her bronze-colored hair.
    “In the city of Athens everyone can write who
is not a sucking babe or a fool. It is only the country people with
dung stuffed into their ears who cannot write.”
    In fact, she could only form some ten or
twelve signs, enough to spell her name and the name of her city’s
patron goddess and a few other trifles, but she taught me
these.
    Writing is a strange, unnatural affair. I
have heard it said that the god Nabu in pity gave men the
daggerlike script that they might remember his preserving prayers,
but I do not believe this. The Greeks can spell any word they wish
with four and twenty signs, which they call “letters,” so why
should Nabu have burdened the people of Akkad and Sumer with
hundreds of symbols, as difficult to form as to remember? The
writing of the Nile people, which I never learned, is even worse.
Only men could produce a thing of such perversity. The gods had no
hand in it.
    “The gods have blessed you with good ears,”
old Bag Teshub would tell me, his voice quavering like a reed flute
as he wiped the sweat from his beardless face. “As a scholar you
have few rivals among your royal brothers—even Nabusharusur, who is
your elder by a quarter of a year, lacks your refinement of
understanding. If the lord king your father decides to make a
priest of you, you will be a fine omen reader.”
    One day our text was the story of Ashur’s
victory over Tiamat the Chaos Monster, how he used the winds to
keep her mouth open while he shot an arrow into her heart, how he
cut her body in half, making the sky with one part and the earth
with the other, and thus became lord over all the other gods, who
gave him fifty great names. It was an easy text, except for the
fifty names.
    “Prince Esarhaddon, recite for us the lines
from the second tablet in which Ea fails to subdue the monster.
Here—take it.”
    My brother, poor soul, accepted the