Ancient DMs

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Future historians who want to learn about the 21st century will probably not lack for primary sources. As of today, approximately 30 ,000 hours of content are being uploaded to YouTube every hour, while Wikipedia is currently home to roughly 55 million articles and counting. For historians who want to study the previous century, the sources thin out just a bit. Archives provide access to about 2 ,000 daily U.S. newspapers and another 2 ,000 magazines. Go back to the late Middle Ages, before the invention of the printing press, and things get a lot rougher.

0:43Only a few thousand hand-copied manuscripts from that time have survived. And as for the very ancient past, the situation is downright bleak. Of the over 100 plays written by Sophocles, we have seven. But the hardest stuff to find, the further back you go, are the documents that tell us something about everyday life, about what it was like to be a bureaucrat in Egypt's Middle Kingdom, or a soldier in the Persian army, or a farmer in ancient Sumeria. It's not that these ancient societies didn't produce lots of everyday communications. Frequently, they did. But it's often the most common, ordinary documents that don't survive, either because no one thought to preserve them, or their society was conquered, or they were written down on a medium that wasn't meant to last.

1:33Ask any historian and they'll tell you. It's called ephemera for a reason. But today, I'm here to tell you the story of some documents of everyday life that did survive. That's 99PI producer Joe Rosenberg. So Joe, you have a story of preservation for us. Yeah. And it's about a trove, you might say, found in what is now northern Iraq of some very, very, very old texts. Very, very, very old times three. That's right. Old times three. And also very, very, very important to historians because Iraq, Mesopotamia, is famously where the first ever city states arose. But for the longest time, historians knew almost nothing about them.

2:17This society had been lost to our memory, really. Lisa Wilhelmi is an assistant professor at the Free University of Berlin who has studied a lot of ancient history, including ancient Mesopotamia. And she says that until relatively recently, historians might have been able to tell you a lot about the Mesopotamian region going back to roughly 2 ,500 years ago, around the time of the ancient Greeks. But if you tried to learn about what happened before then in these even more ancient places like Babylon and Sumer, there was very little to go on. It was always there in the ground, but it had been forgotten about to a large extent.

2:59And for a very long time, the only references to Assyria and Babylonia came through the Bible. I can sense a problem with using the Bible, which uses a mix of history and mythology as a source text. Yeah, I mean, there was a long period of the study of history where people were just endlessly playing precisely that game of like, which parts of the Bible are true. But there was a moment when this kind of profound veil of ignorance of the deep ancient past began to be lifted, which is when archaeologists began excavating the city of Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital of one of those mysterious biblical empires from around 600 BCE, 2500 years ago, the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

3:47But in the 1840s, archaeologists, they actually hit the motherlode, the Assyrians' imperial palace complex. And once there, they started coming across this huge stash of clay tablets. So first hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands of clay tablets and fragments of clay tablets. And these 2 ,500-year-old tablets, for reasons that we'll get to a little later, are in startlingly great condition. They're all remarkably well-preserved. So this find has both quantity and quality going for it. Correct. And even today, if you study ancient Mesopotamia, this find remains arguably the single most impressive collection of documents ever found.

4:29It is outstanding. It is extraordinary because there are so many tablets. As far as I know, we have about 30 ,000 tablets and fragments that we can assign to the collection. And this is really, this is a lot. And what Lisa says is that it's actually the only ancient tablet collection they speak of as a library. And that's because that is precisely what it turned out to be. This was the Assyrians' official imperial library. And so when you say library, what do you mean in this case? Like, are there ancient works of literature? Or are there sort of textbooks? What does it contain? Yes and yes. Okay.

5:10So there are works of literature, mythology, history, astronomy. And not only does it have all the Assyrian stuff from like the 7th century BCE, it's got stuff going back another 1 ,400 years. Wow. Yeah. So like this is where we, and I mean like the global we here, first found a copy of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. Oh my God. So like possibly the world's oldest written long-form narrative was first found here. Yeah, it was. But what over time has turned out to be equally, or if not more fascinating in some ways, are the library's other documents. Because it turned out that the library also contained all these much more prosaic texts that, by virtue of their banality almost, kind of reveal the ins and outs of everyday life.

5:59Wow. So what kind of everyday documents, what kind of ephemera are we talking about here? Yeah, so it just so happened that this library included the daily personal correspondence of the Assyrian court. So all of the petitions from ordinary people, all of the letters between scribes, and most important for our story, messages being written to and from the king. Oh, I see. So everyday royal life. Yes, everyday, but maybe not common. But what that means is that these letters tell the story of the library itself. They tell the story of its creation and its growth right up to the moment before its destruction and unexpected preservation.

6:42Wow. So tell me that story. Like, how did it unfold? Let me take you to a precise year. It's the year 671 BCE. And at this time, the Assyrian Empire basically covers most of the present-day Middle East. It is by many measures the largest single empire the world has ever seen. And the Assyrians' capital is, as mentioned, Nineveh, this great walled city on the banks of the Tigris River. And also, and this is really important to keep in mind, the Assyrians have a reputation for being incessantly, ridiculously, over-the-top, cruel. So they love in the Chronicles to say, oh, I crossed this river on a bridge made of the skulls of my enemy, for example.

7:25That'd be a fairly typical Assyrian comment. This is David Damrosch. David is a professor of comparative literature at Harvard. And he told me that the Assyrians' palaces actually would have these giant images of conquest etched into all the walls. They were meant to intimidate anyone who came into the palace, particularly any foreigner. They'd say just images of tribute being given by everyone who's been conquered. Although Lisa is quick to point out that you should not make the mistake of thinking the Assyrians are uniquely cruel by the standards of their time. I wouldn't say that the Assyrians were more cruel than the other ones.

8:01The Babylonians were just as bad. They just didn't write about it. So the Assyrians were kind of proud of their cruelty, and maybe the Babylonians were a little more sheepish. Yeah, exactly. Whether it's better to be honest about it or sheepish and hypocritical, I suppose, that's just a matter of taste. But this cruelty, keep in mind, did serve a purpose. David says you have to think of those palace reliefs as a look that the Assyrians were consciously cultivating for strategic reasons. The Assyrians, because of the way they'd set up their whole economy, were truly a militaristic state. And the state really required constant warfare to bring in more goods.

8:42So they wanted to project an image of almost totalitarian power. And the texts that they wrote for publication project infinite power, infinite sagacity on the part of the king, infinite loyalty on the part of the king's ministers. But remember, the tablets that were found also contain the private palace records. And the story they tell is quite different than the image the Assyrians were publicly projecting. Because at this specific moment in history we've gone back to here, there's a king named Esarhaddon. And it turns out that the all-powerful Esarhaddon was almost hilariously neurotic. His DMs reveal a different king than what was presented out front.

9:27Yeah, and that's putting it mildly. Esarhaddon was terminally indecisive. And he was also the most powerful person in the world. But he worries about everything. So just to give you the flavor of Esarhaddon, David told me about this one letter he writes to his chief scribe. where basically Esserhaddon was getting ready to invade yet another country. But then when he was exiting the palace, a mongoose apparently passed under his chariot. I hate it when that happens. I know, it's the worst. And apparently this one little thing is enough to totally freak him out because he immediately starts asking his chief priest, what could this mean?

10:05Because, you know, I've heard it said that a mongoose passing under your legs is a bad omen. So maybe we shouldn't invade? Then again, technically the mongoose passed under my chariot, not my legs. So maybe it's okay. I don't know what to do now. What do you think? And the advisor writes back, and this is from the actual tablet. Quote, as to what my lord the king wrote to me, does the omen, if something passes between the legs of a man, apply to something that came out from underneath the chariot? It does apply. However, he goes on to say that Esser Haddon has it all backwards, and not to worry because this is actually a bad omen for his enemies.

10:39Quote, so should we say, mercy for the Nabataeans? Why? Are they not hostile kings? They will not submit beneath my lord the king's chariot. And this letter is basically par for the course for Esser Haddon. His whole reign was pretty much him endlessly over-interpreting omens. And Esser Haddon, you know, if lightning strikes a distant town, Esser Haddon takes it personally. He writes a letter to one of his advisors who writes back, as to what my lord the king wrote to me, why does the king look for trouble? Why does he look for it in a peasant's hut? There's no evil inside the palace. And when has the king ever visited that town?

11:18So the poor advisors, you know, nothing escapes the king's worry. I mean, the advisor is actually surprisingly blunt with the most powerful man in the entire known world. Yeah, it's true. And we actually know that the advisor who wrote that last one was a guy named Blasi, who clearly was one of the few people who can speak this frankly with the king. And his letters to him appear to grow more and more impatient. So, for example, at another point, there's this minor earthquake, apparently, which sends Esserhaddon into one of his spirals. And now Blasi replies in tones of complete exasperation. Was there no earthquake in the times of the king's fathers and grandfathers?

11:57Did I not see earthquakes when I was small? And you see his advisors writing to each other saying, why is the king like this? What can we do? Why is he so worried about an earthquake in the south of the country? How can we stop this? How can we reassure him? I mean, the level of detail here is just amazing. Like these are exchanges between people that are 2 ,500 years old and you really feel like you're getting a window into like an unhealthy level of neuroses and paranoia from Acer Haddon, which, you know, is of course bad for him. but potentially devastating to everyone around him. Yes, although in his defense, like a lot of pathologically neurotic people, he's not being totally illogical either, in his case when it comes to worrying about omens.

12:40Because Lisa says that you have to understand that back then, no matter what you believed, the stakes around omens were really high. If you live in a world where everything is influenced by the divine and there is no question as to the involvement of divinity in what happens on Earth, then the omen literature and the divination and its processes are very, they're political. They are what drives politics. Oh, I see. So there wasn't really an option to ignore omens, even if you wanted to. Correct. And another part of Esser Haddon's problem is he himself, as a boy, grew up in a time of plots and counterplots and splinter groups.

13:28You know, his own father was killed by one of his brothers in a coup. But ultimately for Esser Haddon, all of these considerations only drive him, you know, deeper into his neuroses. And he just grows increasingly and really illogically suspicious of basically every person in his orbit. So in addition to obsessing over omens, he's also commissioning multiple independent oracles and cross-checking the results so the gods can tell him who on his staff might be betraying him. And the small print on Esarhaddon's oracle requests, it's just wild. So here, I just want you to read this one. Okay. Shamash, great lord, give me a definitive answer to what I ask you.

14:06Will any of the eunuchs or the bearded officials, the king's entourage, or any of his brothers and uncles, or junior members of the royal line, or any relative of the king, whatever, or the prefects or the recruitment officers or his personal guard or the king's chariot men or the keepers of the inner gates or the keepers of the outer gates or the attendants and lackeys of the stables or the cooks, confectioners, and bakers, the entire body of craftsmen or their brothers or their sons or their nephews or their friends or their guests or their accomplices, make an uprising and rebellion against Aserhaddon, king of Assyria, and kill him?

14:44That's a long list of people he does not trust. Yeah, I mean, although I still don't know why he has to list everyone specifically, right? Like, he could just ask, like, you know, will anyone betray me? That seems easy. I mean, he's writing this down in clay. Like, you should economize your words a little bit. Yeah, although it's interesting that you're picturing him doing the writing, because actually that brings us to what was arguably Esser Haddon's biggest problem when it came to his paranoia, which was that he may have spent all day sending these messages back and forth, but, and this will be key to the story of the library, Esser Haddon himself didn't know how to read.

15:23Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah, because apparently reading and writing, particularly cuneiform, was kind of like coding today. It was a real skill. So most kings just dictated letters and had letters read to them. They weren't doing any reading or writing themselves. but this meant that they were relying on whoever's advising them to tell them what is happening. And what's clear from these tablets is that the readers maybe didn't always read everything on the tablet out loud to the king. In one case, an out-of-favor official writes an appeal to the king, but he knows the king isn't going to read it.

15:56And he has a little postscript to his appeal. Whoever you are, O scribe, who are reading this, do not hide it from your lord the king. Speak for me before the king. So it's quite a fascinating thing. They all know that there are these intermediaries who are extremely powerful. They can be powerful simply by what they don't say is on the tablet. I mean, that is amazing that the advisors and the intermediaries, they're the ones with the real power. Like they could just choose to not read part of the letter, to make up something completely, and the king would be none the wiser. Right. Yeah. And from what historians can piece together, it appears that Esher Haddon very wisely reasoned.

16:34You know what? Being illiterate sucks. So my son will learn to read. That's an excellent idea. Fantastic idea. And his son's name is Ashurbanipal. And Ashurbanipal is in many ways the reason why there would be a great library for archaeologists to discover in the first place. Because he is a totally different breed of person from his father. And he becomes one of the great Assyrian kings. He's known for many things. And true to his father's wishes, David says that from an early age, Ashurbanipal not only learned to read, but he loved to read. I think he was really a bibliophile, you know, or a tabletophile, whatever you have to call it.

17:17He just loved writing. He was fascinated by it. He was proud of his abilities, being what we would later say as a kind of philosopher king. And the thing to understand is that prior to Ashurbanipal, the palace archive only really contained the everyday correspondence, the court records, which is how we know so much about his dad. But once Ashurbanipal is in power, he takes the existing archive and starts expanding it into what we would think of as a proper library. And this library gets big. He actually creates two new palace buildings just to house it. And he uses the size and power of his empire to collect everything he can get his hands on and expand the collection.

17:58And not just the numbers of texts, but the kinds of texts. So old Sumerian and Babylonian literature, let's get that. Astronomy texts, great. Writings on statecraft, yes, let's add that too. Particularly interesting is that Ashurbanipal sends out a word to scribes all around the kingdom saying, if you know any texts that's about good governments, send it to me. And that's one of the times he gets a new copy made of Gilgamesh. He was reading it as a tale about how to understand what makes a good ruler and a bad ruler and how to be better. And so the collection actually ends up with multiple copies of Gilgamesh.

18:30And a little later, it actually acquires a record showing the astronomical positions of Venus, you know, going back to at least 1700 BCE. Wow. And there's an even older Babylonian text, which is the only complete surviving account of an ancient Near Eastern creation myth. Wow. And so that's on top of all this day-to-day minutia of past kings and their courts, and you have that as a reference. So it's kind of like having the Library of Congress and a presidential library and a national archive kind of all rolled into one. Pretty much, yeah. Which is why, if I could show you one final thing from the collection, this library also contains Asher Banipal's own writings.

19:12And one of the things he wrote was poetry. And there's this one poem where he's actually addressing the patron god of writing, Nabu. And it's just incredibly intimate. You can almost hear in it how he has inherited some of his father's depression and anxiety. But he's kind of channeling it through his writing. So, Roman, if you want to just give this one a read too. Okay. Often I go up to the roof in order to plunge down. But my life is too precious. It turns me back. I would hearten myself. But what heart do I have to give? I would make up my mind. But what mind do I have to make up? Oh, Nabu, where is your forgiveness?

19:52Oh, son of Bel, where is your guidance? Wow. Heavy is the head. I mean, was this written down just for himself? Or was this meant to be taken in by a wider audience? Was this for posterity? I was curious about that, too, when I asked David about it. And he said that the answer is likely the latter. It was probably at least semi-propaganda. Because in the very next stanza, Ashurbanipal says that the god Naboo comes to him in a dream and basically tells him, don't worry, you will emerge triumphant and your ill-wishers will be squashed under your feet like flies.

20:32So even the sensitive poet who contemplates jumping off the tallest tower still builds bridges out of the skulls of his enemies. Yeah, there doesn't really seem to be an off button for that kind of thing when it comes to these Assyrian kings. And so Ashurbanipal simply continued his kingdom's policy of unending military expansion. And, you know, I asked David about that too, about his double nature. Do you like Ashurbanipal at all or not? Like, where do you come across like in your own personal take on these figures? I think Ashurbanipal is a wonderful figure, thoughtful, reflective. He's trying to do his best.

21:13He is a poet. And he's responsible for a vicious militaristic system that is not likely to last, that he has to uphold. And I think that's why Ashurbanipal is feeling, has his suicidal moments. It's like, how long can this hold together? And that turns out to be pretty much true. I mean, the relentless expansion of system can't last. And after Ashurbanipal dies, everything kind of starts to fall apart. All the states who the Assyrians conquered understandably loathed them. And in 612 BCE, the vassal states all band together to revolt and then sack and raise Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, and burn all of it, including Ashurbanipal's library, to the ground.

21:58So if that's the case, then how did the library get preserved? So this is the final puzzle piece of this story. And it's where one of the great oddities of historical preservation comes in. Because ironically, one of the best things that can happen for the preservation of your society's legacy is basically a sudden terrible cataclysm that entombs everything you know and love in an instant and leaves it forgotten for thousands of years. Cataclysmic destruction is terrible for society, but it can be really good. because then what's left there may just get left. I mean, this reminds me of like Pompeii where, you know, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius like covers everything in ash and you get this snapshot of, you know, things as mundane as what kind of snacks people were eating that food cart owners were selling in just like an incredible catastrophe that just sort of just freezes everything in time.

22:54Exactly, which is why that kind of instant catastrophe is often, you know, in a weird way, what counts as good news for historians like Lisa. Yeah, no, accidental destruction tends to preserve much more information on the actual lives of people. All of the letters, all of the accounts, all of the debt notes. And then we get the real people, their imagination, their stories. So in the case of Nineveh, how did the tablets get preserved before the invaders ransacked the place? Because I can't imagine they were like, would be careful with the clay tablets in the library. No. So with Nineveh, weirdly, it was precisely because the invaders set fire to the library buildings that the tablets were preserved.

23:38Because remember, all of these tablets were made of clay. And these tablets fill through the floor into the basement and were buried in the rubble. But the thing with Kinnear Farm tablets is if you cook them, it makes them last forever. They become like terracotta. And so the tens of thousands of terracotta-ized tablets just sit there, buried and preserved for 2 ,500 years. You know, all the literature and history the Assyrians wanted preserved, but also all the everyday stuff they'd probably be mortified to know was preserved. Until 1849, when they were discovered. And so that's how we know all this wonderful history and literature and the story of why it's there in the first place.

24:24And one of the things that was part of royal ideology in the ancient Near East was to try and get your name to be preserved for eternity. And in a way, I wouldn't actually say that the effort failed because here we are, two and a half thousand years later, speaking about it. I mean, it's just remarkable that it took both things. Like, it took the act of creation of the library and its destruction for all this knowledge to be preserved for us to take it in 2 ,500 years later. Like, if only one of those things had happened, we wouldn't be talking about this. We would never know that name. We would never know this civilization.

25:06It's stunning. Yeah. Preserving the human legacy. I mean, it kind of turns out it takes, I guess, equal parts hard work and dumb luck. That's right. That's right. Well said. Well, Joe, thank you so much for this. This is really just this unexpected way to journey back into time. I just loved our conversation. No, thank you, Roman, for listening. I'm glad you enjoyed the journey.

25:32When we come back, we'll learn more about how historians succeed and sometimes fail in piecing together all those thousands of ancient fragments.

25:53So, Joe, you're back, and you have a little antechamber of this archaeological story that you want to talk about. Yeah, I do, because I have to confess something here, which is that I was being intentionally a little vague when I said Lisa Wahami was a professor who studies ancient history, because Lisa actually wears a few different scholarly hats, and one of them is a very cool job with a very confusing name. She is an Assyriologist. An Assyriologist. So I take it this is someone who studies ancient Assyria. So no. And this is what's confusing because Assyriology is actually the study of any ancient society that used cuneiform writing, whether you're looking at the Sumerians or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or whoever.

26:39And your particular focus could be archaeology, it could be art history, etc. And in Lisa's case, she spends a lot of time sorting through and interpreting texts. What we do is we look at texts, we try and piece them back together. We then try to understand them chronologically, geographically, and also content wise. So we get more information on people, society, history, culture, literature, and so on. So really what we do is we have a giant puzzle and we try and get more and more pieces, but we try and fill in the gaps. And you know, although I went into the interview with Lisa intending to ask a bunch of questions about the Assyrians and the library of Ashurbanipal specifically, I really ended up spending the majority of our time talking with her about her profession, because I got really fascinated with the story of what Lisa does.