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Video Transcript:
In The British Museum, we have objects of all sizes. Some pinheads, some gigantic, and everything in between. Once in a while, one of the very smallest things turns out to have information in it which is totally unexpected.
My name is Irving Finkel, and I'm a curator in The British Museum in the Middle East Department, and welcome to my corner.
Curator's Corner with Irving Finkel
So what we have here is a clay tablet. As a matter of fact, it is not a real clay tablet; it is a replica because the real clay tablet has to be on exhibition all the time. Also, it's very delicate. We couldn't wave it around in front of the screen and say, "Look at this, look at that." That would be terribly irresponsible. So we can use this replica for demonstration purposes with impunity.
Ancient Mesopotamian Cuneiform Tablets
The ancient Mesopotamians—Sumerians, Babylonians, all those people—they wrote on clay. That was their natural activity. Clay tablets with impressions of writing on them are pretty good and stable. You can handle them, but you can't play football with them. They're pretty reliable. But in antiquity, there are wars, buildings collapse, fires, and disasters. People die and go away, and other people come and trample on things. When archaeologists find them, it is not often that an ancient inscription on a piece of clay comes to light in perfect condition.
So this tablet, you can easily see that it isn't complete. There's stuff missing here, there's stuff missing there, and it also looks like elephants have danced a polka over the surface because many of the signs are damaged or squashed. But nevertheless, this piece of cuneiform inscription is a remarkable thing.
The oldest map of the world, in the world
This is the oldest map of the world! It has two sides: this is the front or 'obverse,' and this is the back or the 'reverse.' The reverse consists of lots of lines of cuneiform in different ruled sections. So it's full of information, even though it's a bit damaged.
What is the Babylonian Map of the World?
The other side is the remarkable thing. Firstly, there's some lines of cuneiform ruled across very firmly at the top. This is about the early creation of the world and how animals were put in the sea and in different parts of the universe. It's a kind of brief summary of creation, which has nothing to do with the map because there's a clear border between that and this.
And it's this which is so exciting because if you look carefully, you will see that the flat surface of the clay has a double circle drawn in the surface. The double ring is very important because it has cuneiform writing in it which says it's the "Bitter River," and this water was deemed to surround the known world. The area inside the double ring is Ancient Mesopotamia itself. This word 'Mesopotamia' is the Ancient Greek word for what is modern Iraq.
Inside the drawing of this circle, we have very interesting things. There is a great river that runs from north to south, which is the Euphrates River. The river is straddled by a long oblong, which is obviously the city of Babylon. This ring of water was important because it meant for the Babylonians, they had an idea of the limits of their world where they lived in about the 6th century BC, with these important rivers which brought life and food to them, waterways for transport, all the way down to the Persian Gulf. If you look carefully at the picture, you will see that in the surface of the known world, there are these rings drawn with little bits of cuneiform inside those, and those tell you the name of the city it represents or sometimes the tribe.
Encapsulated in this circular diagram is the whole of the known world in which people lived, flourished, and died.
What are the triangles on the Babylonian Map of the World?
However, there's more to this map than that. If you look at the outer ring, you will see that going off at different angles are triangles. Sometimes people say they are islands, sometimes people say they are districts, but in point of fact, they are almost certainly mountains. The idea is that if you go across the water, you see these jutted, pointed things above the horizon, which are remote lands far beyond the limits of the known world. They go out in different directions from the perimeter of existence and are, for the Babylonians, places full of magic and mystery.
When you look at the diagram geometrically, it is evident there were originally eight of them. We can be sure of this partly by calculation of what makes sense and also because the inscription on the other side tells you what is on each of those triangles. There was a place where the sun was never seen, a tree that had jewels instead of fruit, and giant birds that couldn't fly—all those sorts of things. Traditional stories were associated with each of these districts, recorded together with the diagram to show where they were.
Probably nobody ever went there; we're talking about the imaginative world of cosmology, theology, tradition, and inherited ideas. But up until quite recently, we didn't know which description on one side went with which triangle on the front. This was an irksome matter because we knew there were supposed to be eight, but nowhere near eight were visible. We had to work out which place the three we could read clearly matched up with the descriptions on the back, and it wasn't really possible.
Then something happened. One of those missing triangles came to light in the collection.
In the 19th century, when tablets were excavated, they were very careful to bring back everything. A big lump of clay, any small bits lying around it, any small bits not lying around it—anything they could find with writing on was carefully excavated. Sometimes the very small pieces, which we couldn't join to anything, were put in special trays for the long-term future when it might be possible to see what we could do about them.
Edith Horsley - Cuneiform LEGEND
Once upon a time, there was a lady called Edith Horsley. Edith loved cuneiform stuff and came to classes that I used to teach after work once a week to learn about cuneiform. She was very enthusiastic and attentive, and a good student. When the class ended after several months, she said she wanted to do something more.
Channel 4 News report on Babylonian Map of the World September 1995
For as long as anyone can remember, this has been a map with a central piece missing. But from today, no longer. Nicholas Glass reports on an unexpected moment of archaeological excitement in The British Museum.
The British Museum has boxes of tablet fragments, but it's only in the last two months or so, when Edith Horsley was first invited to work at the museum, that they began trying to sort things out. Even as a child, Edith was intrigued by the signs used in cuneiform. But it wasn't until she attended Irving Finkel's lectures that she became an addict.
As a volunteer, Edith comes in just once a week. She was asked to keep an eye out for any piece with a geographical or astronomical image on it. I saw this quite small piece with this triangle on it and the signs inside, and I thought it was probably a map. So I put it in the little section where I put the pieces that I think are of special interest, because Dr. Finkel can't go through all of these trays obviously. I put those aside, and he became quite excited when he saw it.
BABY IRVING!
She put aside a little pile of half a dozen pieces that didn't look like everything else, and I went through them one by one. She said, "Look, this one's got some lines on it." As soon as I saw it, I knew it must belong to this tablet because, as I say, it's such an unusual thing. It's actually rather funny because the map wasn't in its normal place; it was downstairs on exhibition. So I got out an old photograph of it, and the photograph was at a different scale. When I put the fragment on the photograph, I was sure that it must belong, but I couldn't quite see where it would fit. It was only the following morning that I took the fragment downstairs to the exhibition where it's on public view. By looking at the original tablet, I could see straight away that it fitted perfectly in the hole. And it did. As a matter of fact, when I put it in experimentally in the gallery in front of Edith, we couldn't get it out again afterwards. It was such a snug fit, and it had to go down to conservation to be dealt with properly and glued in position.
Having opened a bottle of bubbly and danced around in the gallery, the time came to think very seriously about what this meant. The tablet is very famous; it's often reproduced in all sorts of different encyclopedias and books about ancient ideas and histories of maps. It's quite a famous object, and to make a join to that was an extraordinary thing. But then there was the question of what it told us...
What the missing piece revealed
Against one of the diagonals, there was in cuneiform the expression "The Great Wall." I'm going to read you what the scribe tells us about this triangle: "To the fifth, to which you must travel seven leagues," meaning you have to row across the bitter river for seven leagues before you can land at the foot of the mountain. "The Great Wall, its height is 840 cubits, its trees up to 120 cubits. By day you can't see in front of yourself, by night, lying on..." (it's still broken) "then you must go another seven leagues in the sand and you must..."
There's always dot dot dots because nothing is perfectly preserved. But the important thing is, we now know which of the triangles goes with the description of this gigantic wall. As a result of Edith's discovery, we've got three of these triangles in a row, which is a great boon because you can imagine if you have isolated triangles, trying to match them to the description on the back is very difficult to get anywhere seriously and reliably. But when you've got three in a row, all you have to do is find three descriptions in a row, and it stands to reason that you'll be able to somehow match them up. And that is what we did. The discovery was very clear once you realized that the counting was anti-clockwise, not clockwise.
Number four says, "To the fourth, to which you must travel seven leagues," because it's like a kind of fairytale; everybody knows it's always the same introduction. Each time you have to travel seven leagues across the water. Then it gets a bit broken. Then it says you see something which "are as thick as a parsiktu-vessel."
This parsiktu measurement is something to an Assyriologist which makes their ears prick. The fact is it's only once otherwise known from cuneiform tablets. It's an interesting cuneiform tablet too because it describes the Ark, theoretically built in about 1800 BC by the Babylonian version of Noah. In this account, the details are given, and the God says, "You have to do this, this, and this," and then the Babylonian Noah says, "I did this, this, and this. I've done it! And I made these structures as thick as a parsiktu vessel," he says out of his own mouth in the original story. So this word 'parsiktu' is like a kind of noise that immediately locks into this thing on the map, immediately and incontrovertibly.
Speaking plainly, if I may, it means that if you went up this mountain all the way with your sandwiches and broke regularly for lungfuls of fresh air, eventually you would see against the night sky or the dark sky of the outer universe, silhouetted, the ribs made of wood as thick as a parsiktu vessel of the wreck of the Babylonian Ark, which, like the one in the Bible, came to rest on a mountain. If you come down the mountain and cross over the water back to the homeland, the first place you come to is called 'Urartu,' drawn on the map.
Now, the interesting thing about that is in the Bible, Noah, in his Ark, landed on a mountain where the name is 'Ararat,' and 'Ararat' is the Hebrew equivalent of the Assyrian 'Urartu.' That's quite a meaty thing, quite an interesting thing to think about because it shows that the story was the same, and of course, one led to the other. But also, from the Babylonian point of view, this was a matter of fact. If you did go on this journey, you would see the remnants of this historic boat which saved all the life of the world for the long-term future, from which we, of course, profit today, still there in the crags against the dark sky.
What does it all mean?
So what does this actually mean to us? Let's imagine that we can borrow a time machine and go back to Ancient Mesopotamia. I've always thought this was a good idea; we'll have a party, we'll all go together. When we get there, somebody might say, "Any idea where the Ark is?" And I'll go, "We have the map! Here it is! In fact, it's THERE! That's where it is." What we have to do is get in our rowing boat, off we go, and we will see it for ourselves.
Although this is a map which would not encourage you perhaps to moat across Iraq today in a land rover, when it comes to operating beyond the limits of the known world, into the world of imagination, it's indispensable. So, for the first time, we can pronounce with authority that if we were an ancient Babylonian, we would know where to go to see the remains of that wonderful boat.
Author of Babylonian Map of the World
Then there's the actual question of who wove it together. Often with cuneiform tablets, at the bottom of the reverse, there's a bit that tells you the name of the scribe, what's called the colophon. Unfortunately, the scribe's name is broken. There's no trace of it left. But his father's name is there. In Babylonia, they always said, "Mr. So-and-So, son of Mr. So-and-So." The dad was called Iṣṣuru. 'Iṣṣuru' is the Babylonian word for 'bird.'
This is an interesting thing because we know all about people's names in Mesopotamia. They usually meant something intelligible like ‘Servant of Such and Such a God,’ or ‘She's Beautiful Beyond Compare’ – no one is called Bird. There's no other case of a person called Bird; it's not a very good name! So what does that mean?
If you look at this for the first time in the museum case, which I hope you will now do, and peer through and make out the details, you would think, "Ah! I see, it's a sort of birds-eye view of the world!" Well, I think that's what it is. It's a Birdy Birdy family, and this is a birds-eye view of the known world and what lies beyond it.
This gives it a special kind of warmth of understanding. Because its failings, as it were, from a cartographical point of view, are irrelevant. It's not what they're interested in. And it's given us a tremendous insight into many aspects of Mesopotamian thinking. It's also a triumphant demonstration of what happens when you have a very small, totally uninformative, and useless fragment of dead boring writing that no one can understand, and you join it onto something in the collection which is much bigger, and a whole new adventure begins all over again!
Hey you! Cuneiform nerd! Do you want some more cuneiform? Of course you do. Below is a playlist full of all the videos we've ever made concerning cuneiform. You can see in the top left corner right now a preview of the next episode of Curator's Corner, which also covers cuneiform. We are going to the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu in southern Iraq, where Sebastien Rey will talk you through two bricks that were found in the same building. That's pretty normal; buildings are made of bricks. The weird thing is, these bricks were made 1500 years apart from each other but were in the same building. Also, crazy thing, Sebastien's excavated both of these bricks, but one of those bricks has been excavated twice previously. The first time it was excavated was 2300 years ago! Archaeology is weird.