Most thoughts and ideas expressed by humans barely survive the present moment. What helped their messages survive, and stay meaningful, over such a long period of time? And how might we use that knowledge to craft our own messages to the future? Altogether, across different languages, there are more than a million cuneiform texts from the ancient Near East – and we can read them thanks to eternal clues left by ordinary scribes like Nabu-kusurshu. To give you an idea of the size of his impact: these lists helped unlock Sumerian records spanning three millennia of history, including the Sumerians' pioneering use of the wheel, and the 60-minute hour. He believes the young scribe, who would have been in his late teens or early 20s, produced nearly a quarter of all known copies of a bilingual sign list that proved crucial in the decipherment. "A lot of what we know about Sumerian is via this one man, Nabu-kusurshu," says Crisostomo. They were found next to some broken pillars and bricks when archeologists opened the long-buried rooms of the temple at Borsippa around 1880. And they had also found the ancient scribes' Sumerian-Akkadian clay lists, which they could use as a dictionary.Īmong them, one set of tablets stood out for its pristine condition and "distinctive fine script": Nabu-kusurshu's tablets. But the scholars had recently deciphered Akkadian, thanks to its link to surviving languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. What made the challenge particularly tricky is that Sumerian is not related to any other known language. In the 19th Century, scholars were racing to decipher a mysterious language found on cracked, charred tablets dug up from the sand-covered ruins of Mesopotamian temples and palaces: Sumerian, which had been thoroughly lost and forgotten. Some of them, like Nabu-kusurshu, even left us a key to entire civilisations. People have successfully crafted immortal messages – or at least, very long-lasting ones – in the past. What's easy to forget is that this is not a mere thought experiment. Many of us may daydream about writing a message that can be read in thousands of years' time, be it to share wonderful poetry with future generations, or warn them about the hazards lurking in nuclear waste. It was these humble lists, quietly written in the shadow of a giant ziggurat – a pyramid-shaped stepped temple tower – that would earn Nabu-kusurshu immortality.
MESOPOTAMIA SCRIBE HOW TO
"He's learning how to write, and learning these lists, alongside other things, and then dedicating his work to the god Nabu and the temple," says Jay Crisostomo, a professor of ancient Near Eastern civilisations and languages at the University of Michigan, who has studied Nabu-kusurshu's tablets in depth. He wrote on the tablets that he copied them "for his own study", perhaps as practice or scholarship, and placed them in the temple as an offering. He faithfully copied the old tablets, noting down for example that a Sumerian sign pronounced "u", could mean marriage gift, burglar, or buttocks. But he probably assumed that he was just one ordinary young writer in a long line of writers, preserving cuneiform for many more generations, under the benevolent eye of Nabu, the god of writing and "scribe of the universe". Nabu-kusurshu's generation, who would have spoken Akkadian or maybe Aramaic in everyday life, was among the last to use the cuneiform script.
When Sumerian gradually slid out of common use, and was replaced by the more modern Akkadian, scribes cleverly wrote long lists of signs in both languages, essentially creating ancient dictionaries, to make sure the wisdom of the oldest tablets would always be understood. Over time, the Sumerian texts became more complex, recording beautiful myths and songs – including one celebrating the goddess of brewing, Ninkasi, and her skilled use of "the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound". It was invented by the Sumerians, who initially used it to record rations of food – and indeed, beer – paid to workers or delivered to temples. These daily tasks, and his devotion to beer, writing and knowledge, made him part of an extraordinarily resilient literary legacy.Ĭuneiform had already been around for roughly 3,000 years by the time Nabu-kusurshu picked up his reed stylus. His duties involved brewing beer for religious offerings, but also, learning to keep administrative records on clay tablets in cuneiform script, and preserving ancient hymns by making copies of worn-out tablets. His name was Nabu-kusurshu, and he was training to be a temple brewer.
More than 2,000 years ago, in a temple in the city of Borsippa in ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq, a student was doing his homework.
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