'Rife Bible College, which he founded, has the richest archaeology department in the world. They have been conducting a dig in Eridu, which was the cult center of a Sumerian god named Enki.'
'How are these things related to each other?'
The Librarian raises his eyebrows. 'I'm sorry?'
'Well, let's try process of elimination. Do you know why Lagos found Sumerian writings interesting as opposed to, say, Greek or Egyptian?'
'Egypt was a civilization of stone. They made their art and architecture of stone, so it lasts forever. But you can't write on stone. So they invented papyrus and wrote on that. But papyrus is perishable. So even though their art and architecture have survived, their written records - their data - have largely disappeared.'
'What about all those hieroglyphic inscriptions?'
'Bumper stickers, Lagos called them. Corrupt political speech. They had an unfortunate tendency to write inscriptions praising their own military victories before the battles had actually taken place.'
'And Sumer is different?'
'Sumer was a civilization of clay. They made their buildings of it and wrote on it, too. Their statues were of gypsum, which dissolves in water. So the buildings and statues have since fallen apart under the elements. But the clay tablets were either baked or else buried in jars. So all the data of the Sumerians have survived. Egypt left a legacy of art and architecture; Sumer's legacy is its megabytes.'
'How many megabytes?'
'As many as archaeologists bother to dig up. The Sumerians wrote on everything. When they built a building, they would write in cuneiform on every brick. When the buildings fell down, these bricks would remain, scattered across the desert. In the Koran, the angels who are sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah say, 'We are sent forth to a wicked nation, so that we may bring down on them a shower of clay-stones marked by your Lord for the destruction of the sinful.' Lagos found this interesting - this promiscuous dispersal of information, written on a medium that lasts forever. He spoke of pollen blowing in the wind - I gather that this was some kind of analogy.'
'It was. Tell me - has the inscription on this clay envelope been translated?'
'Yes. It is a warning. It says, 'This envelope contains the nam-shub of Enki.''
'I know what a nam-shub is. What is the nam-shub of Enki?'
The Librarian stares off into the distance and clears his throat dramatically.
'Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion,
There was no hyena, there was no lion,
There was no wild dog, no wolf,
There was no fear, no terror,
Man had no rival.
In those days, the land Shubur-Hamazi,
Harmony-tongued Sumer, the great land of the me of princeship,
Uri, the land having all that is appropriate,
The land Martu, resting in security,
The whole universe, the people well cared for,
To Enlil in one tongue gave speech.
Then the lord defiant, the prince defiant, the king defiant,
Enki, the lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy,
The lord of wisdom, who scans the land,
The leader of the gods,
The lord of Eridu, endowed with wisdom,
Changed the speech in their mouths, put contention into it,
Into the speech of man that had been one.
That is Kramer's translation.'
'That's a story,' Hiro says. 'I thought a nam-shub was an incantation.'
'The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation,' the Librarian says. 'A self-fulfilling fiction. Lagos believed that in its original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it describes.'
'You mean, changed the speech in men's mouths.'
'Yes,' the Librarian says.
'This is a Babel story, isn't it?' Hiro says. 'Everyone was speaking the same language, and then Enki changed their speech so that they could no longer understand each other. This must be the basis for the Tower of Babel stuff in the Bible.'
'This room contains a number of cards tracing that connection,' the Librarian says.
'You mentioned before that at one point, everyone spoke Sumerian. Then, nobody did. It just vanished, like the dinosaurs. And there's no genocide to explain how that happened. Which is consistent with the Tower of Babel story, and the nam-shub of Enki. Did Lagos think that Babel really happened?'
'He was sure of it. He was quite concerned about the vast number of human languages. He felt there were simply too many of them.'
'How many?'
'Tens of thousands. In many parts of the world, you will find people of the same ethnic group, living a few miles apart in similar valleys under similar conditions, speaking languages that have absolutely nothing in common with each other. This sort of thing is not an oddity - it is ubiquitous. Many linguists have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue.'
'Has anyone come up with an answer yet?'
'The question is difficult and profound,' the Librarian says. 'Lagos had a theory.'
'Yes?'
'He believed that Babel was an actual historical event. That it happened in a particular time and place, coinciding with the disappearance of the Sumerian language. That prior to Babel/Infocalypse, languages tended to converge. And that afterward, languages have always had an innate tendency to diverge and become mutually incomprehensible - that this tendency is, as he put it, coiled like a serpent around the human brainstem.'
'The only thing that could explain that is - '
Hiro stops, not wanting to say it.
'Yes?' the Librarian says.
'If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population, altering their minds in such a way that they couldn't process the Sumerian language anymore. Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one computer to another, damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around the brainstem.'
'Lagos devoted much time and effort to this idea,' the Librarian says. 'He felt that the nam-shub of Enki was a neurolinguistic virus.'
'And that this Enki character was a real personage?'
'Possibly.'
'And that Enki invented this virus and spread it throughout Sumer, using tablets like this one?'
'Yes. A tablet has been discovered containing a letter to Enki, in which the writer complains about it.'
'A letter to a god?'
'Yes. It is from Sin-samuh, the Scribe. He begins by praising Enki and emphasizing his devotion to him. Then he complains:
'Like a young … (line broken)
I am paralyzed at the wrist.
Like a wagon on the road when its yoke has split,
I stand immobile on the road.
I lay on a bed called 'O! and O No!'
I let out a wail.
My graceful figure is stretched neck to ground,
I am paralyzed of foot.
My … has been carried off into the earth.
My frame has changed.
