There was a huge viewing screen above the stage that along with the tiered seating made him feel like he’d come to watch an IMAX movie. However, the still image projected on to the screen - some glossy brownish skull with a heavy brow ridge, maybe ape, maybe primitive human - wasn’t exactly blockbuster material.
When Flaherty’s gaze finally settled on the lecturer whose sultry voice buttered the sound system, his eyebrows went up.
‘Whoa!’ he exclaimed to himself.
Roaming freely in front of the stage’s central podium, clicker in her hand, clip-on microphone wired to the lapel of a form-fitting navy pants suit, was Professor Brooke Thompson. What he’d seen of her on the BlackBerry was only a headshot that showed wavy hair shaped to the shoulder, a long graceful neck and a face straight off a magazine cover. The complete picture was far more impressive. She seemed taller than the five-nine indicated in her profile, lithe with a perfect blend of tight curves that suggested a conscientious diet and rigid fitness regimen. Certainly helped explain the predominantly male turnout, he thought, glancing once again at the attendees.
Finally he began to focus on what she was saying. And once again, he was impressed. Brooke Thompson was an engaging speaker. Though Flaherty thought he wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about the seemingly arcane topic - listed on the programme as ‘Mesopotamia and the Origins of Written Language’ - she immediately hooked him.
10
‘So it’s around 10,000 years ago,’ Brooke Thompson went on, ‘when the most recent Ice Age finally comes to a close. The massive glacial sheets retreat to uncover the land, while the rapid melt-off causes a dramatic rise in sea levels. The most recent cycle of global warming, not attributable to emissions from SUVs and coal-burning power plants.’
Some chuckles from the audience.
‘The Neanderthals had long since vanished’ - she pointed up to the skull still showing on the big screen - ‘whether due to a turf war with early humans, or, as some scientists have suggested, genetic dilution through inbreeding with
She pointed the clicker and the projector brought up a detailed map centred on the Middle East.
‘Surplus foods allow extensive trading over wide areas, while specialization of labour fosters hyper-speed technology. To manage this new way of life, industrious humans develop a systematic means of communication that doesn’t rely on memory or oral transference. They are to become the world’s first bureaucrats. Enter the first written language. Which leads us to the epicentre of it all - right here …’
Brooke used the clicker’s laser pointer to place a bright red dot at the map’s centre, just north of the modern Persian Gulf.
‘Here is where archaeologists have unearthed the ruins of the world’s earliest hierarchical societies. This once lush and peaceful paradise was known as the “land between two rivers”, or “Mesopotamia”. Hard to imagine since today it is a war-torn nation known as Iraq.’
Some quiet chatter rippled through the crowd.
‘Now I’d like to focus on how written language enabled these early civilizations to develop first into agricultural cities with tens of thousands of citizens, then city states hundreds of thousands strong, and eventually … empires stretching across Eurasia.’
Scanning the sea of faces that filled the auditorium, Brooke focused on the intent smiles and nodding heads, blocked out the few sceptical scowls. The recent articles she’d published in the
‘The earliest known written communication dates to around 3500 BC.’
Brooke hated snubbing the
Taking a five-second break to sip some water helped her to fight the compulsion to scream out a pronouncement that would amount to career suicide. Any one of the faces staring back at her from the audience might be linked to that benefactor, she reminded herself. Someone out there is hanging on my every word.
If only she could tell the world how irrefutable evidence showed that around 4000 BC a cataclysm took place in northern Mesopotamia - an event so profound that progress and humankind itself were thrown back in time, forced to start anew. The first Dark Ages.
But instead, she forged on with the story that her esteemed colleagues expected.
‘Around 3500 BC, the Mesopotamian elite began using stamped seals to identify their property. A mark of ownership. Here you have a typical cylinder seal,’ she said, pointing the clicker to advance to the next image - a small stone tube covered in geometric depressions. ‘Cylinders like this would be rolled on to a wet clay slab to leave artful impressions and picture stories. Fast-forward to 3000 BC and we find that scribes then begin pressing into these damp clay tablets with reeds, or stones chips, or other instruments, to create pictographs and hashes representing numbers. Our first accountants and tax collectors.’
The next slide showed an oblong clay tablet delineated into rows of boxes, which were filled with simple representations of animals. The pictographs were beset by vertical lines bisected with numerous cross hashes to resemble overlapping Ts .
‘Here is a fantastic specimen that shows how the oldest Mesopotamian civilization, the Sumerians, tallied food supplies. This mushroom-shaped symbol here represents a cow …’ she indicated it with the laser pointer, ‘… and here we have the head count.’ She moved the dot slightly up and to the left to indicate symbols that looked like sideways Vs. ‘At first, these simple clay tablets were left to dry in the sun. As such, few of the earliest examples remain, since over time moisture and the elements took their toll on the clay - disintegrated the tablets. Eventually, however, the scribes learned that if the finished tablets were baked at a high temperature, the record would be virtually indestructible - permanent. It’s worth noting that this same technological advance was also applied to mud brick so that the ancients could construct grander, more permanent architectural structures.’
For the next few minutes, she elaborated on a series of slides that showed a steady 2,000-year evolution from crude pictographs to schematic wedge-shaped forms called cuneiform - a slow march towards standard word symbols that borrowed and refined the old elements. Next came pictures of various artifacts that chronicled 3,000 years when cuneiform reigned supreme: a clay tablet from 2300 BC Akkad which tallied barley rations; an elaborate cylinder seal whose impressions depicted the Mesopotamian pantheon of gods and goddesses alongside narrative inscriptions; a clay ‘letter’ circa 1350 BC sent by the Babylonian king Burnaburiash to an Egyptian pharaoh; a stela from 860 BC, depicting the Assyrian king, Ashurnasirpal II, in full royal dress, covered in neat rows of cuneiform; an inscribed Babylonian world map from 600 BC; an elaborate clay cylinder excavated from the palace wall of Nebuchadnezzar II.
‘It wasn’t long before writing was used to record legends and mythology. Thousands of years before Adam and Eve appear in the Hebrew book of Genesis, Mesopotamian creation myths - the world’s first true literature - featured a garden paradise, a tree of knowledge and humanity’s first man and woman. Long before Noah’s great flood, a cuneiform epic written in clay around 2700 BC tells the story of the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh, who’d built a boat to escape a cataclysmic flood. The tower of Babel is based on a magnificent temple pyramid in Ur - the ziggurat. And in 2100 BC Abraham leaves Ur to become the Old Testament patriarch, founder of monotheism and progenitor of the twelve tribes of Israel.’
She noticed that the few scowling faces in the audience looked visibly relieved, leading her to conclude that they found her delicate tip-toeing through the material agreeable.
‘From these primitive languages emerge the early Semitic languages: Assyrian, Aramaic, Hebrew. Then come Greek, Latin, the Romance languages and English,’ she said. ‘Not until the Macedonian army led by Alexander the Great conquered Mesopotamia and Persia around 325 BC did cuneiform begin its rapid decline,’ Brooke said. ‘So be
