There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

His voice rising with excitement, he tells them that thousands of years ago, in Nineveh, there lived a remarkable king called Ashurbanipal. Unlike any other ruler, before or after, he was devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. To this end he amassed a monumental library, ordering his emissaries to gather tablets from far and wide. Gilgamesh is merely one of the many stories in this library—an important one nonetheless. It was an essential part of the oral tradition, central to the collective imagination long before it was written down on clay around 1800 BC, all of which sets the date of the epic almost a thousand years before the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, nearly a millennium before the Book of Genesis. A thin film of perspiration on his brow, Arthur explains how Ashurbanipal’s library was burned when the city was attacked by its enemies. The destruction was total, palaces and temples reduced to naught. The inhabitants were slaughtered, treasures looted, buildings razed to the ground. But, being made of river mud and water, cuneiform tablets proved astonishingly resilient. While flames can easily consume papyrus and parchment, and devour rolls of paper, they cannot harm clay. Quite the opposite, in fact: the fire only baked and hardened them further. This is how they have survived under the earth while centuries have come and gone.