There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

They call it Kouyunjik—the mound covering the ruins of the North Palace. Located just on the opposite bank of the Tigris, forty feet high, it is a hill with mysteries buried inside. This is where, one early-summer afternoon thousands of years ago, a tiny raindrop fell from the skies on the head of King Ashurbanipal, and this is where Arthur Smyth is now digging through layers of earth, layers of time.

“I am proud to be from the Middle East, Nen. Our region has always been misunderstood. Ask a Westerner, ‘Do you happen to know where Syria, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey are on a map?’ They’d draw a total blank. In their eyes we’re all from somewhere in the back of beyond. They don’t even know that Mesopotamia was a fount of civilization. We invented cities, maths, writing, astronomy, even the bloody wheel! And the clock, too. How would they measure time without us? They have no idea how much they owe us.”

“But don’t get me wrong, I’m not Middle Eastern,” Uncle interrupts. “I’m from the Levant! A proud descendant of Hellenistic culture. The Mediterranean and the Near East were one. No one talks about this anymore, but it’s a fact. Smyrna, Alexandria, Beirut—they were profoundly cosmopolitan. We weren’t in separate boxes, the Greeks here, the Syrians over there. We constantly mingled. How would the Western classics have survived if they had not been translated into Arabic?”

“Zaleekhah tells me you like the Epic of Gilgamesh.” “I do.” “And you tattoo its characters?” “I do.” “Lord, heavens!” Another sigh. “It’s a great poem, though.” Nen nods. “It is—and it has fans from all over the world. You should see the tourists coming to my shop—from Japan, Norway, Canada…The ancient poem unites us across borders, but also, in some strange way, we can never seem to agree on how to interpret it. That’s why it’s been treasured by dictators and dissidents alike, the mighty and the weak. It can be read in multiple ways.”

“For me, the epic is primarily about both the fragility and resilience of being human, and, also, it is about the possibility for change. Learning to care for others, not just yourself. Gilgamesh, let’s admit, is an awful person in the beginning, and it is only through love and friendship and loss that he becomes more humble and gentle. So it is a story in which there is no hero in the traditional sense, and everything is either fractured or fluid—like life itself.”

“I beg to differ, my dear. I believe the poem is about the fear of death. We all must shuffle off this mortal coil, so to speak; we’ll all push up the daisies. Can’t be avoided. What is its moral lesson? Simple. The epic tells us that, since we cannot attain immortality, or even prolong youth, we must eat and drink and make merry and always prioritize family and friends. Our own people. That’s its universal message. Family comes first.”

“So do you have a favorite quote from the Epic of Gilgamesh?” Nen smiles, both because she likes the question and also because she knows Zaleekhah is trying to soften the tension. “I have, actually. There’s this line that Enkidu says to Gilgamesh just before they set out on the road. I think it’s one of the most beautiful things you can say to a friend or spouse or lover.” Nen pauses for a second, her eyes sparkling in the light of the flickering candles, and then she recites: “Where you have set your mind begin the journey Let your heart have no fear, keep your eyes on me.”

Arthur knows they were frightened of death, even the mightiest rulers. It was the one thing they had no control over. He also knows that not far from here, on a day like this, thousands of years back, people of all ages lined the streets to watch the funeral of a Mesopotamian king. Leading the procession were the king’s favorite wife, the king’s youngest wife, the king’s favorite son, the king’s barber, the king’s storyteller…Also accompanying them was a retinue of soldiers, servants, musicians bearing harps and lyres, and members of the court, clad in dazzling garments adorned with carnelian and lapis lazuli. They marched in silence, each carrying their own small cup. When they arrived at the place designated for the royal grave, one by one, they drank the poison in their cups. They were all to be buried in the very same tomb, just so the king would still have his barber and his servants to serve him and his musicians to play him songs and his storyteller to tell him stories in the afterlife. That afternoon they all killed themselves as arranged, simply so that a man accustomed to power would not have to face his own mortality alone.

Arthur is beginning to suspect that civilization is the name we give to what little we have salvaged from a loss that no one wants to remember. Triumphs are erected upon the jerry-built scaffolding of brutalities untold, heroic legends spun from the thread of aggressions and atrocities. The irrigation system was Nineveh’s glowing achievement—but how many lives were squandered in its construction? There is always another side, a forgotten side. Water was the city’s greatest asset and defining feature, yet it was also what undermined it in the end. The large amounts of salt deposited by torrent and tide wrecked the soil. Rivers raised, rivers razed. Sometimes your biggest strength becomes your worst weakness.

They kill the water first. In this land where rivers are sacred and every drop of rain is a blessing, they creep in at dead of night and poison all the wells, shafts and fountains in the village. The next morning the inhabitants of Zêrav wake up to a shocking sight. Slabs of concrete, metal debris and sacks of pesticides have been dumped into every source of water. Several men volunteer to walk to the next Yazidi village to ask for help, only to find out that they, too, have suffered similar devastation and are in desperate need. The only drinkable water is kilometers away. The group, now larger, decides to go check on their Muslim neighbors. They are surprised to see that their fountains have been left untouched. It is only the water in the Yazidi settlements that has been tampered with.

There is something almost sacrilegious in witnessing clean water being deliberately soiled.

Two days later, the enemy returns, this time to kill the trees. Always at night, shrouding themselves in darkness, they set fire to olive groves, turning whole fields into wastelands of charred stumps. They break off branches, spoil the fruit; they torch the shrubs and uproot tender saplings.

A lone tree burning bright against the sky is a sorrowful sight. But entire groves going up in flames, once glimpsed, will be forever branded on your memory.

Çarşema Sor, “Red Wednesday”—the festival that welcomes spring and hails new beginnings. The day the universe was created from a white pearl, and water and land were separated from each other. A time of rebirth and revival. April is “the bride of the year.” The villagers boil eggs and paint them in the brightest colors, ready for the festive game hekkane. A mixture of broken eggshells, wild flowers and clay is applied to the entrances of homes. They decorate the graves, celebrating the arrival of the new year with the living and the dead.

Leila starts to sing—a haunting melody, dirge-like. Her voice keeps rising and falling. One moment she is a young woman, but the next she sounds ageless, featureless, a creature of water and foam. When she speaks it is no longer in Kurdish. Arthur feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The words pouring from her lips are remarkably similar to Akkadian, the ancient Semitic language of Mesopotamia. It enthralls him, the mirroring of the consonants. Yet again he finds himself wondering whether the Yazidis could be the descendants of a civilization that flourished in this region thousands of years back.

When the firman strikes, the faqra says, the tomb of Nabi Yunus, the prophet Jonah, will be destroyed. Sacred sites will be reduced to ruins. Many will die; others will experience such brutality that they will wish they had. “I see men, armed and trained, their hearts of stone I see my village burn, my home razed, Cries of the elderly, hills of bone.” Everyone in the room is silent. Some are weeping without a sound. No one dares to interrupt. “The day they come to kill us run to the mountain. Do not go near the water, river, well nor fountain.”

“The Ancient Mesopotamians—did they have a word for depression?” “They did, but they viewed mental health differently, as if some outside force, a god or a demon, caused it. There are fascinating descriptions on clay tablets—incantations, rituals, fumigations and potions. There is ashushtu, which is more like distress. Puluhtu, used for people who are constantly worried or afraid, or have phobias. Nissatu means ‘grief.’ Gilgamesh says ‘grief enters my belly’ when Enkidu dies. Šinīt ṭēmiis is the alteration of the mind, so that could be suicidal thoughts or severe panic attacks. And then there is hip libbi, the malady of melancholy—it literally means ‘shattering of the heart.’ ”

“For a long time, my hip libbi lived inside a bottle of gin—like a djinni in a lamp. I would glimpse her in my drink—sometimes she would be floating on her back, utterly still, at other times swimming, but always there, at the bottom of each glass.”

The Ancient Mesopotamians believed mountains to be alive. Borders connecting the terrestrial and the celestial, in-between spaces. The fingers of earth jutting out as though hoping to touch the skies. One of the oldest words found in archeological excavations is hursag—“mountain.”

“You must listen to me now. Whatever happens, tell it to the water. It will take away all the pain and fear. And, even if you cannot find a flowing stream, remember it is in you. You are made of water.”

On the fourth morning, as death quickens its pace, Grandma gives the last of the water she has so carefully guarded to Narin. She places the drop from a plastic bottle with a blue lid on the girl’s tongue as though it were a precious pearl. — She has no way of knowing, but this last drop on Mount Sinjar in August 2014 is the same one that fell on Nineveh one stormy afternoon, thousands of years back, settling in the hair of King Ashurbanipal.

The night before his departure, he watches Leila from his window one last time. He assumes she is sleepwalking, but, when she turns to face him, her eyes are open and alert. She carries a glass of water, which she splashes in his direction and smiles. “What does that mean?” asks Arthur. “We spill water for luck and protection. Go like water, come back like water—freely and easily.” He takes out his pocketknife and through the open window reaches out to the pomegranate tree. He makes three vertical marks on its bark. “That’s the ancient sign of water,” he says. “This mark is my pledge—I promise I will come back.” “You will, I know,” she says. “But you will return changed, and you will find things changed.” He shakes his head, even though he senses she is probably right. He feels such a strong desire to hold her then that he has to cross his arms to stop himself. His voice weak, all he can do is to repeat himself. “I will return. I promise, I will come back.”

Arthur catches sight of his reflection in the French windows. Sorrow clings to his features. It feels wrong to find the artifacts of Nineveh displayed for the amusement of the wealthy and the powerful. The people of Mesopotamia, the descendants of the scribes who composed the tablets and the artisans who chiseled the statues, will never have a chance to see these pieces. Up until this moment, it had not troubled him that antiquities were to be brought to Europe to be lodged in major museums and institutions. To the contrary: he believed he was rescuing them from obscurity. But seeing them in a private home tonight makes his heart ache.

That’s the one thing he hasn’t shaken off—the memory of hunger. The cramps shooting through his insides are still sitting in his stomach like stones. He feels the need to check daily whether they are out of provisions. He may have managed to lift up his head and change his prospects, but the ground beneath his feet never feels solid or secure.

“In those days, in those far-off days…in olden times…the sky and the land were one. The world was a blank tablet, waiting for the first words to form. Everything was in harmony—bitter waters and sweet waters blended seamlessly. Tiamat was the goddess of the sea—the saltwater—and Apsu was the god of springs—the fresh water. They were very different, but they fell in love.” “Then what happened?” “From their union rose other deities. When her beloved husband was killed, Tiamat wanted revenge. She was formidable, strong-willed. She assembled an army of mythical creatures and charged against the forces of Marduk—her arch-enemy. The war went on for a long time, but Marduk came up with a plan. He asked the wind to enter Tiamat’s mouth. Her body grew as big as the world. He then easily killed her with an arrow. Earth was created from her decomposing body, and from her crying eyes sprang the two legendary rivers of Mesopotamia: Tigris and Euphrates.”

She says when we look at a person all we see in that moment is a partial image of them, often subconsciously biased. They appear successful and content, and so we conclude there must be something wrong with us, since we cannot be more like them. But that image is not the full reality and nor are we that simple or static. “We are all like clay tablets, chipped around the edges, hiding our little secrets and cracks.” “Not everyone, though.” “Everyone, I promise you. Is there such a thing as absolute happiness? Never-ending success? A perfect marriage? A quick fix to cure anxiety? We want to believe there is—just like Gilgamesh wanted to believe he could live forever. Then we’re defeated, humbled. We learn to accept there’ll always be something amiss, something broken, and unless we are kind to ourselves it won’t change, this feeling of incompleteness.”

They called her Nisaba, though, depending on the place and the era, she went by other names, too: Nidaba, Naga, Se-Naga…The goddess of grain and harvest, the one who holds sway over the rain, directing every drop that falls from the sky. In her pictures, she carries, in one hand, a stalk of wheat—the symbol of life, renewal and rebirth; in her other hand, she holds a gold stylus and a tablet of lapis lazuli. The roots of agriculture and the roots of literature are intertwined, and it is none other than Nisaba who braids them like a lock of her hair. Nisaba is born of the union of heavens and earth, realms that seem so different and distant that it may not be clear what they have in common, and thus her gift—the art of writing—will always represent a desire to efface dualities, dissolve hierarchies and transcend boundaries.

To write is to free yourself from the constraints of place and time. If the spoken word is a trick of the gods, the written word is the triumph of humans.

The goddess of writing documents the good and the bad: celebrations and lamentations, victories and defeats, beauties and atrocities, all that makes humans resilient and vulnerable in equal degree. In parts of Mesopotamia, she is so highly venerated that she is not only entrusted with recounting legends and tales but also with settling disputes and mending grievances. Justice, if it is to be at all meaningful, needs to be recorded.

The temple at Eresh, dedicated to Nisaba, is known as Esagin, the “House of Lapis Lazuli,” for this is her stone and this is her color. The goddess of knowledge and storytelling is imagined in the deepest shade of blue.

In the time of Hammurabi of Babylon, a new fear enters hearts. The harshest punishments are set into laws, terror inscribed in stone. The code favors might, the code favors men—and therefore women, children, slaves, outsiders and men who do not have any power or wealth are all deemed inferior. Hammurabi’s wrath is particularly reserved for those who transgress. A wife who accidentally hurts her husband’s testicles is to be punished more severely than a habitual thief or even a cold-blooded murderer. Women accused of neglecting their homes are cast into the river. The Tigris, ever patient with the ways of humans, receives their bodies.

In the present order, the goddess of writing is stripped of her powers, all of which are now assigned to a male god—Nabu. From now on Nabu will be the patron of literacy and storytelling. Nabu will embody knowledge, memory and wisdom. And in hundreds of schools, young scribes are made to finish their assignments with these four words: Praise be to Nabu As for Nisaba, she is transmuted into “the loving wife of Nabu”—faithful, giving and dutiful. Next she becomes his diligent secretary, helpfully hovering in the background. The only vestige of her glorious past is a lapis lazuli pendant in the shape of a stylus that hangs around her neck. Thus expunged not all at once but by degrees, Nisaba retreats into the shadows, from where she watches Nabu gather accolades and adulations. How fast he ascends! As Marduk is crowned the king of the gods, Nabu is declared the son of the king of the gods. He stands tall and proud by his father’s throne, carrying in his hands the blue tablet that once belonged to Nisaba. By the time of the sixth king of the first dynasty of Babylonia, writing is no longer regarded as a suitable occupation for women. Nabu’s fame will continue to soar, spreading from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean basin, where he is embraced by multiple civilizations—Greek, Roman and Christian. But the tradition of Nisaba will remain rooted in the very place where it was born, and it will also perish there, her tablets broken, her stylus buried by the banks of the Tigris. The...

What happened in the village of Golden Waters will never be mentioned in history books. Only the grandchildren of the survivors will remember. It will remain unvoiced in their unfinished sentences, uneasy silences, resurfacing nightmares. The memory of the massacre will be carefully handed down from one generation to the next, like passing someone a lit match protected from the wind in the shelter of your palm. One day itinerant bards will sing about the firman. Luring the ghosts from their burial places, the ballads will tell how the pasha and the qadi, joining forces with the Beg of Rowanduz, known as Mir Kura, put hundreds of Yazidis to the sword in a matter of hours. Together they organized an army, instructing the soldiers to kill all the men and boys, and keep the women and girls as spoils of war. The songs will lament how, outnumbered and outgunned, the villagers—women, men, children—tried to outrun their fate. Some fled toward Mount Judi and Tûr Abdin, others toward Mount Sinjar, but a larger group made for the River Tigris—the waters roiling and rising with melted snow. To their horror they found the makeshift bridge had disappeared. They searched for a boat, a raft, anything to help them cross, but there wasn’t one to be found for miles. Unbeknownst to them, the qadi had had the bridge destroyed and the vessels removed. And so the people of Zêrav were trapped, the river rushing past in front of their eyes. Those who tried to swim were drowned. Paralyzed by fear, ...

It is an odd thing, to lose faith in the beliefs you once held firmly. How strange it is to have carried your convictions like a set of keys, only to realize they will not open any doors.

Narin knows two mighty streams flow through every human being: the good and the bad. Which course we choose to follow—through heart, spirit and mind—ultimately determines who we are. Some people will do everything they can to avoid hurting another person, even in the most desperate of situations, while others will inflict suffering as casually as if they were swatting away a fly.

In the blackest sky there is a star glimmering high above, in the deepest night, a candle burning bright. Never despair. You must always look for the nearest source of life.

When King Gilgamesh died, they interred his body under the river. Not inside, but under. To do this they had to divert the Euphrates, forcing it to flow in an unnatural direction; once the funeral was over, they returned the river to its original course. The workers who dug the hero’s grave were all killed afterward. That way, there would be no one left alive to reveal the burial place.

Mesopotamia is made of stories of water. Across its alluvial plains, the oldest tales are dedicated to streams, storms and floods. The Sumerian word for water, a—just like the Kurdish word aw—also means conception, semen, beginning.

Rivers are fluid bridges—channels of communication between separate worlds. They link one bank to the other, the past to the future, the spring to the delta, earthlings to celestial beings, the visible to the invisible, and, ultimately, the living to the dead. They carry the spirits of the departed into the netherworld, and occasionally bring them back. In the sweeping currents and tidal pools shelter the secrets of foregone ages. The ripples ...

The songs of this land, though seemingly about love or heartbreak, are actually about place—both the beauty and the sadness it embodies. The Ancient Mesopotamians are famed for inventing writing, mathematics, astronomy, irrigation and the wheel, but their biggest discovery has gone unr...

The inhabitants of this region have always known that they rely on water for survival. Grateful for every drop of fresh water that graced their days, they thanked the rivers—and also feared them. When the levees break and the banks burst, they leave trauma behind—a story to be told from one generation to the next. Mesopotamian lore understands that water is the defining force of life. Trees are “rooted water,” streams are “flowing water,” birds are “flying water,” mountains are “rising water,” and, as for...

When Arthur first started studying the tablets, he used to think of civilization as a solid edifice, elegantly expressed in marble, wood, glass and metal. A feat of engineering, planning, design and construction. The triumph of humankind over nature. But now, as he traverses this desolate landscape, it seems to him that what they call civilization is, in truth, a storm in waiting. Powerful, protean and perfectly destructive, sooner or later it will burst free of its barriers and engulf everything in its insatiable path.

The Ancient Mesopotamians saw portents everywhere—in the glow of embers in the hearth, the murmurations of starlings in the skies, the swirls of smoke from incense burners, the fall of Knucklebones in the dust, the formations of the clouds…They read omens in the intestines of sacrificial animals, the contours of spilled flour, the patterns of oil on water…No one was indifferent to the auguries: kings and servants, all yearned for a glimpse of the unseen. Partly because they understood how fragile life is and how close the breath of death. And partly because they retained a naive hope that, despite the inequalities and injustices of this world, someone or something from another realm might give them counsel and assistance in their hour of need.

They not only murder, kidnap and rape. They have a sideline business: looting and trading antiquities. Despite the videos circulating of militants tearing down statues, vandalizing libraries and burning books, behind the display of indiscriminate destruction enormous profits are being made from smuggled artifacts. There are collectors across the world so eager to own pieces from Mesopotamia that they will blithely ignore their bloodstained provenance. Some items are openly auctioned; others quietly find their way into the hands of private buyers—in New York, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin and London.

Time is a river that meanders, branching out into tributaries and rivulets, depositing sediments of stories along its shores in the hope that someday, someone, somewhere, will find them. The blue tablet is exceptional, but, as he ruminates about it, his own fallibility hits him. To whom does the object belong—the itinerant bards who recited the poem, traveling from city to city; the king who ordered it to be put in writing; the scribe who labored in setting it down; the librarian who scrupulously stored it; the archeologist who unearthed it centuries later; the museum that will keep it safe—or does it belong only to the people of this land, and, if so, will minorities like the Yazidis ever be counted among them?

We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honor, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, “Remember us.” It is our way of admitting we were weak and flawed, and that we made mistakes, some inevitable, others foolish, but deep within we appreciated beauty and poetry, too. Each historical artifact, therefore, is a silent plea from ancestors to descendants, “Do not judge us too harshly.” We make art to leave a mark for the future, a slight kink in the river of stories, which flows too fast and too wildly for any of us to comprehend.

So it is that on this day in August 1876, King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums—the boy born on the banks of the River Thames into poverty and hardship, raised in the tenements of lower Chelsea; student in a ragged school; apprentice to a leading printer and publisher; decipherer of cuneiform tablets at the British Museum; a reluctant celebrity thrust into the center of a fierce debate on religion versus science, Creation versus Evolution; scholar, explorer, archeologist and savant; father and husband and a man with a secret love buried in his heart—breathes his last on the shores of the River Tigris, in the confines of a dilapidated mud hut, no different from those of the Ancient Mesopotamians, whose poetry and stories defined his life.

They bought Narin from a dealer who did business with a dealer who did business with ISIS. They paid $3,200—the market price for a human being on that particular day. Most of the money came from the tattoo shop. They had assistance from locals, people who wanted to help. It was no secret that one more Yazidi slave was being held captive in a house in a busy suburb in a booming city in Turkey, just as thousands of others were still in family homes in Syria, Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia…Prisoners in ordinary neighborhoods where life went on as normal.

It is only a matter of time now, and time, like an ancient tablet, is breaking apart, faster than anyone can reassemble it. Tomorrow, when the last remaining poems of Mesopotamia are submerged and all that was Hasankeyf has drowned, people will speak of the destruction of culture and environment and the memories of the land, though no one, not even the river itself, will remember that it all began with a single raindrop. A droplet from the Tigris ascends ever so slowly, evaporating under the sun, a gauzy spiral of mist. An eternal cycle starts to repeat itself, from liquid to vapor to solid. Tears from the destroyed cities of Mesopotamia mingle with the haze of torrents yet to come. As the cloud passes over continents, it freezes into crystals. A snowflake falls over London, seesawing rapidly toward a newborn baby lying on the icy ground. And the infant looks up at the mystery that is water, all flurry and movement, now silver, now blue, the most beautiful, deepest blue. And if we could only see the world through a baby’s eyes, gazing up with innocent wonder, we could watch the rivers in the sky. Mighty rivers that never cease to flow.