The library of Ashurbanipal, Obama’s audacity of hope, and Highsmith’s first job: newsletter, January 10, 2020

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The library of Ashurbanipal: its discovery changed our view of history

Ashurbanipal was as cruel and ruthless as any of his Assyrian predecessors. All of the kings who had come before had sought to strike fear into their enemies by their spectacularly horrid treatment of those who opposed them — treatment that included blinding their children and jerking them around as their tongues were impaled by hooks. Such acts were designed to induce immediate and unconditional surrender when the Assyrian army aimed itself in your direction.

Ashurbanipal, however, had an additional quality that makes us today — more than 2,500 years after his death — remember his name while we have forgotten all who went before him.

He was curious.

He wanted to know what other people knew. He wanted to possess their secrets. If they had some magical powers to use against him, he wanted to know that. The way to do that, he decided, was to collect as many of the written records from his enemies, both real and potential, as he could and to store them in a large building or in his palace in his capital city of Nineveh.

These “documents” did not exist on paper. Rather, they were written on clay tablets that had been softened mud when they were created and had been dried to a hardened and almost permanent condition. Ashurbanipal wasn’t just interested in current documents. He wanted a tribe’s antiquities. Consequently, his “library” consisted of clay tablets that went back to the Sumerians, more than a thousand years before the time of Ashurbanipal himself.

Ashurbanipal had thousands of these tablets — everything from crop records to magic potents to legal documents to poems and stories.

But the Assyrian empire eventually fell to stronger enemies, and Ninevah was sacked, burned, covered by the sands of time, and forgotten.

Indeed, it would have been completely wiped from the memory slates of mankind except for a reference to it in the Old Testament prophetic book of Nahum, where the fall of Nineveh is described. It was that description that stuck in the head of a 19th century Englishman, Austen Henry Layard, who decided that he could, and would, find the spot where Ninevah existed.

In 1849 Layard found Nineveh (although confirmation that it actually was Nineveh did not come for another decade), but it was what the city contained that profoundly changed the modern view of ancient civilizations. Layard began extracting clay tablets from what became known as the Palace of King Sennacherib. Two years later, working in a different part of the city, Layard’s assistant, Hormuzd Rassam, found another quarry of clay tablets in Ashurbanipal’s palace.

All of these tablets were packed up and shipped back to the British Museum in London. Unfortunately, there are no records as to exactly which palace, Sennacherib’s or Ashurbanipal’s, they were found in, and the tablets have been irretrievably mixed up. Still, the tablets themselves are astonishing in their number (more than 30,000) and in the breadth of information they contain.

Finding the tablets was one thing. Figuring out what they were and what they meant was another. That’s next week.

William Tapply on invisible writing

Before his untimely death in 2009, one of the best mystery novelists around was William G. Tapply, creator of the Brady Coyne mystery series.

Tapply’s novels live up to the cover blurbs — well-formed characters, tightly woven plots and elegant writing.

Tapply practiced what many of us who taught writing often preached, and he gives voice to some of those practices in an essay titled “Invisible Writing.”

The essay tells the story of what Tapply learned from his father — also an excellent writer — when he was beginning his craft. The essay emphasizes two major points I make with my students:

— pay attention to verbs (read more on this) and

— try to make your writing invisible to the reader.

The term I use for the second point is “modesty.” A good writer should try to put the content in the foreground and the writer in the background.

Tapply’s essay and his novels are well worth reading.

It was with plenty of audacity and no small amount of hope that Barack Obama sat down in the early 1990s to write his life story.

He had just turned 30 in 1991 and could reasonably assume that much was ahead of him — an assumption that would be true, of course — but he also knew that his life to that point had been like no one else’s whom he knew:

• The son of a white mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya;
• Raised in Indonesia, Africa, and Hawaii;
• Intellectually brilliant, confirmed by the fact that he was editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama’s defining experience to that point had been his relationship with his father, with him he had lost touch early in life and then re-established contact. Shortly after that, however, his father died, and Obama traveled to Kenya to find out more about the man. There, many of the images he had of his father are shattered. He finds that his father had slid from being a brilliant and respected academic to a drunk and an object of pity.

The small amount of fame that Obama achieved as being the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review netted him a call from a literary agent, a book proposal and a publisher. His first idea was to write about race relations, but that didn’t suit him and where he was, according to an article about the book by Janny Scott published by the New York Times.

That journey of discovery through the images he had of his father is what he decided he had to tackle. What he produced was Dreams From My Father (Amazon).

He did so with confidence and flair — even audacity — using composite characters, invented dialogue, out-of-sequence events and a variety of literary techniques. He has since come under some criticism for his account. Inquiring journalists and political opposition researchers say things didn’t happen the way he said they happened.

But there is one fact that no one disputes. Obama wrote his own book.

He struggled with sentences, phrasing, and structure. He edited, rewrote and re-thought.

The words are his and his alone. He didn’t pay a ghostwriter or take on some partner to do the literary heavy-lifting. The writing is his creation. In this age of spin and carefully calibrated public pronouncements, getting an unobstructed look into the mind of a prominent political figure does not happen very often.

Obama wrote his own story. In my book, that counts for a lot.

Sources and links:

• Janny Scott, The Story of Obama, Written by Obama, The New York Times, May 18, 2008
• Paul Watkins, A Promise of Redemption, New York Times, August 6, 1995 — a review of Dreams From My Father

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