Anunnaki and the Book of Enoch Sleep Stories · 11 Hour Compilation · Five Specials in One Night

Welcome back to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight, five of our specials gathered into one long night. The Anunnaki and the clay tablets of Sumer, and the Book of Enoch and the lost books that came back. Eleven hours, nothing sudden, only one calm voice, and music after the last story.
Rest well.

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight, the oldest story that anyone ever bothered to write down. You have heard the word Anunnaki. Tonight we go all the way back to the clay it was first pressed into, and read what the tablets actually say. They are older than the Odyssey by a thousand years and older than the Bible by longer than that, and what is written on them is stranger and kinder and far more human than anything invented about them since. There are gods in it who dig rivers by hand until they cannot bear it any longer. There is a night when the workers of heaven burn their tools and stand outside a door in the dark, and nobody is harmed, and everything changes. There is a god who is chosen so that people can exist. There are people who are made out of river clay and given the baskets to carry, and who then multiply and thrive and become so gloriously loud that the gods upstairs cannot get to sleep. And there is a man who is warned of a coming flood by a voice that refuses to speak to him, and speaks instead to the wall he is standing behind. Stay with it if you can, down to the tenth chapter, where the kings reign for twenty eight thousand years each, and I will show you the small quiet true thing that explains those numbers. For everyone remembers who the gods were. Almost no one remembers that somebody had to sit down with a lump of wet clay and write them, or that we can only read a word of it tonight because of a fire that was meant to destroy everything. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp. It is a small lamp, a clay dish of oil with a wick laid in the lip of it, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. Beyond its light the room goes soft and brown and shadowed. This is a tablet house. It stands in a city of mudbrick beside a slow river, in a country that lies between two rivers, and outside the door the night is warm and smells of water and dust and barley. The river is out there in the dark, moving the way rivers move, patient, in no hurry, asking nothing of you. The stars are out. They are the same stars that shepherds have counted and named on this plain for longer than anyone can say, and they do not know that any time has passed at all. By the lamp sits an old scribe. His hands are the interesting thing about him, and you would know his trade from them alone: the flattened place on one finger, the fine grey dust worked into every crease, the way they move without being told. On the table in front of him there is a tablet of river clay, still soft, still dark with water, cut to the size of a hand. Beside it lies a reed, cut at an angle. And propped in front of him, where a musician might prop a page of music, there is another tablet, dry and pale and old. That older tablet is what he is copying. And here is the thing worth knowing before anything else tonight. It was already ancient when he sat down. The man who wrote it had been dead for a thousand years before this scribe was born, and the story on it was old when that man wrote it too. Every hand that has ever touched this story was copying it from somebody further back. There is a place for you here in the warm part of the room. There is a reed mat, and a folded cloak for your head, and a whole night with nothing in it that you must carry. Tonight, the scribe says, I am not going to tell you what people say about the great gods. You have heard some of that already, or you think you have. Visitors. Ships. Somebody's clever idea about who really built the world and why. That is a story from a different country and a much later century, and it will keep. Tonight I am going to read you what is actually written here, in this clay, in front of me, by people who believed it and lived beside these rivers and had names and a language and a great deal of trouble with the weather. It is a story about work, mostly. About who has to do the work, and what happens when they refuse. I have always thought that is the most honest beginning any world has ever been given. You do not have to do anything now. Settle onto the mat. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other, the way the whole world feels when you are almost asleep and perfectly safe. Close your eyes if they want to close. This story does not need to be watched. It only needs to be near you, the way the lamp is near you, the way the river is near you, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the scribe will go on without you, and he will not mind. In a tablet house, drifting is only another way of listening. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the clay. Nothing in this story will ever startle you. There is a flood in it, and there is a god who is chosen and does not survive it, and I will not pretend to you that those things are gentle. But they will be told the way this house tells everything, plainly, in a low voice, at a little distance, and then set down. No storm in here will ever be louder than the river outside. You can trust this lamp. That is what it was lit for. The old scribe turns the reed once in his fingers and lays it against the clay. It makes a small dry sound, like a bird stepping on a roof. Before he begins, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next tale will be waiting for you when you need it. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and let him begin. We begin.

Chapter One. The Tablet House. Long ago, and far to the east of here, there was a country with no stone worth speaking of, no forest worth the name, and almost no rain. What it had instead was mud. It had the finest mud in the world, black and deep and endlessly renewed, laid down every spring by two rivers that came down out of the mountains full of snowmelt and dropped their silt across a flat plain on their way to the sea. The rivers were called, in the language of that place and in ours, the Tigris and the Euphrates. And the people who settled between them looked at all that mud and did something that no one had ever done before. They built a civilization out of it. Consider what that actually means, because we say the word civilization quickly and it hides the work. They had no timber, so they cut reeds from the marshes and bound them into pillars and boats and houses. They had no quarries, so they pressed mud into rectangles, laid them in the sun, and made brick. With brick they made walls, and with walls they made cities, the first cities anywhere, with streets and gates and temples and neighbors you had not chosen. They had no rain to speak of, so they cut channels from the rivers and carried the water to the fields themselves, mile after mile of it, dug by hand, and kept clear by hand, forever, because a canal that is not cleaned is a ditch that is filling in. And when all that work produced more barley than one family could eat, and more sheep than one man could count, they needed a way to remember who had what. So they took the mud again, and pressed a mark into it. That is what writing is, and that is where it began. Not with poetry. With inventory. Somebody wet a piece of clay, and pressed a shape into it that meant a measure of grain, and let it dry, and the thought outlived the day it was thought in. Everything that has happened since, every letter and law and love song and lie ever set down, is a consequence of somebody in this country deciding that clay would hold a mark. And once you can hold a mark, you can hold anything. Within a few centuries they were writing letters. Then contracts, then lawsuits, then complaints, and here I want to tell you something true and delightful, because it is the sort of detail that lets you love people you will never meet. Among the tablets that survive from this country there is a letter from a man to a merchant, complaining bitterly that the copper he was sold was of poor quality, that he was treated with contempt, that he has been messed about, and that he will not stand for it. Almost four thousand years old. A complaint about a delivery. They wrote down the movements of the planets. They wrote down recipes. They wrote down the words to songs, and school exercises, and jokes, and the names of cows. And eventually, inevitably, they wrote down the stories. The tablet house was where all of this was taught. In their language it was called the edubba, which means, in a plainness I find very moving, the house of tablets. Boys came there in the morning, and some of them hated it, and we know that they hated it because they wrote about hating it, and those tablets survive too. They learned to cut a reed. They learned to hold it. They learned to press the wedge shaped marks that we now call cuneiform, which only means wedge shaped, and which is not a language at all but a way of writing, the way our alphabet is not a language. They copied lists. They copied more lists. They were beaten when they were late, and they wrote that down as well. And the ones who lasted, who kept going through the lists and the beatings and the ache in the hand, eventually earned the right to copy the old stories, which is where our scribe is sitting tonight, a grown man now, in a quiet room, at a lamp, with the good reed and the good clay, doing the thing he was made for. Picture him for a moment, because we are going to be with him all night. He is not young. The lamp shows the grey in his beard and the deep line between his brows that comes from thirty years of looking closely at small marks in dim light. He sits cross legged, or on a low stool, with the wet tablet cradled in his left hand, because clay must be held to be written, it cannot lie on a table and be pressed properly, and any scribe will tell you that the left hand does half the work and gets none of the credit. The reed is in his right hand. He does not scratch with it. That is the thing everyone gets wrong about this writing. He presses. He sets the cut corner of the reed against the clay and pushes, and lifts, and the clay takes a small triangular bite, deeper at one end than the other, and that is one wedge. Three wedges here, two there, turned this way and that, and you have a word. It is closer to typing than to handwriting, and it is closer still to something else, to the setting of tiles, or the stitching of a seam, a craft of small repeated identical motions that add up into meaning. The sound of it is the sound of this whole night, so listen to it once and then let it go under everything else, the way you let rain go under everything else. A soft press. A pause. A soft press. A pause. And now and then the scrape of the tablet turning in his hand. Outside, the river. He works at night because the day is hot and full of other people. At night the tablet house is his. The lamp is enough for a hand's width of clay, which is all he needs, and beyond that little circle the room could be any size at all. The other tablets sleep on their shelves in the dark, hundreds of them, standing on edge like plates in a rack, each with its little tag hanging down so it can be found again. There is a system. There has always been a system. Someone made this place with the expectation that a person a hundred years from now would want to find something, and would need help doing it, and that is a kind of love that does not usually get called love. He wets his thumb and smooths a corner of the clay. And now he looks at the old tablet propped up in front of him, the pale dry one, the one he is copying, and I want you to look at it with him, because that tablet is the reason for tonight. It is chipped along one edge. Someone dropped it once, long before he was born. The marks on it are cut a little differently than he would cut them, in an older style, the way a letter written by your grandmother has a slant that no one uses anymore. He can read it perfectly well. But he can tell, the way you can always tell, that a stranger from another time made these marks, and that the hand that made them has been dust for longer than his city has stood. And what is written on it begins like this. When the gods were the ones who did the work. The actual first words are only three, in his language, and they are so compact that scholars still argue over exactly how to unfold them. When gods were man, they say, or when the gods were like men, or when the gods did the work of men. Every reading circles the same idea, and the idea is the astonishing part. Not in the beginning was the word, and not sing to me of the man, but a flat opening statement about labor, made by people who knew exactly what labor was, delivered without a shred of ceremony. When the gods were the ones who did the work. He reads it, and then he reaches for the wet clay, and he begins to copy it, so that when this tablet finally crumbles the story will already be somewhere else. That is the entire job. That is all any of them were ever doing. Moving a story from a dying object into a fresh one, hand to hand, down four thousand years, until it arrives in a warm room where you are lying down with your eyes closed. So let us go back to the beginning of what is written there. Back before the mudbrick and the canals. Back before the boys and the lists and the complaints about copper. Back to a time when this whole plain between the rivers was empty of anything that could hold a reed, and the only ones here to do anything at all were the gods themselves.

Chapter Two. Before Anyone Was Made. There was a time, the tablet says, when the gods were the ones who did the work. Sit with that a moment before we go on, because it is not how these stories usually begin, and the difference matters. In a great many traditions the world opens with a word, or a wish, or a great calm act of making, and the maker is never tired. Here the world opens with a shift roster. Here the first fact about existence is that somebody has to carry the baskets, and at the beginning there is nobody to carry them except the gods themselves. So picture the plain as it was then, which is to say picture this same country with everything human subtracted from it. The two rivers are already running. They have always been running. But there are no canals yet, and so the water goes where water goes, which is wherever it likes, spilling out in the wet season across the flat land into marsh and reed bed and standing pools that dry to cracked grey plates in the summer. There are no fields. There is no barley in rows. There are no walls, no gates, no roofs, no smoke going up anywhere at all, and no lamps at night, so the dark is complete and the stars come all the way down to the ground on every side. And in that empty country, the gods. Now, who were they. This is where I must be careful with you, and where almost everything you may have heard goes wrong, so let us take it slowly and get it right, and I promise you it costs nothing to follow because there are only two names to hold. The first is Anunnaki. It is a Sumerian word, and it is built out of ordinary pieces the way most old words are. There is a piece in it that means princely or lordly, and a piece that carries the sense of offspring, of seed, of the ones descended from. And there is An, who is the sky. So the word means, near enough, the princely offspring, the children of the sky. That is all it means. The Anunnaki are the great gods. They are the senior ones, the assembly, the council that sits and decrees what will happen. When something is decided in these stories, it is decided by them, and the phrase that comes with them again and again is that they decree the fates. That is their office. They are, if you like, the ones with the authority to say what a thing will be. The second name is Igigi. The Igigi are the other gods. The younger ones, the lesser ones, the ones without a seat in the assembly. And the relationship between these two groups is genuinely unsettled across the tablets, and I would rather tell you that plainly than tidy it up for you. In some texts the two names are used almost interchangeably, as though a scribe reached for whichever one fitted the line. In others they are clearly and firmly distinct. In later centuries the word Anunnaki drifts downward and comes to mean the gods of the underworld, while Igigi drifts upward and comes to mean the gods of the sky, which is very nearly the opposite of where they started. Old words do this. They wander. Anyone who tells you the ancient world used its terms with perfect consistency has not spent much time with the ancient world. But in the tablet our scribe is copying tonight, the one called by scholars the Atrahasis, the arrangement is clear and it is the arrangement that matters for everything that follows. The Anunnaki decide. The Igigi dig. And I want to say one more thing about that word, Anunnaki, and then I will let it rest for the whole of the night, because it is the reason many of you are here and it deserves one straight sentence before we go on into the story. It does not mean visitors. It does not mean the ones who came down from somewhere else, and it does not mean travelers, and it does not mean anything to do with other worlds. It means the princely offspring of the sky god. The people who wrote it down knew exactly what they meant by it. It is one of the best attested words in the language, and it sits in hundreds of texts, in accounting records and hymns and lists of offerings and curses and prayers, and in every single one of them it means the great gods. There is a much later story about all this, a modern one, and it is genuinely interesting, and we are going to give it a proper hearing of its own on another night. It is not a cheat and it is not a footnote and I am not going to sneer at it. But it is a story from the twentieth century of our era, and tonight we are in the eighteenth century before it, and I would like you to hear what these people said with their own voices first, before anyone speaks over them. So. The sky gods decide, and the young gods dig. Dig what. Everything. That is the answer, and it is worth understanding properly, because the labor in this story is not vague and it is not symbolic and it is not a metaphor for something else. It is the specific, backbreaking, entirely real work of making this particular country habitable, and the people who wrote it knew that work the way you know the road to your own front door. The gods dug the rivers.

Chapter Three. The Ones Who Carried the Baskets. The Tigris first, the tablet says, and the Euphrates after it. They dug the beds of the two great rivers, and then they dug the channels that lead off the rivers, and then the smaller channels that lead off those, out and out across the plain in a branching pattern like the veins in a leaf, until the water could be brought to any place that a growing thing might want to stand. That is what the Igigi were doing. That is the whole of their existence in this story. They were building the irrigation system of southern Mesopotamia, by hand, with baskets. And here is why I love this detail so much, and why I think it tells you more about these people than any temple ever could. They were describing their own lives. Every man who ever heard this story recited had spent part of his year on exactly that work. Canal digging was not a poetic idea in that country, it was the tax you paid in labor, the thing everyone owed, the reason your back hurt in the spring. A canal silts up. It silts up constantly, because the water it carries is thick with the mud that made the whole country in the first place, and so every year, forever, without exception, the channels have to be dug out again, and the spoil carried up the bank in a basket on your shoulder, and dumped, and then you go back down and fill the basket again. So when the scribes wanted to describe the world before people, they did not imagine a paradise. They imagined the work continuing without anyone to do it, and the gods themselves down in the ditch with the baskets. And how long did that last. Here the tablets give us a number, and the number is where I need you to pay a small amount of attention, because we are going to come back to it in the tenth chapter tonight and again on another night entirely, and it is the single most useful thing you will learn in this whole story. How long were the Igigi digging. Some read the worn signs one way and some another, and I will not pretend the tablet is cleaner than it is. Some read the worn signs as a mere forty years. But in the fuller reading, the number the tablet itself gives for the years of that labor is three thousand six hundred. Three thousand six hundred. Remember it. That is all I ask of you tonight. Three thousand six hundred, and I will tell you in the tenth chapter exactly what it is, and it is not what almost anyone thinks. For now, simply understand that the labor went on for a very long time, longer than anyone would agree to if they had known at the start, which is true of most labor. And it broke them. Not suddenly. That is what makes it good. The tablet is quite precise about the shape of it, and the shape is one that anybody who has ever worked too long at something will recognise immediately. It was not one terrible day. It was the accumulation. It was the fact that the basket was full again in the morning, and the channel was silting again behind them, and there was no version of the future in which it stopped. They complained among themselves first. You can hear it in the lines, the way the murmuring goes around the work gang, the way one god says what several have been thinking. Excessive toil, the tablet calls it. The load is too great. The work is killing us. And still they went out the next day and did it. That is such a human note, and it is four thousand years old. They complained for a long time before they did anything. Complaint came first, as it always does, and it changed nothing, as it usually does not. Until one night it did.

Chapter Four. The Night They Burned Their Tools. Out on the dark plain, in the middle of the night, a fire has been lit that nobody is cooking over and nobody is warming themselves at. There is a moment in every long grievance where the talking stops being talking. The tablet does not explain how it happened. It does not give us the god who said the words that turned it. It simply moves, in a few lines, from a work gang muttering in the dark to a work gang that has made a decision, and the decision is expressed not in speech but in fire. They burned their tools. Consider how complete that is. Not a work stoppage, which can be ended. Not a walkout, which can be waited out. They took the baskets and the picks and the carrying frames, everything they had been given to do the work with, everything that made them the ones who did the work, and they put it all in a heap and set it alight, in the middle of the night, on the plain, with nobody watching. You do not burn your tools if you intend to be talked back into using them. And then, by the light of that fire, they went to the house of Enlil. Enlil is the god in charge. He is the great god of the air and of authority, the one whose word carries weight in the assembly, and the one who, in this story and in others, has the least patience of anyone in the sky. His house is where the decision was made that the Igigi would do the digging. So that is where they went. And here is the part I want you to see, because this is the whole reason I love this passage, and because it matters for how you sleep tonight. Nothing happens. They surround the house in the dark. All of them, the entire younger generation of the gods, standing in a ring around the door with the light of their burning tools behind them. And they do not break the door. They do not raise a hand. There is no blow struck in this scene, not one, and no god is harmed, and nothing is destroyed except the tools that they themselves had chosen to destroy. They simply stand there, and wait, and refuse. It is a picket line. It is the oldest picket line in recorded literature, and it is a good one, because it works. Inside, the tablet says, there is alarm. Enlil's steward wakes him. Enlil bars the door. And this is the detail that makes the whole scene, so listen for it: he is frightened. The great god of authority, the one whose word decides things, wakes in the night to find his house surrounded and his first instinct is to bolt the door and send for help. He calls for the other senior gods. Anu comes down from the sky. Enki comes up from the sweet water under the earth. And the great gods of the assembly sit down in the middle of the night, in a barred house, with a silent crowd standing outside in the dark, to work out what on earth to do. They send someone out to ask who started it. That is the first thing authority always asks, and it is always the wrong question, and the answer they get is the right one and a very old one. Nobody started it. Every one of us. All of us together. There is no ringleader out here to hand you, because the grievance is not one god's, it is everyone's, and it is the work itself. And so the senior gods do something that I find genuinely surprising every time I come back to this story. They agree. There is no punishment. There is no god dragged out of the ring and made an example of. The assembly hears the complaint, and considers it, and concludes that the complaint is correct. The work is too hard. It has been too hard for too long. And it is not going to be borne by the ones who have been bearing it. Which leaves them, of course, with the original problem, sitting in the middle of the floor where it has always been. The rivers still need digging. The channels still silt. The country does not maintain itself, and now nobody in the sky is willing to maintain it either. So who will. And into that silence, in a barred house, in the middle of the night, with the fire of the burned tools still going outside, one god has an idea. The god who has the idea is Enki, and you should know a little about him before he opens his mouth, because he is going to matter enormously tonight and he is my favourite figure in this whole literature.

Chapter Five. The God Who Had Intelligence. Enki is the god of the sweet water and of wisdom, and those two things are the same thing in that country, which tells you a great deal about the place. The sweet water is the water under the ground. Not the rivers, which anyone can see, but the water that is down there in the dark beneath the whole plain, the water you reach by digging, the water that comes up in a well when everything above is dust. They called that the Abzu, and they understood, correctly, that it was always there, patient, underneath, whether you knew it or not. And the god of that water is also the god of cleverness, of craft, of the solution nobody else in the room has thought of yet. Because that is what wisdom looked like to them. Not thunder. Not a voice from the sky. Something quiet and underneath and available if you dig. He is also, and this is important for everything that follows tonight, the one who likes people. He has not made any yet. But he is going to, and once he does, whenever the stories bring people into danger, he is the one you will find on their side, again and again, even when it costs him. So Enki speaks, in the barred house, with the crowd outside. His idea is this. The work is real and the work must continue. The Igigi are right that they should not carry it. Therefore let something else be made that can. Let there be a new kind of thing in the world. Give it hands. Let it take up the basket and the pick, and let it dig the channels and keep the rivers clear, and let the gods be free. And the assembly agrees, and there is only one question left, which is what such a thing would be made of. The answer has two halves, and the first half is the earth. Clay. Of course clay. What else would it be, in that country. They lived in brick, they wrote on clay, they ate from clay, they were buried under it. When those people imagined the substance a body might be made from, they reached for the one material they had in unlimited supply, the mud that came down the river every spring, the stuff that everything in their world was already made of. There is something very honest in that. Other traditions build the first people out of divine breath or the tears of a god or the wood of a sacred tree. These people looked at their own hands, and at the riverbank, and made the obvious connection. But clay alone is a pot. Clay alone is a brick. Clay alone lies there. Which brings us to the second half of the answer, and this is the hard part of the night, so I am going to tell it to you the way I promised, plainly, at a little distance, and then we will set it down and go on. For the thing to be alive, and to think, something of the gods had to go into it. So a god was chosen, and a god was killed. The tablet says it as plainly as that, and it does not linger over it, and neither will we. The tablets name him. He is called, in the text our scribe is copying, We ila, and in other tellings the name comes down to us as Aw ilu, and in others as Geshtu e. The name is not stable, the way names in very old stories are often not stable, and I will not pretend to you that we know exactly how it was said. But the sense inside the name is stable, and the sense is this. He is the god who had intelligence. The god who possessed understanding. The thinking one. That is who they chose. Not the weakest. Not a nobody. The one whose defining quality was mind. And they took him, and he was killed, and his flesh and his blood were mixed into the clay. I am not going to describe that further and there is nothing further you need. The tablet itself does not linger over it either, which I have always found telling. It is stated, and it is grave, and then the text moves on to what came of it, because what came of it is the point. What came of it is you. Because the thing that went into the clay was not strength and it was not obedience. It was intelligence. The mind of a god, the specific quality of understanding, mixed into river mud and made into a body. That is what these people believed a human being is. Ordinary earth from an ordinary riverbank, with something in it that thinks, and the something that thinks was not ours originally and did not come free. And there is one more line in that passage that I have carried around for years, and I will give it to you now while you are drifting, because it is the kind of thing that is better received half asleep than fully awake. The tablets say that from the flesh of that god there would be a spirit, and that the spirit would remain, and would be the sign that the god was not forgotten. Some read it as the drumbeat of the heart. That the pulse in you, the sound you can hear in your own ears right now if the room is quiet enough, is the part of that god that did not stop. I do not know if that is what they meant. Scholars argue about the line and they are right to. But it is what is written, near enough, and it is four thousand years old, and it is a remarkable thing to have thought. Then the birth goddess took the mixture, and fourteen pieces were pinched off, seven and seven, and set down in two rows, and from them came the first people. And they were given the baskets.

Chapter Six. The Noise of a Full World. Picture the plain again, but now at night, from high up, the way a bird would see it. And where there was nothing but dark water and dark reeds, there are now ten thousand small lights. Cooking fires. Doorway lamps. The glow of kilns banked for the evening. Towns strung along the rivers like beads on two long threads, and every light with people around it. The story does something genuinely lovely here, and it does it in about four lines, and if you were not listening for it you would miss it entirely. It skips forward, and it lets people be a success. Because they were. That is the next thing that happens. The people take up the work, and the channels get dug, and the water goes where it is meant to go, and the barley comes up in rows, and the gods are free, and everybody in the arrangement gets what they were promised. It works. The solution worked. And then, because this is a story written by people who had watched their own cities grow, the people multiply. Twelve hundred years pass, the tablet says. And in twelve hundred years there are more of them. Then another twelve hundred years, and there are more again. The villages become towns. The towns become cities. The plain that had nothing on it but reeds and standing water now has walls on it, and roofs, and streets, and markets, and boats knocking together in harbors, and temples going up, and a great deal of everything all the time. And the land, the tablet says, bellowed like a bull. That is the phrase. The land bellowed. Not the people. The land itself, the whole country, roaring with the sound of everybody living on it at once, the hammering and the arguing and the animals and the children and the singing and the grinding of grain, all of it going up off the plain like heat off a road, day and night, without stopping. And upstairs, Enlil could not sleep. I want you to appreciate the position we have arrived at, because it is one of the great quiet jokes in world literature and nobody set it up on purpose. The gods made people because they did not want to work. The people did the work, exactly as designed, and did it so well that they thrived, and thrived so thoroughly that they filled the country, and filled it so completely that the noise of them rose up and reached the god of the air, who now lies awake at night listening to the success of his own solution. He is not angry about wickedness. That is the thing to understand. This is not a story about people becoming corrupt or cruel or forgetting their duties. There is no moral failure anywhere in this passage, and no god accuses them of one. They are simply there, in enormous numbers, being alive, loudly. And he cannot sleep. Now. I am aware of the situation we are in, you and I, on this particular channel, at this particular hour, and I am not going to lean on it. But I would be failing in my duty if I did not point out that four thousand years ago, on a plain between two rivers, somebody sat down with a reed and a piece of wet clay and wrote a story in which the central grievance of the king of the gods, the complaint that sets the entire remaining plot in motion, is that he was trying to get to sleep and there was too much noise. He has my sympathy. I suspect he has yours. Rest here a moment, because the next part is where the story turns. Because Enlil, being who he is, does not solve his problem by asking anyone to be quieter.

Chapter Seven. The Voice in the Reed Wall. There is a house in the marsh country whose walls are made of bundled reeds, and you can hear everything through a wall like that. Hold that house in your mind, because the story is on its way there. First, Enlil tries three times. That is the shape of this part, and it is worth knowing in advance so that nothing in it catches you unprepared. Three attempts, each one worse than the last, and I am going to move through the first two lightly because they are not where the story lives. First there is a plague. Then, later, a drought and a famine. Both times the same thing happens, and the pattern is what matters. The people suffer. And down in the sweet water under the ground, Enki hears about it, and Enki tells them what to do. Direct your offerings here, he says. Concentrate everything on this one god, and shame him into lifting it. And they do, and it works, and the plague lifts, and later the rain comes back. Twice Enki gets his people out of it. Twice Enlil works out that somebody has been helping, and knows perfectly well who. So the third time, Enlil closes the door. He goes to the assembly, and he binds them. Every god present is made to swear an oath that this time nobody will warn the people, nobody will help them, nobody will breathe a word of what is coming. And the oath includes Enki. He is in the room. He swears with the rest of them, because a god of the assembly cannot simply decline, and the thing that is coming is a flood that will end every person on the plain. But one god in that room is already turning the wording of the oath over in his mind, looking for the crack in it, and he is going to find one. Now hold that situation in your mind, because everything I love about this literature is about to happen in a single move. Enki has sworn an oath not to tell a man. He has not sworn an oath not to talk to a wall. There is a man called Atrahasis, whose name means something close to exceedingly wise, and he is a king of a city, and he has always been Enki's man, the one who listens, the one who keeps the offerings, the one who has heard the god's voice before. His house has a wall of reeds, because that is what houses were made of in the marsh country, bundles of river reed standing upright and lashed together, and you can hear everything through a wall like that. Anybody who has ever lived in a thin walled house knows exactly how this works. And one night, Enki comes and stands on the other side of that reed wall. And he does not address the man. He addresses the wall. Wall, he says. Reed wall. Listen to me, reed wall. And then he tells the wall everything. He tells the wall that a flood is coming. He tells the wall that it must tear down the house and build a boat with it. He tells the wall the measurements. He tells the wall to roof it over, above and below, so that the sun cannot be seen inside it. He tells the wall to take aboard the living things. And on the other side of that reed wall, in the dark, a man is standing perfectly still, listening to a god talk to a piece of architecture. I find that scene almost unbearably wonderful, and I have never entirely been able to say why. Part of it is the sheer legal cheek of it, the oldest loophole in the world, a god keeping the exact letter of a promise he has every intention of breaking. Part of it is the picture itself, the reed wall, the night, the two figures on either side of it who are both pretending this is not a conversation. But most of it, I think, is that it is an act of love performed under surveillance. He cannot help them openly. He has sworn. So he finds the one crack in the wording and he pours everything he has through it, and he does it in the dark, alone, talking to a bundle of reeds, hoping the man behind it is awake. The man behind it was awake.

Chapter Eight. Seven Days and Seven Nights. He tore down the house and he built the boat. The tablets are damaged here, in the way that tablets are, and pieces of what follows are missing or worn to nothing, and where the Atrahasis breaks off we can go across to the other great telling of the same flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which preserves it more fully. The two accounts agree closely enough that scholars treat them as the same story told twice, and I will tell it to you as one, and where I am drawing on the fuller telling I will say so. He built it, and he loaded it. His family. His kin. The craftsmen. The animals of the field, the birds of the sky, the cattle and the creatures that walk, brought aboard by whatever means a man in a story brings such things aboard. And then he went inside, and the door was sealed with pitch. I said at the beginning of tonight that nothing here would startle you, and I meant it, and so I am going to tell you the flood the way the tablet tells it, which is from the outside, at a distance, the way weather is described by someone remembering it rather than someone in it. The storm came up from the horizon. For seven days and seven nights it came. The wind went over the land, and the water came with it, and the whole plain that they had drained and dug and channelled and planted went back under, and everything that had been built on it was gone. The tablets say the gods themselves were frightened. They say the great gods sat and wept, and that the birth goddess who had pinched the fourteen pieces from the clay grieved for what was being undone. That is the register the story uses. Not triumph. Not judgment. Grief, upstairs, among the ones who ordered it. And on the seventh day, the storm lay down. That is the phrase, near enough, and it is the gentlest sentence about the end of a catastrophe I know. The storm lay down. The sea grew calm. The water stopped rising and began, slowly, to go. The man opened a hatch and light came in on his face. And then comes the part that everyone remembers even if they do not know where it comes from, and it belongs here, in the calm, at the end. He sent out a dove. And the dove went out, and found nothing to stand on anywhere in the world, and came back. He waited, and he sent out a swallow. And the swallow went out, and found nothing, and came back. He waited, and he sent out a raven. And the raven went out, and the raven did not come back, and that was how he knew. Somewhere out there beyond the horizon the water had gone down far enough that a bird could find a place to stand and something to eat, and had decided, in the way of ravens, that it had better things to do than return to a boat. The boat came to rest on a mountain. He opened it, and let out everything living that was in it, in every direction, and they went. And on the top of that mountain he made an offering, and the smoke of it went up. And the gods, the tablet says, gathered around that smoke like flies. Which is a startling image to find in a sacred text, and it is not disrespectful, it is hungry. They had ended the people who fed them, and they had been days without offerings, and when the smoke went up they came to it the way anything comes to food. Enlil arrived last, and saw the boat, and understood at once that somebody had talked. And there was an argument in the sky, and Enki won it. He won it by pointing out the thing that the whole story has been driving at from the first line: that the flood was not justice, that it was disproportionate, that you do not end everything because of noise. Punish the wrongdoer if there is one, he says. Not all of them. Never all of them. And a settlement was made, and this is where the story lands. There would be no second flood, not ever again. Instead there would be limits. Lives would have a natural end, the way a river has banks, so that the plain would always have room in it for the people coming, and the great gods bound themselves to that, and it held. It is a spare arrangement and it is also, if you turn it in the light, a merciful one. The alternative on the table had been ending everybody. What they settled on instead was that people would go on, generation after generation, in a world with room in it. And what became of the man who had listened at the reed wall. Here the tellings agree on the shape of it, and it is a gentle shape. The gods did not punish him, and they did not quite let him go home either. They took his hand, the old version says, and blessed him, and made him and his wife something other than what they had been. He was given life like a god's, and settled far away, at the mouth of the rivers, in a place at the edge of the world where nothing withers. As far as the tablets are concerned he is there still. So the one man who heard the warning through the wall did not simply survive the story. He was carried out past the far edge of it, to a quiet country, to live on and on. And the story of the flood ends there, and nothing louder than this will happen for the rest of the night. Rest now. The hard part is behind us, and it will not come back.

Chapter Nine. The Sages Who Came Out of the Water. At dawn, on the oldest shore in the world, something is standing up out of the sea. It is shaped like a man, and it is robed like a fish, and it is walking up out of the shallows toward the people on the sand, and it has come to teach. Let us go back, now that the flood has gone down, and give this figure the chapter it has been waiting for, because we walked past it on the way in. Because there is another set of figures in these stories, and they are not gods and they are not people, and they are the ones the later world has found most interesting of all. They are called the Apkallu, which means, simply, the sages. The wise ones. And there were seven of them, and they came before the flood. Here is what the tradition says about them, and I will tell you where each piece comes from as we go, because this is a place where the sources thin out and it is only honest to say so. Enki sent them. That is the first thing. They belong to the god of the sweet water and the god of wisdom, which by now you will recognise as exactly the right address for them. They came to teach. That is their entire purpose, and it is a purpose I find very moving. In the age before the flood, when people were new and had nothing, seven sages were sent up out of the water to give them the things a civilization needs, and then to go back down again. And what did they give. Not fire, and not weapons, and not gold. They gave writing. They gave the working of numbers. They gave the measuring of land, and the building of cities and temples, and the planting and reaping of crops, and the making of laws, and the ordering of the year. They gave, in other words, precisely the list of unglamorous technical skills that actually produce a functioning society, and the fact that this is what an ancient people chose to imagine as the gift of the gods says something rather wonderful about them. They were named, all seven of them, and the names survive. I will not make you hold them, because names in a dead language slide off a sleeping mind, and there is no examination in the morning. But they were written down, in order, each one attached to a king he had advised and a city he had served, the way a list of ministers might be kept. That is the detail I want you to have. These were not vague shining figures. Somebody kept a record of which sage went with which reign. The first of the seven has a name that comes down to us in two forms. In the cuneiform he is Uanna. In Greek he became Oannes, and it is the Greek form that most people have heard. And we know about Oannes chiefly through one man, so let me introduce him properly, because he matters again in Part Two. His name was Berossus. He was a Babylonian priest, and he lived long after everything we have talked about tonight, around two hundred and ninety years before the common era, in the Greek speaking world that Alexander had left behind. And Berossus did something that almost nobody in his position did. He sat down and wrote the history of his own country, in Greek, for outsiders, so that the Greeks would know that Babylon had a past longer than theirs and better recorded. His book is lost. We have only pieces of it, quoted by later writers who were quoting earlier writers, which is a fragile chain and you should hold it lightly. But the pieces we have are extraordinary, and the very first thing in his history, the thing he chose to open with, is Oannes. And this is how he describes him. In the first year, from the sea, there appeared a creature. It had the body of a fish. And under the head of the fish there was another head, a human one, and human feet came out from beneath the tail, and it had a human voice. By day it came up out of the water and moved among people and taught them. It gave them letters and the knowledge of arts and crafts. It taught them to build houses and found temples and set down laws. It taught them the measuring of land, the sowing of seed, the gathering of harvest. It taught them everything that softens life. And when the sun went down, it went back into the sea and passed the night in the deep, for it was amphibious. Then it came back the next morning, and did it again. That is the account, near enough as it comes to us, and I have not embellished it. Now. I know what some of you are thinking, lying there in the dark, and I am not going to pretend I do not. A figure that comes out of the water, teaches humanity everything it knows, and returns each night to somewhere we cannot follow. Somebody in the twentieth century was always going to read that and reach for a different explanation, and somebody did, and we will get to him properly. But hold, for tonight, what the Assyrians actually carved. Because we have pictures. There are stone reliefs from Assyrian palaces, hundreds of years old before Berossus was born, showing these figures, and they turn up over and over, standing beside doorways and beside kings. They come in two kinds, and the difference is worth a moment. Some of them have the head of a bird. A great curved beak, a calm eye, wings folded down the back, and in the hands a small bucket and what looks like a pine cone, held up as though about to touch the wall or the king or the sacred tree beside them. Nobody is entirely certain what the bucket held. Something purifying. Something you sprinkle. And the others, the ones that matter for tonight, are not fish men at all. They are a man wearing a fish. That is what the carving shows, once you look properly. The head of the fish is worn up over the man's own head like a hood, with the fish's mouth open above his forehead, and the body and tail of it hang down his back like a cape, and underneath it he is plainly a man, with a man's legs and a man's beard and a fringed robe. It is a costume. It is a priest of Enki in the dress of his office, because the fish is the sign of the god of the sweet water, and a man who serves that god wears it, the way a man who serves another god wears something else. We have the reliefs. They are in museums. You can go and look at them. So the seven sages, in the art of the people who believed in them, are dressed as what they are: the servants of the water god, come up to teach, in the uniform of their service. And they did not only carve them. They made them small, and buried them. This is my favourite thing in the whole of Mesopotamian archaeology and I have been waiting all night to tell you. Across Assyria and Babylonia, in city after city, archaeologists digging out ordinary houses kept finding little boxes of brick set into the foundations, down under the floor, sealed up. And inside the boxes, standing in rows, are small clay figurines of the sages. Groups of six or seven of them. Fish cloaked, bird headed, a few inches high, made of unbaked clay, put down there deliberately when the house was built, and then covered over and forgotten and lived on top of. They were guards. That is what they were for. A householder who wanted his home protected called in the priest who knew the ritual, and figurines were made, and prayers were said over them, and then they were put into the fabric of the building itself so that the walls and the floors and the doorways would be, in a sense, watched. And we know where they were meant to go, because the instructions survive. In front of the door. Behind the chair. In the middle of the main room. At the threshold of the chapel. And at the head of the bed. I will say that again, because I do not think I could have invented anything better for this particular hour. Three thousand years ago, in a city of mudbrick between two rivers, a man who could not sleep easy, or a woman lying awake in a house that felt wrong, would have someone come and bury seven small clay sages in the floor at the head of the bed, so that the ones who taught the world everything it knows would stand under the room all night, in the dark, facing outward, while the household slept. Somebody, four thousand years ago, wanted exactly what you want tonight. To lie down and be guarded and let go. And there is a last piece of it that I like best of all. The tradition did not end them at seven. After the flood, it said, there were more of them, and these later ones were not sent up out of the sea at all. They were human. They were scholars, and scribes, and the wise men of particular cities, and they were named, and their names were written down, and they were counted in the same line as the seven who came out of the water. One of them, the tradition says, went the other way. It says that the last of the seven ascended, and did not come back down, and it does not explain itself further, and I have always liked that it does not. But the human ones stayed. Which means that somewhere in that country, a scribe sitting at a lamp understood himself to be the far end of a chain that began with the sages, and that the work he was doing, the copying, the teaching, the keeping of the letters, was the same work. He was not wrong.

Chapter Ten. The Kings Who Reigned in Thousands. And now we come to the list, and to the number I asked you to remember. Among the tablets of that country there is a document that scholars call the Sumerian King List, and it is exactly what it sounds like. It is a list of kings. It names them, city by city, in order, one after another, down through the centuries, and it says how long each of them reigned. For most of its length it is an ordinary and rather dry historical document, and kings reign for twenty years or thirty or six. But at the very top of it, at the beginning, before everything else, there is a section that is not ordinary at all. It opens with one of the great sentences, and it is worth hearing in the shape it comes in. After kingship came down from heaven, it says, kingship was in Eridu. Came down. That is how they thought of it. Kingship was not invented and it was not seized. It descended, the way rain descends, onto one particular city, and that city was Eridu, which was real, and which you can walk around today, and which is among the oldest cities anyone has found anywhere on earth. And then it lists the kings before the flood. And there are eight of them, in five cities. The first is called Alulim, and he ruled in Eridu, and the list says that he reigned for twenty eight thousand eight hundred years. His successor reigned for thirty six thousand. Then kingship moved, the way it does in this list, from city to city, as though it were an object being handed along. To Bad tibira. To Larak, where a king reigned twenty eight thousand eight hundred years. To Sippar, twenty one thousand. And at last to a city called Shuruppak, and hold on to that name for a moment, because we have been there tonight already and you do not know it yet. And when you add all eight of them together, the list tells us that the kings before the flood ruled for a total of two hundred and forty one thousand two hundred years. And then comes the line that stops the section, and it is five words long. Then the flood swept over. That is all. No description, no storm, no boat, no bird. The list is not a poem and it does not pause to grieve. It simply notes that everything before this point is on the other side of the water, and then it carries on. And when it carries on, something happens to the numbers. Kingship came down from heaven a second time, the list says, and this time it came down in a city called Kish. And the reigns after that are still long, and then less long, and then less long again, and if you follow the list down its length the numbers come sliding gently out of the impossible and into the ordinary, until by the end you are reading about men who reigned for thirty six years, or six, or in one case a matter of months, which is a very human number indeed. The list itself walks you out of legend and into history, and it does it without a word of explanation. Now. Shuruppak. The last king of Shuruppak in that list is a man called Ubara Tutu. And in the story we heard tonight, the man who was warned at the reed wall, the man who built the boat, is in one telling the son of Ubara Tutu of Shuruppak. In the Sumerian version of the flood story he even has a different name. He is called Ziusudra, which means something very close to life of long days. Now, is Ziusudra himself on the list. I will tell you exactly, because this is a place where copies of the list differ, and you deserve the truth rather than the tidy version. In the standard copy the last name before the water is his father, Ubara Tutu, and the flood man himself is not written there. But other copies of the list add him, Ziusudra of Shuruppak, reigning last of all, in the last city before the water came. The scribes themselves did not fully agree on the roster, which is, if anything, more convincing rather than less. Real records are like that. Either way, the family of the flood man sits in the civic register at the hinge, the last names before the water. The people who kept this document did not think they were writing mythology. They thought they were writing the register of who had governed, going back and back, past the point where the record and the story become the same thing. Now let us do the numbers, because I promised you. Sit with those reigns for a moment. They are magnificent. They are also, quite plainly, not a record of anybody's actual lifespan, and the people who wrote them down were not confused about how long a man lives. They buried their dead. They knew. So what are they. And here, at last, is the thing I asked you to carry all night. Three thousand six hundred. Look at those reigns again with that number in your hand. Twenty eight thousand eight hundred is three thousand six hundred, eight times. Thirty six thousand is three thousand six hundred, ten times. Twenty one thousand is not a clean multiple, and there are one or two like it, and I would rather you knew that than be sold a tidier story than the tablets support. But very nearly all of them, up and down that list, are clean multiples of three thousand six hundred. Because three thousand six hundred is a unit. That country did not count the way we count. We count in tens, because we have ten fingers, and everything in our arithmetic is built on that. They counted in sixties. And sixty is a much better choice than ten, which is the sort of thing you only notice when somebody points it out. Ten divides evenly by two and five and that is the end of it. Sixty divides evenly by two, three, four, five, six, ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty and thirty. If you are a people who spend your lives dividing fields and rations and canal work and barley among unequal numbers of men, sixty is an enormously practical number to build a world on. So they counted in sixties. Sixty, and sixty sixties, and sixty of those, going up in steps. And it is the reason a minute has sixty seconds and an hour has sixty minutes and a circle has three hundred and sixty degrees to this day. That is theirs. Nobody has ever replaced it. You are using the arithmetic of that plain every single time you look at a clock. And in that system, sixty times sixty is three thousand six hundred, and it was a named unit, the way we say a dozen, or a gross, or a million. They called it a sar. That is all it is. A sar is three thousand six hundred. It is a counting word. So when the list says that Alulim reigned twenty eight thousand eight hundred years, what the scribe wrote was eight sars. They were writing in round units, the way we say a man lived a hundred years to mean he lived a long life, and the way a story says a thousand ships, or forty days, and means a great many. The enormous numbers are not a claim about biology. They are a way of saying: this was long ago, and these were the great ones, and the time before the flood was of a different order than ours. Which is, when you think about it, exactly what we mean when we say once upon a time. Remember it anyway. A sar is three thousand six hundred. You will want it again.

Chapter Eleven. What the Tablets Were For. And that is the story on the old chipped tablet, and the copy is nearly finished. The lamp has burned down. Our scribe has been working most of the night, and the fresh tablet in his left hand is covered now, both faces of it, edge to edge, with the small wedge marks going across in their careful lines. He will let it dry slowly, in the shade, out of the sun, because clay dried too fast will crack. In a few days it will be pale and hard and it will keep. Then it will go on the shelf with the others, standing on edge, with its little tag hanging down. And that is the end of his part in it. I want to spend this chapter on him, and on all of them, because we have talked all night about gods and floods and I would like to finish with the people who actually did the work of getting any of this to you. There were thousands of them. That is the first thing. This was not one inspired man writing a masterpiece. This was a profession, with a training, and a bad school, and a guild, and standards, and thousands of ordinary practitioners across two thousand years, most of whom we will never know the names of, doing a job. They copied. That was the job. A tablet cracks, a tablet chips, a tablet gets dropped, and so you make another one, and the story steps sideways into a fresh object and keeps going. Copy after copy after copy, each one made because the last one was wearing out, a relay race run in the dark by people who could not see the finish and did not know there was one. And they were not always reverent about it. We know this because we have their notes. There are tablets with the scribe's own remarks at the bottom, and some of them are complaints, and some are jokes, and some are just a man saying that he checked this against the original and it was correct. There are exercise tablets covered in the same sign written a hundred times by a child getting it wrong and then less wrong. There are tablets where a teacher has written a line at the top and a student has copied it underneath, badly, and you can see exactly where the boy's attention wandered, four thousand years ago, on a warm afternoon, in a hot room, when he would rather have been outside. There is even a school story, written by scribes about scribes, about a boy having a bad day. He gets up late. He is anxious about being late. He hurries his mother for his lunch. He gets to the school and he is caned for being late, and then caned for talking, and then caned for standing up without permission, and then caned for his handwriting. And at the end of it his father invites the teacher home for dinner and is extremely nice to him and gives him a present, and the teacher, thus refreshed, tells the boy he will become an excellent scribe. Four thousand years. The same joke. The same tired parent buying peace with hospitality. And before the stories, before any of it, they copied lists. This is the part of the profession nobody ever mentions and I find it quietly astonishing. A large share of everything that survives from the tablet houses is lists of words. Not sentences. Lists. And not lists of important words either, but lists of everything, arranged by kind, going on and on for tablet after tablet. Lists of trees. Then lists of things made of wood, every object in a house that had wood in it, in order. Lists of reeds, and things made of reeds. Lists of clay vessels by shape and size. Lists of hides, and metals, and animals, and the parts of animals. Lists of birds. Lists of fish. Lists of stones. Lists of garments. Lists of the names of places, and of professions, and of gods, and of the words for kinds of beer. A boy learning this trade spent years copying an inventory of the world. And you can call that drudgery, and it was, and the boys said so. But look at what it actually is. Somebody decided that the whole of creation could be written down if you were patient enough, and then set about doing it, one category at a time, and kept at it for two thousand years. Every tree. Every pot. Every fish. The universe, alphabetised before there was an alphabet. Not everything was kept, either. Clay that has not been fired can be soaked in water and worked back into a lump, and a great deal of it was, because a practice tablet is worth less than the clay it is written on. Somebody had to decide, every time, whether a thing was worth keeping. Most of what was ever written in that country was quietly turned back into mud. Which makes the survivors stranger and more valuable. Everything you have heard tonight got through because at some point, more than once, somebody with a wet lump in their hands looked at it and thought, no. Not this one. This one we keep. That boy is why you know this story. Not the kings, who commissioned nothing that lasted. Not the gods. The boy in the hot room, and the tired man at the lamp, and the thousands like them, pressing the same wedges into the same clay year after year after year, because it was their trade and somebody had to. And they had a goddess of their own, which I have saved for the end because it is the loveliest fact in the whole profession. Her name is Nisaba. And she is the goddess of writing. She is also the goddess of grain. Not two goddesses who happened to share a name. One goddess, holding both, and once you see why, you cannot unsee it. Writing began as counting, and what they counted first was barley. The measure of grain and the mark that recorded the measure came into the world together, out of the same fields, in the same hands. So the power that made the crop and the power that made the sign were understood to be one power, and she was it, and she is shown with grain growing out of her shoulders and a stylus in her hand. The scribes belonged to her. She was their patron and their teacher, and when a scribe finished a tablet he would often write a line to her at the bottom, in the little space left over, asking her to guide the stylus, or to keep the tablet free of errors. And there is a formula that closes an enormous number of these texts. It is the last thing written, after the story is done, when the clay is nearly full and the work is over. Four words, more or less, depending how you render them. Praise be to Nisaba. That is how they signed off. Not with their own names, most of them, and not with the name of a king. With thanks to the goddess of grain and letters, for the help in getting it finished. There is a word they used for a good copy. It meant, roughly, checked and true. Checked and true. Somebody sat with two tablets in front of them, an old one and a new one, and went along both, line by line, making sure. And then wrote at the bottom that they had done it. That is the whole of civilization in one gesture, I have always thought. Somebody caring whether it came out right, on a night when nobody was watching, for a reader they would never meet. Which is you. Tonight. You are the reader they would never meet.

Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Lamp in the Tablet House. The copy is done. He sets the reed down on the table. He turns the new tablet over once in his hands, and looks along both faces of it in the low light, checking the way anyone checks work they have finished late at night, not really seeing it anymore. It is good. He knows it is good. In the small space at the bottom he has written the line to the goddess, the way he always does, the way he was taught to as a boy in a hot room. Praise be to Nisaba. It took him a moment. He did not think about it particularly. He carries the tablet to the shelf in the corner where the wet ones go, and stands it on its edge, and leaves a space beside it so the air can get all the way around. The old tablet, the chipped one, he puts back in its place among the others. It has a while yet. Outside, the river. It is very late now, and the city is as quiet as a city of mudbrick ever gets. Somewhere a dog. Somewhere further off, a door. The night is warm and the air coming through the doorway smells of water and dust and barley, the way it has all night, the way it will smell in the morning. Below the floor of the room, under the brick, the small clay sages stand in their box in the dark, facing outward, as they have since the house was built, doing the work they were put there to do. He does not put out the lamp. There is oil in it still, and it is a small thing, and someone may come in before dawn. So he leaves it burning on the table, in the empty room, with the shelves standing all around it in the dark and the hundreds of tablets on them sleeping on their edges. That is where we leave him. And the tablet he made tonight will sit on that shelf and dry, and then it will be shelved properly, and then it will be copied by somebody else, and that copy by somebody else, and the story will go on stepping sideways from object to object, down and down through the years, the way it has to. But this particular tablet, this one, the one he pressed tonight with his own hands. This one is going to have a longer night than he knows. It is going to lie in the dark a very long time. It is going to be buried, and it is going to be burned, and the burning is going to be the saving of it, though nobody alive tonight could possibly guess that. And then, thousands of years from now, in a cold country he has never heard of, a tired man on his lunch break is going to pick it up and read what it says. That is the story for another night. For now there is only the lamp, and the shelf, and the small clay guardians under the floor, and the river going on in the dark outside, and the clay drying slowly in the good cool air. Let the room be as it is. The lamp will burn a while and then it will go out on its own, some time before morning, and nobody will see it happen. The oil will be gone and the wick will cool and the room will be dark, and the tablets will go on standing on their shelves in the dark exactly as they were, which is what they are for. They do not need to be looked at to keep what they hold. That is the whole point of them. Outside, the river will keep going. It has been going all night under everything I have told you, and you may not have noticed it for a long while now, and that is exactly right. It was never asking for your attention. It was only there, the way it was there for the scribe, and for the boy in the hot room, and for every one of the thousands of them, going past the city in the dark, carrying the mud that all of this was made of down toward the sea. In the morning somebody will come and open the door, and the light will come in across the floor, and the tablets will be where they were left. But that is the morning, and the morning can wait. Sleep well. Goodnight.

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight, the story of the story. Last time, if you were here, an old scribe at a clay lamp read us the oldest tale anyone ever wrote down, the gods who dug the rivers, the night the workers of heaven burned their tools, the people made from clay to carry the baskets, the flood, and the voice that would not speak to a man and spoke to a wall instead. Tonight is stranger than any of that, because tonight is true all the way through, and you can go and stand in front of the proof. Tonight is the story of the clay itself. How a library was gathered by a king who could read, which was rare. How a city was burned to erase a people from memory, and how the fire that was meant to be the end of everything turned out to be the saving of it, for a reason so simple you will want to tell somebody in the morning. How the books of that library lay under a hill for two and a half thousand years while empires walked over them, not lost, only asleep. And how they came back: a soldier hanging from a cliff to copy a king's boast, a quiet man who taught himself the oldest writing on earth in his lunch hour, and an afternoon in London when he read a few broken lines about a flood and a dove and understood, before anyone else alive, what he was holding. Stay with it, if you can, to the tenth chapter, where one man reads the same tablets and finds an entirely different story in them. If you were here for the last story you already carry the small quiet key to that puzzle, and you will turn it yourself before the sentence ends. And if tonight is your first night, the tablets will press the key into your hand at the exact moment you need it. For everything you heard last time survived by accident, twice over, and tonight you get to watch it happen. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp. It is the same lamp. Perhaps you were here on another night, and heard the old scribe read the story of the gods and the baskets and the flood while the river went by outside in the dark. If so, welcome back. Your place on the reed mat is where you left it. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome too. The scribe never begins a story that will leave a newcomer behind. Everything you need will be given to you as you go. The lamp is a small clay dish of oil, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. The room smells of river water and dust and barley. On the shelves all around, in the dark beyond the light, hundreds of tablets stand on their edges like plates in a rack, each with its little tag hanging down. And on the drying shelf in the corner, pale now, hard now, sits the tablet the scribe pressed on the night you were last here, the one with the whole old story on it, the gods, the strike, the clay, the flood, the wall. Last time, the scribe says, I read you what is written. Tonight I will tell you what happened to the writing. It is not the story of any king winning any war, though kings and wars pass through it. It is the story of an object. A piece of dried river mud, small enough to hold in one hand, and what the world did to it across four thousand years, and how it came through everything the world did, and where it is at this exact moment, tonight, while you are lying there with your eyes closing. I know where it is tonight. That is not a manner of speaking. Before morning I will tell you the room. You do not have to do anything now. Settle onto the mat. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other, the way the whole world feels when you are almost asleep and perfectly safe. Close your eyes if they want to close. This story does not need to be watched. It only needs to be near you, the way the lamp is near you, the way the river is near you, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the story will go on without you, and it will not mind. It has been going on without everybody for most of four thousand years. Drifting, in this house, is only another way of listening. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the clay. Nothing in this story will ever startle you. There is a city that burns in it, and I will not pretend to you that the night it burned was gentle. But it is told the way this house tells everything, plainly, in a low voice, at a distance of many centuries, and then set down. And I will tell you something now, in advance, so that you can rest easy through all of it. Every fire in this story goes out. Every one. And the thing we are following comes through every single fire, which is how you know, before we even begin, that this is a story with a good ending. You can trust this lamp. That is what it was lit for. Before we begin, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next tale will be waiting for you when you need it, and the great season that all of this is leading to will find you easily when it comes. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and we begin.

Every story we have told at this lamp has had a hero, and tonight's hero is lying on a shelf. Look at it once more before it sets out. A tablet of river clay, the size of a hand, dried hard now, pale as biscuit. Both faces are covered edge to edge with small wedge shaped marks, pressed in with a cut reed on a warm night by a tired careful man. Down in the last corner, in the little space left over, a line of thanks to the goddess of grain and writing, because that is how a scribe signs off. It weighs about as much as a cup of flour. You could break it over your knee. Hold that thought, because everything that follows happens to something that fragile. And notice, while we are looking at it, what it does not have. It has no lock. It has no guard. It has no gold in it to make anyone protect it, and no iron in it to protect itself. Every other treasure in this story's world, the crowns, the weapons, the carved ivories, had value that men could see, and value that men can see is the most dangerous thing an object can carry through a war. The tablet has nothing anyone wanted. That is worth remembering later tonight, when the soldiers come. Being worthless, in the eyes of the people passing through, will turn out to be one of the great survival skills of all time. The other one is patience, and a tablet is made entirely of that. Now, the honest thing, said once, plainly, the way this house prefers. The journey we are about to take is the journey of the story itself, and a story travels the way a flame travels, from wick to wick, not the way a stone travels. Our scribe's tablet will crumble one day, as clay does, and before it does, somebody will copy it, and somebody will copy the copy, and the words will step sideways from object to object down the centuries, the way you saw them step on the night they were written. When I tell you tonight about the tablet that was buried, and burned, and found again, and read, I am telling you about the far end of that chain, the copy of the copy of the copy, carrying the same words in the same wedges. The story is one unbroken thing. The clay it rides changes horses. So. The words leave our scribe's room, copy by copy, and they travel. They travel north. They travel north because, over the centuries after our scribe banked his lamp for the last time, the weight of the world tilted that way. The old cities of the south, Eridu and Uruk and Ur, grew very old indeed, holy the way a grandmother's house is holy, visited, honored, quiet. And up the two rivers, in the north, a people called the Assyrians built the loudest empire the world had yet seen. The Assyrians were terrifying, and there is no point telling it any other way. Their kings hunted lions from chariots and carved the hunts on their walls. Their armies took cities the way weather takes them. The whole ancient world paid them tribute, and was glad when the paying was enough. But here is the thing about the Assyrians that the carvings do not tell you, and it is the reason they matter to our story. They kept the old religion, and the old stories, and above all the old writing. The wedge marks our scribe pressed were, to them, already antiquity, the script of the deep past, the way Latin on a monument feels to you. Their scholars learned the dead languages of the south the way ours learn Latin and Greek. Their kings collected southern tablets the way kings elsewhere collected gold. And one of those kings collected more than all the others put together.

His name was Ashurbanipal, and he ruled the greatest empire on earth from a city called Nineveh, and the thing he was proudest of, in a life with a great deal to be proud of, was that he could read. We know this because he said so, in writing, repeatedly. Among the royal inscriptions of that world, where kings list the cities they took and the tribute they carried home, Ashurbanipal lists something no other king thought to boast of. I learned the craft of the sage Adapa, he says. The hidden treasure of all scribal knowledge. I can read the tablets from before the flood. Sit with that last claim a moment, because you know exactly what he means by it, and a listener in any other century would not. He means the old stories. He means the kings who reigned in sars, and the flood, and the tablets of the deep past. He is boasting, this master of the greatest army alive, that he can read the very things you heard at this lamp. And there is a reason this particular king could read, and it is a good story in itself, and it is the kind of accident tonight keeps turning on. He was not supposed to be king. He was a younger son. The throne was going to his brother, and so the boy Ashurbanipal was raised for the quieter destiny of younger royal sons, the temple and the school. While his brother learned kingship, he sat where every scribe you have heard about tonight once sat, at the tablets, learning the signs, copying the lists, working through the old languages of the south sign by sign. He learned to ride and to shoot as a prince must, but the shape of his mind was made in the tablet house. Then the succession changed, as successions do, and the bookish son became the heir, and then the king of the world. Consider what that means for our story. The most powerful man on earth, master of the armies everyone feared, had spent his boyhood exactly where our scribe spent his, bent over clay in a hot room, being corrected. Of all the kings who ever ruled between the two rivers, the one who ended up with power over everything was the one who had been trained to read anything. A king who could read was rare. A king who loved reading was nearly unheard of. And a king with unlimited power who loved reading did what such a man will always do. He built a library. Not a casual one. A deliberate, systematic, imperial one. He sent scribes and agents out across the whole of the two rivers country with orders that survive to this day, and the orders are wonderful. Seek out the tablets in the temples and the houses of the scholars. The rituals, the omens, the prayers, the old songs. Whatever is good, whatever is rare, whatever the libraries of the south are holding. Copy what they will let you copy. Take what they will not. Some of those orders survive on clay, and you can hear the collector's hunger through the royal politeness. Tablets are named by their first lines, the way we would name a song. Seek out the rare ones, the orders say. The ones the scholars are keeping in their houses. The ones no copy of has reached Assyria. And a line that any librarian in any century would recognise at once: complete tablets, not broken ones, and if a thing cannot be had, have it copied, and send the copy quickly. And into Nineveh, year after year, the tablets came. By cart and by boat, in baskets and in chests, from the old cities of the south, from the temple libraries, from private shelves, from the estates of dead scholars whose heirs could not read them. His scribes copied and sorted and labelled. Colophons at the foot of tablet after tablet say, like a stamp, palace of Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria. The library was organized, and the organization itself is moving, because it is so familiar. Tablets stood on shelves and lay in labelled baskets and jars, sorted by subject. Catalogue tablets listed works by their opening lines, so a scholar could find a text the way you would find a song you only know the first words of. Some tablets carried a warning to borrowers at the foot, invoking the gods on anyone who carried a tablet off or rubbed out a line, which tells you two things: that people borrowed, and that people always, always failed to bring things back. By the end there were tens of thousands of them. Every subject that world knew. The movements of the stars, and the meanings of dreams, and the treatments for fever, and the grammar of languages already two thousand years dead. And the stories. The flood. Gilgamesh. The gods and the baskets and the wall of reeds. And it was for this same king, in this same palace, that the finest of the lion hunt panels were carved, the ones his empire would be remembered by, the king calm in his chariot, the lions terrible and doomed, and among them the dying lioness, struck and dragging herself forward, that sculptors ever since have ranked among the greatest carvings any hand has made. Hold those panels in mind tonight. They were on the palace walls, rooms away from the library shelves, and what happened to the tablets happened to them too, and before morning you will stand in front of them again. Somewhere in those rooms, on those shelves, lay the words our scribe had pressed, in their newest clay, the copy of the copy of the copy, filed and tagged and resting in the best kept library on the face of the earth. And it was used. That matters, and it is attested, and it changes how you should picture those rooms. This was not a trophy vault. The omen series were consulted, the star records kept current, the old poems copied afresh by the palace scribes. And it pleases me beyond reason to report that the king himself, by his own account, read for pleasure. Somewhere in that palace, on evenings four hundred years after our scribe and twenty six centuries before you, the most powerful man alive did exactly what you are doing tonight: took up an old story, and let the day go, and followed the wedges down toward rest. It was the safest place in the world for them. For about thirty years.

In the summer of a year we can name, six hundred and twelve years before the common era, two armies arrived together under walls so wide that chariots could pass along the top of them. Empires end. It is the one thing they all have in common, and the bigger the empire, the more completely the world arranges its ending. Assyria had spent three centuries being feared, and fear is a debt that comes due. The empire had broken cities the way winter breaks branches, and deported whole peoples from one end of its map to the other, and it kept accounts of all of it, carved in stone, in the confident grammar of power that expects to be read forever. The neighbors had long memories, because the carvings would not let them forget. When the strength finally faltered, the peoples who had paid tribute for generations did not simply drift away. They gathered. The Medes came down from the mountains in the east. The Babylonians rose from the south, the old country itself, the very cities the tablets had been gathered from. Two peoples with three hundred years of reasons. In the summer of a year we can name, six hundred and twelve years before the common era, their armies arrived together under the walls of Nineveh. The city was the largest in the world. Its walls were so wide, the boast went, that chariots could pass on top of them. It held out for roughly three months. Three months, for the capital of the earth. And then the walls were breached, and the greatest city alive went down in a single season of fire. I promised you this would be told plainly and at a distance, and it will be, but I will not pretend it was small. People died in great numbers that summer. A power that had broken cities for centuries was broken in its turn, in the same manner it had taught everyone else. The palaces were looted of everything that shone, and then the torches went into what remained. The carved lions, the winged bulls at the gates, the painted halls, all of it burned or fell or blackened, and Assyria, which had ruled everything, was gone from the world in a single season. The victors were thorough, and their thoroughness had a purpose. This was not only plunder. It was erasure. The point was that there should never again be an Assyria, and so completely did they succeed that within a few centuries the very location of Nineveh was forgotten, and travelers crossed the mounds where it stood without knowing a city was under them. What was it like inside the city that season. I will not take you there, because I promised, and because no one who was there wrote it down for us. The record of the fall is the fall itself, the burnt layer that diggers find everywhere at that level, a stripe of ash in the earth with an empire above it and an empire below. History's loudest single night in that country comes down to us as a quiet dark line in the ground, which is, if you think about it, this whole story in one image. And in the burning palace, in the rooms where no looter bothered to linger, stood the shelves. Gold is worth carrying out of a burning building. Tablets of dried mud are not. Nobody in history has ever run into a fire to save somebody else's library of clay. The soldiers took what soldiers take and moved on, and the fire came into the tablet rooms, and the cedar beams of the roof caught, and burned, and gave way. And the roof came down on the books of Ashurbanipal. The shelves fell. The tablets fell with them, into the heat, under the burning timber. The walls of mudbrick, calcined and cracking, slumped inward over the top of everything. By morning the library of the king of the world was a smoking ruin sealed under its own collapse, and in the reckoning of everyone alive that day, it had ceased to exist. And every soul who reckoned so, on both sides of those walls, was wrong. Now let the fire burn out, as every fire in this story does, and let the smoke go, and come close and look at what has actually happened. Because the reckoning of everyone alive that day was wrong.

Here is the whole turn of tonight, and it fits in one sentence, and you already know every fact in it. You have known them since you were small. Books are made of paper, and fire ends them. But these books were made of clay, and clay does not burn. Clay bakes. Think of what a potter does. A potter shapes soft mud, and dries it, and then puts it into a kiln, into deliberate ferocious heat, on purpose. And the heat does not destroy the pot. The heat is what finishes it. It drives the last water out of the body of the clay and changes it, hardens it, settles it into a form that will hold for thousands of years. Fire, to clay, is not death. Fire is the kiln. And the people of the two rivers knew this about clay better than anyone who has ever lived. They were the potters of the world's first cities. They fired their bricks when they wanted a wall to stand forever, and left them sun dried when they did not. Their own scribes, wanting a tablet to last, sometimes baked it on purpose, in an oven, as a finishing. Everything about the material they trusted their words to, they understood. What none of them could have arranged is what happened next: the enemies of Assyria, at no charge, performing that finishing on the entire royal library in a single night. The tablets of Nineveh had been dried mud, tough enough, but soakable, crumble prone, mortal. The burning of the palace fired them like pottery. The very night that was meant to end everything cooked the king's library into ceramic. And the collapse that buried them, the roof beams and the slumping walls, the ruin sealing itself over the top, that was not their destruction either. That was the lid going on. Sealed under brick and ash, the tablets were shut away from rain, from frost, from thieves, from reuse, from every patient enemy that eats old things. The fire hardened them and the fall hid them, all in one night, by the hand of an army that believed it was erasing Assyria from the face of the earth. I want to be precise here, because this story is told loosely in many places and you deserve it told right. This good fortune belongs to Nineveh. Clay from other cities survived other ways, by burial alone, in dry ground, patiently. And some of the king's tablets had been baked on purpose by his own scribes before any enemy arrived. But for this library, on that night, the arithmetic is simply this: the men who came to erase a civilization gave its books the one treatment that guaranteed they would outlast the men, the empire, the language, and the memory of all three. If a librarian in that world had been granted one wish for the collection, one guarantee against the long dark ahead, and had been wise beyond any wisdom actually available to them, the wish would have been this: let every tablet be fired hard, and then let the whole library be sealed away, at once, in a single night, someplace no one will look. That is the complete recipe for immortal clay. It was granted, in full, by an invading army, as an act of hatred, free of charge. Nobody planned it. Nobody knew it had happened. That is the part I find I cannot let go of, lying awake some nights, and I offer it to you now as a thing to fall asleep against rather than a thing to puzzle at. The best preserved library of the ancient world was preserved by the people who came to destroy it, and no one on either side of those walls ever found out what they had done. The army marched away. The smoke thinned. The rain came, that winter, and the mud of the ruined walls began its slow settling over the buried rooms, like a blanket being drawn up. And the books of Ashurbanipal went to sleep.

Now comes the part of tonight that is my favourite part, and it is the part in which nothing happens. I mean that exactly. For the next stretch of this story, nothing happens to our tablets at all. No hand touches them. No eye reads them. No voice says the words. The story that began with gods digging rivers, the story that survived a flood and a fire, simply stops moving, and lies still, in the dark, under a hill. Because that is what the ruin became. A hill. The walls melted down over the decades, the way mudbrick does in rain, each winter softening the edges a little, each summer baking the softened mud into a new skin, until the broken city was a smooth swelling in the plain with grass on it. The two rivers country is full of such hills, and the people who lived there called them by an old word, tell, and knew, in a general way, that the hills were old places, and let them be. Above the buried library, the world got on with itself. And we happen to know, from an eyewitness, just how completely the forgetting worked, and how fast. About two hundred years after the fire, a Greek soldier came marching up the Tigris with ten thousand countrymen, mercenaries on the long road home from a war that had gone wrong, hungry, harried, and writing it all down. His name was Xenophon, and his account of that march survives, and in it, on one ordinary day of the retreat, the army passed an enormous ruin. He describes it with a soldier's eye. Walls of dressed stone at the base, brick above, a circuit so vast it took the column a long day to put it behind them. A dead city of impossible size, standing empty on the river plain, with a smaller ruin a day's march before it. He asked the people of the country what it was. They told him the Medes had built it, long ago. That was all they knew. The Medes, the people who had helped tear the walls down, were now remembered as the people who had raised them. Two hundred years, and the name of Assyria had come off its own capital like a label off a jar. Xenophon wrote down what the locals told him, Larissa for one ruin, Mespila for the other, and marched on, and the greatest soldier historian of his age walked the length of Nineveh without ever learning he had been there. Under his boots as he went, down through the grass and the settled brick, in the dark, the library. Empires you have heard of rose and fell over that hill. The Babylonians who burned it were conquered in their turn by the Persians. The Persians fell to Alexander. Alexander's generals carved up the world and lost it to Rome and to Parthia, and the armies of a dozen banners in a dozen centuries marched their roads past that hill, and none of them knew what was under the grass. And here is the gentlest irony in all those quiet centuries. Nineveh lies under two mounds, not one, and on the second mound, across from the hill of the library, there stood for centuries a shrine, and the shrine drew pilgrims, and the pilgrims came because tradition said that buried there was a prophet. The prophet was Jonah. The one man in all of scripture whose story is that he was sent, against his will, to Nineveh. So for hundreds of years, people came from far away to pray at the edge of the lost city, over the bones of the reluctant messenger, and nobody among them suspected that the city itself, the one Jonah was sent to, lay all around them under the grass, or that the other hill within sight of the shrine had a library in it. The one address in Nineveh the world never forgot was the tomb of the man who had not wanted to come. Shepherds grazed flocks on it. That went on for something like a hundred generations. Boys who watched sheep on that hill grew old and were buried by boys who watched sheep on that hill, a hundred times over, and not one of them, in two and a half thousand years, ever knew. Season went over season on the hill. Spring grass, summer bake, autumn rain, winter mud, and again, and again, in a rhythm with no events in it at all, the exact rhythm you are breathing in now. If a year had a sound up there, it was sheep bells and wind, which is very nearly the sound of nothing. The languages fell silent. That is worth resting with for a moment. Not only the empire, the very words. There came a day, somewhere in those quiet centuries, when the last person alive who could read the wedge shaped writing set down their last tablet, and no one came after them, and the entire written memory of the first civilization on earth became marks that no living person could turn back into sound. But hold on to this, because it is where tonight is going: silent is not the same as gone. The name of Gilgamesh went silent. The flood story went silent, in its oldest telling. The gods and the baskets and the reed wall, silent, everywhere on earth, for level after level of centuries. And the tablets were not alone down there. Whole halls of the palace lay sealed in the same dark. The carved stone panels stood along their buried corridors all that time, the lion hunts, the processions, the king in his chariot, the dying lioness dragging her hindquarters that visitors would one day stand in front of without speaking. The winged bulls stood at their buried gates, five legged so that they walk when seen from the side and stand guard when seen from the front, holding up doorways that no longer led anywhere, for centuries on centuries, in the dark, under the sheep. An entire civilization stood down there in the dark together, statues and stories and account books and letters, the way the furniture of a shut house stands together under its sheets, waiting for the family to come back. And silent, as I said, is not gone. The marks did not fade, because fired clay does not fade. The tablets did not rot, because the sealed dark of the hill held no damp worth the name. They lay in their collapsed rooms in their thousands, stacked and tumbled, edge on edge, holding the words with perfect patience, every wedge exactly where a hand had pressed it, needing nothing from anybody, the way a key needs nothing from anybody while it waits for the return of a lock. Two and a half thousand years is a span the mind cannot really hold, so do not try. Hold one night of it instead. One ordinary night on the hill, no different from ten thousand others. Stars over the grass. A cold wind off the river. The sheep folded, the shepherd asleep, and under it all, far below the grass, the rooms, the shelves where they fell, the words in the dark. Now let that one night stand for all of them, the way a sar stands for its thousands. Sleep, for a story, is only keeping. That is tonight's deepest secret, and you are welcome to apply it more widely. And if the hill could have spoken in all that time, it would have said only what the reed wall said long before it, which is nothing at all. Some keepers keep by speaking. The best ones keep by holding still. The story was asleep. And the world, without knowing it, was slowly making its way toward the hill to wake it.

The world arrived in the eighteen forties, wearing a very large hat. By then the land between the rivers was a quiet province of a large empire, and into it, in the way of that century, came Europeans. Diggers, dreamers, collectors, imperial agents, men with notebooks and money and shovels and the confident belief of their age that the old East was theirs to uncover. I will tell you about two of them, because they are the two who matter to our tablet, and I will tell you honestly what they were and were not. The first was Austen Henry Layard, and his presence in this story is itself an accident of the road. He was a young Englishman bound for Ceylon, at the far side of the world, where a respectable position in the law had been arranged for him, the whole settled shape of a life already drawn. He chose to travel out overland, for the adventure of it. And on the way, in the wilds of Mesopotamia, he saw the mounds. He never reached Ceylon. He never became a lawyer. The settled life waited at the end of the road and he simply did not arrive, year after year, because the hills with cities inside them had gotten into him and would not let him go. Files somewhere in an office in Ceylon presumably record a man who never turned up to his own future. What the world got instead was the man who opened Assyria. He was clever, restless, half adventurer and half scholar, and the great swelling mounds along the Tigris took hold of his imagination and did not let go. He raised money, hired local crews, and cut into the hills. And the hills opened like books. Out of the first great mound came the palace of an Assyrian king, its carved stone panels still standing in rows, the lion hunts, the winged bulls, the processions, a whole vanished empire pouring back into the light of day. It caused a sensation across Europe. And in time Layard and his crews came to the largest mound of all, the one across the river from the town of Mosul, the one the local people called Kuyunjik. It was Nineveh. The lost city itself, found again after twenty four centuries, and under the grass, in the burned rooms of the palace, the diggers began to come upon tablets. Then more tablets. Then rooms whose floors were drifted deep with them, thousands upon thousands of pieces of inscribed fired clay, the whole spilled library of Ashurbanipal, still lying where the shelves had dropped it on the night the roof came down. The finds went down the Tigris the way everything had always gone down the Tigris, on rafts. The great stone panels and the crates of small finds were floated on keleks, the river craft of that country since before Assyria itself, platforms of poplar beams lashed over hundreds of inflated goat skins, steered by men with sweeps, riding the spring current down to the sea road. It is worth closing your eyes on that image for a moment, because the river you are hearing tonight is the same river: the winged bulls of Nineveh, sailing south past the reed beds on breath filled skins, exactly as the timber for the first tablet houses had sailed two and a half thousand years before. The second man was Hormuzd Rassam, and I want you to know his name, because history was slow to give him his due. He was not a visiting Englishman. He was born in Mosul itself, across the water from the ruins, a local man of an old eastern Christian community, and he became Layard's assistant and then his successor, and he was one of the great excavators of that century in his own right. It was Rassam's crews, digging at Kuyunjik after Layard had gone home, who found the palace room containing the finest of the tablets, including pieces of the very stories we care about tonight. Now the honest sentence, because this house does not skip them. The tablets did not stay in the country that made them. They were crated, thousands upon thousands of them, and carried down the rivers and shipped to London, to the British Museum, where the greater part of them remains to this day. The men who took them believed they were rescuing antiquity, and it is also true that they were taking it, and both of those things sit in the crates together, and I will not untangle them for you tonight. It is a thing that happened, and where the tablets lie tonight is part of how this story goes. And notice who actually brought them up. Not the famous men, mostly. The mounds were dug by local crews, hundreds of hands, men of the villages around Mosul working in the heat with picks and baskets, carrying the spoil up out of the trenches on their shoulders, load after load, season after season. If that picture feels familiar, it should. It is the first picture in the whole story. The oldest tale on the tablets begins with diggers in that same earth carrying baskets, and the tale came back into the world the same way it began, on the shoulders of people whose names nobody wrote down. What matters most for us is this. The books of Ashurbanipal came up out of the hill, into the light, for the first time in two and a half thousand years. And nobody on earth could read a word of them.

The wedge marks had been silent for so long that waking them took a mountain, and a man willing to hang off it. In the western mountains of Persia there is a great cliff on an old caravan road, and high up on its face, far above the road, an ancient king had carved a proclamation. The king was Darius of Persia, and he had things he wished the world to know about how he came to the throne, and he had them cut into the living rock in letters of wedge, and then, so that no hand could ever revise him, he had the ledge beneath the carving cut away. Unreachable, and therefore unedited, his words hung in the air for more than two thousand three hundred years. He had them cut three times over, in three languages, saying the same things. Remember the Rosetta Stone, and how Egypt's script was unlocked because one stone said one thing in known Greek and unknown Egyptian side by side. This cliff was the Rosetta Stone of the wedge marks, except that nobody could reach it, and one of its three languages, Old Persian, was at least partly within the grasp of scholars, a cousin of tongues still spoken. If a man could copy the whole cliff, the known could be used to pick the locks of the unknown, and the unknown included the very script drifted deep in the ruined rooms of Nineveh. The man who copied it was an English officer stationed in Persia, whose name was Henry Rawlinson, and he was the kind of man the nineteenth century produced in quantity and no other century quite has. Soldier, linguist, athlete, entirely unable to leave a puzzle alone. Beginning in the eighteen thirties, on and off for more than a decade, whenever duty allowed, Rawlinson went to the cliff and climbed it. He worked standing on a ladder, on a ledge little wider than the ladder's feet. His body was pressed to the rock face. He copied wedge after wedge into notebooks, with hundreds of feet of empty air below his boot heels. For the more distant panels he rigged ropes and planks across the cliff face, and worked from swaying board bridges of his own devising. Season after season, panel by panel, he took it all down. He was, the whole time, at genuine risk of simply falling off the ancient world's most important document. He never fell. And the highest panel, the one in the old Babylonian script, the one that mattered most and could not be reached by any grown man's route at all, was finally captured because a local boy, a Kurdish boy whose name nobody wrote down and I am sorry for it, swung himself across the bare rock on ropes, wedging his fingers and toes into cracks, and pressed wet paper moulds into the carving, and brought the king's third language down the mountain in squeezes of papier mache. It took him, all told, the better part of twelve years, fitted around a soldier's actual career, postings and wars and duties elsewhere, the cliff waiting through each absence exactly as the hill outside Mosul was waiting, patient in the way of things that hold writing. He would come back, and climb again, and copy another stretch, a man keeping a very long appointment in installments. And the copying was only the beginning of the labor. The decipherment itself was years more, done at desks by lamplight, which pleases me and will please you. Guessing that this recurring group of wedges might be a king's name. Testing the guess against another inscription. Watching it hold, or watching it collapse, and beginning again. It was exactly the schoolboy's work from the hot room in Part One, the same patience with the same wedges, performed in reverse, signs back into sounds, by men for whom no teacher existed anywhere on earth. With the whole proclamation finally on paper, Rawlinson and a handful of scholars across Europe went to work, and through the eighteen forties and fifties, step by step, the locks came open. The Old Persian yielded first. Then, through it, the third script cracked, and it proved to be the wedge writing of the two rivers country, the script of Babylon and Assyria and, behind them both, of Sumer. To prove the thing was truly done, the Royal Asiatic Society in London ran one of the great experiments in the history of scholarship. They sent one freshly dug Assyrian inscription to four different men, Rawlinson among them, in four separate sealed envelopes, and asked each to translate it alone, without consulting the others. The four translations came back matching, in all the ways that mattered. The dead language was alive again. The marks could be turned back into sound. Which meant that somewhere in London, in a museum whose basement was filling with crates from Kuyunjik, tens of thousands of baked clay tablets were no longer silent objects. They were mail, waiting to be opened. And the man who would open the most important one had, at that moment, no idea. He was seventeen years old, and he was apprenticed to an engraving firm, and he had never been to school past childhood.

George Smith engraved bank notes for a living. Hold the picture a moment, because it is where the whole of tonight has been heading. A working London man in his twenties, respectable, quiet, exactingly good with small marks on hard surfaces, ten hours a day over the burin and the steel plate, engraving the fine lines that make a bank note hard to forge. No university. No family money. No Latin, no Greek, nothing past an ordinary childhood schooling that ended when the apprenticeship began. What he had was an obsession, and it had chosen him early. As a boy he had read the new discoveries from Nineveh, Layard's winged bulls and buried palaces, and something in it had taken hold of him and would not let go, the way the mounds had taken hold of Layard himself. And George Smith's lodgings and his wages could not take him to Mesopotamia. But the crates from Kuyunjik had come to London. So he began spending his lunch hours at the British Museum. He was not a solitary eccentric, and I want that on the record because men like him are usually remembered wrong. He was a family man, married, with children, a household to keep on an engraver's wages in a crowded city. The hours he gave the tablets were hours most men in his position gave to rest, because there were no other hours in the day to give. Nobody paid him to learn cuneiform. Nobody so much as suggested it. For years, the entire enterprise ran on stolen lunchtimes and the lamp oil of a man who could not stop wondering what the marks said. Think of what that means, practically. A man with perhaps an hour of liberty in the middle of a working day, walking to the museum, standing at the cases where the tablets and the inscriptions lay, studying the wedge marks, going back to the plates and the burin, coming again the next day. He bought and borrowed what little had been published on the new decipherment and taught himself at night, alone, with no teacher, the hardest script on earth, in a language reconstructed within his own lifetime by a handful of men. Understand what the wedges ask of a reader, and what it means that a self taught man mastered them. The same sign can be a word, or a syllable, or a silent marker, depending on where it stands. Hundreds of signs, thousands of readings, on tablets that are chipped, cracked, worn smooth, and drifted among a hundred thousand unrelated fragments. Reading Nineveh's library is not reading. It is jigsaw work performed on the shattered mail of a dead world. He turned out to be better at it than anyone alive. The museum men noticed him at the cases. The quality of his questions changed, and then the quality of his answers did, and there came a point where the bank note engraver on his lunch hour was quietly correcting the published readings of gentlemen with chairs and titles. To the museum's lasting credit, and Rawlinson's in particular, they did not close ranks against him. They gave him piecework, then employment. The man who had stood outside the cases was given the keys to them, and set to work sorting and joining the broken tablets of Ashurbanipal's library, fragment against fragment, day after day, year after year. The work he was given sounds humble, and was in fact the whole game. The library had not come out of the ground as a library. It had come out as rubble, tens of thousands of fragments in trays, mixed and mingled, a tablet's four corners sometimes lying in four different crates. Before anyone could read the books of Ashurbanipal, somebody had to put the books of Ashurbanipal back together, piece against broken piece, with no picture on the box. He was made for it. The engraver's eye, trained on fine lines for a decade, turned out to be precisely the instrument you would design for reading worn wedges on broken clay. He could hold thousands of fragment shapes in his head. He joined pieces no one else could join. And all the while, patiently, lunch hour by lunch hour become a life's work, he was reading his way through the drifted heaps of a library no one had read in two and a half thousand years. And one day in the autumn of eighteen seventy two, at his work table, he cleaned the facing of a broken tablet, and began to read it, and stopped.

The fragment in front of him was part of a long poem, the eleventh tablet of a series, and the lines he was reading said this. A ship, resting on a mountain. A man opening a window. And then the man releasing a dove, which flew out, and found no resting place, and returned. A flood that had covered the world and was going down. A dove sent out over the water. George Smith, who like every man of his century knew his Bible to the letter, was reading the story of Noah's flood, told in the wedge writing of Nineveh, on clay from a library assembled two centuries before the book of Genesis reached the form he knew, in a version so old it made every written thing in his world look young. He later said, and colleagues repeated it after him, that he was the first man to read those lines after more than two thousand years of oblivion. In the accounts told afterwards he was so overcome that he began, to the alarm of the room, taking off his clothes. I give you that detail as what it is, a story told later by others, embellished or not, nobody can now say. What is certain is what he did next, and what it set moving. On the third of December, eighteen seventy two, before the newly founded Society of Biblical Archaeology in London, with the great and the learned of England in the seats, the bank note engraver stood up and read his paper. The Chaldean account of the Deluge. The flood, before the Bible, on clay, from Nineveh. The room understood at once what it was hearing, and by morning, so did the newspapers, and after them the world. Put yourself in that room for one breath. On the platform, reading carefully from his paper, a man who had left school as a boy, who had taught himself everything he knew at a museum case in his lunch hour, and who was now explaining to the assembled learning of England what was written on a tablet none of them could read. Whatever else the nineteenth century got wrong, it made room, once, for that. The sensation crossed every border. Was the Bible's flood the memory of this older flood. Had Genesis borrowed. Was this confirmation, or challenge, or both. Victorian England argued about it at full volume, and that argument is its own long story, and it is not our fight, and the fire of it has long since gone out, as every fire in this story does. What matters for tonight is what the argument did. It made a broken tablet in a museum drawer the most famous object in the world, and the world wanted the rest of the poem, and the poem had a hole in it. Part of the flood story was missing, broken away in some room of the buried palace on the night the roof came down. So a London newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, put up a thousand guineas to send George Smith, the engraver who had never left England, to Nineveh, to find the missing piece of the oldest story on earth. He went, the following spring, and I would like you to feel the size of that going. This was a man whose whole life had been lived inside a few miles of London, whose travels had been from his lodgings to the museum and back. Now he crossed the Channel, and then Europe by rail, and then took ship, and then rode, week upon week, down through the East he had only ever read about, sleeping in strange rooms, doubting himself in letters home, a museum man on a newspaper's errand at the far end of the earth. He was not an adventurer. That is the beauty of it. He was a reader, going to the place the books came from. He reached Mosul, and stood at last on the grassed hill over the buried library, the place he had been reading his way toward since boyhood, and he set crews digging in the old spoil heaps the earlier excavations had left behind. Picture the scene on that hill honestly, because it is one of the strangest scenes in the whole history of reading. Trenches and spoil heaps under a huge sky. Local crews turning over the broken earth of the old excavations. And moving among them a pale, quiet Londoner, examining fragment after fragment with the museum eye, the engraver's eye, the only pair of eyes within a thousand miles that could tell at a glance whether a broken biscuit of clay was an account of barley or a piece of the oldest story on earth. And on the fifth day, he found it. A broken fragment of clay, the right size, the right script, carrying lines of the flood narrative that answered the gap. Five days. After two and a half thousand years. He wrote home that he had found the missing portion, and the newspaper trumpeted it, and it made him famous a second time. Now, the fifth day fragment has one more secret in it, and it was not discovered until long after, and it is for you, tonight, because nobody else will savor it the way you can. When later scholars examined that fragment closely, they found that it did not belong to the poem Smith was completing. It slots into that flood narrative, near enough, but it is not Gilgamesh. It is a piece of an older telling. It is a fragment of the poem that begins, when the gods were the ones who did the work. It is Atrahasis. It is the story you heard at this lamp, the gods and the baskets and the strike and the clay and the reed wall. George Smith went to the hill to find the flood story, and the hill handed him the opening of the older flood story, the deep one, the original, and he carried it home believing it was something else, and he never learned what he had been holding. The hill gave back the exact story it wished to give back. I do not offer that as mysticism. I offer it as the plain record, which is better. The tablets were speaking again. All of them. In the years that followed, Smith and the scholars after him read their way into the library shelf by shattered shelf, and the whole world of the old story came back up into the light. Gilgamesh. The flood. The kings who reigned in sars. The gods and the baskets. Silent for level upon level of centuries, and now translated into every language spoken by the children of the people who buried them. George Smith himself did not get to grow old in that library. He went back east a third time, and took ill in the summer heat, and died on the road near Aleppo at thirty six, a working man who had given the human race back the oldest chapter of its own memory. The room where he worked is still there, in the museum. So, on their shelves and in their drawers, are his tablets. And with that, the recovery is complete, and everything loud in tonight's story is over. The fires are all out. The arguments have all cooled. There is only one turn left, and it is a quiet one, and you already hold the key to it.

A hundred years passed, quietly, in the way of libraries. The tablets sat in their cases and drawers, and the scholars worked on them, generation after generation, publishing thick grey volumes with careful titles. Fragment joined to fragment, year by year, Smith's successors carrying on the jigsaw he began. Gilgamesh, reassembled, entered the literature of the world, translated into every living language, taught in schools, the oldest story on earth becoming, in its late age, one of the famous ones. The flood tablet went into its case and became one of the most visited objects in the museum. And the deep old poem of the gods and the baskets was pieced together too, slower, from scattered fragments, the way you heard it whole at this lamp. The script that one man had taught himself at lunch became a university discipline with chairs and journals. By the middle of the twentieth century you could, in a dozen cities on earth, learn to read the wedges properly, from teachers, out of grammars, the way our scribe learned them in the hot room as a boy. And in nineteen seventy six, a book about the tablets appeared in the shops, and it sold more copies than every grey volume ever printed about them put together. Its author was named Zecharia Sitchin, and he had read the tablets on his own, outside the discipline, and he had come back from them with an extraordinary announcement. Let me set the whole of it out now, as carefully and as fairly as I can, the way its readers hold it. It deserves that much. You cannot weigh a thing you have only ever heard in pieces. The story goes like this. There is a planet, and it is ours, a twelfth one, and its path is enormous. It does not circle the sun in a year the way we do. It goes out into the long dark and comes back every three thousand six hundred years, and its name, in the tablets, is Nibiru. The people of that world are the Anunnaki, and their own name tells you what they did, because in the Sumerian, so the story runs, it means those who from heaven to earth came. They came here for gold. Their own world was dying, its air thinning and drifting away, and gold, ground fine and hung in the high air, would hold the warmth in and save it. So they came down in the marshes at the head of the gulf, and they mined, and the mining was long and hard, and it was the lesser ones among them who did it, shift after shift, age after age, until the night they set down their baskets and refused. And then, so the story goes, they solved it the way we would solve it. There was already a creature here, upright, nearly ready, wanting only a little work. Enki, who in the tablets is the god of the sweet water and of cleverness, is in this telling a geneticist, and Ninmah beside him at the bench, and what the two of them did in the clay was not myth at all but a procedure. They took what was here, and they put something of themselves into it, and the ones in the tablets who come out wrong, the one who cannot hold water, the one who can bear no children, are not a poem about imperfection. They are the failed attempts, written down the way a laboratory writes them down. And the thing that finally came right was us. And once you hold that key, so the readers say, every locked door in the old world swings open. Genesis remembers them, the sons of God who came down and took wives among us, and the giants that were born of it. A little carved stone in Berlin remembers them, a sun with eleven bodies set around it, cut four thousand years before anyone built a telescope. Our own bodies remember them, because one of our chromosomes is two chromosomes joined, which the great apes do not have, and which happened, so the story says, in a room and not in a wilderness. And the suddenness of Sumer remembers them, because writing and mathematics and the reading of the sky do not come slowly there, they arrive nearly all at once, the way a thing arrives when it is handed over rather than worked out. That is the case. I have put it to you as strongly as I know how, because it is put strongly, and because you deserve to hear it whole and in one piece before you hear anything else at all. And the world, in enormous numbers, loved it. The books sold in the millions, in many languages, decade after decade. And I understand why, and so do you, if you are honest about it. It is a magnificent story. It takes the strangest true things in the tablets, the gods who dig, the making of workers from clay, the sages from the sea, the kings who reign for tens of thousands of years, and it makes them make a new kind of sense. It is also, in its shape, a very old kind of story. A hidden truth, guarded by scholars, available to the bold. People have always loved that story. People always will. And there is one more honest thing to say about why it was believed, and it reflects well on the believers, not badly. The people who loved those books had noticed something true. The tablets really are strange. The gods really do dig rivers and knead workers out of clay, the sages really do walk out of the sea, the kings really do reign for spans no life could fill. The scholars, writing carefully for each other in the grey volumes, had mostly stopped saying out loud how strange it all is. The man who came along and said, is nobody going to explain this, was answering a real itch, with the wrong key, in a lock that was never locked. The right explanations existed. They lived in the grey volumes, and almost nobody had ever carried them out to the people doing the wondering. Tonight is, in its small way, that errand, a few thousand years late and a few decades behind the wrong answer, walking the long way home. So now let the tablets answer, in their own voice, the way the scribe checks a copy against its original. No heat, no scorn. Just the clay, and what is on it. The first is the hidden planet, and its name. Nibiru is truly there. It is a real Akkadian word, and the scholars know it well, and what it means, in the astronomical tablets where it lives, is a crossing. A ford. A ferry point. It is the name the sky watchers of Babylon gave to a crossing place in the heavens, and in the texts where they name it, it refers to the planet we call Jupiter, once to Mercury, and to a star. Every occurrence is catalogued, and there are not many, and they are all of them ordinary sky lore. Nothing in them orbits far away and returns. Nothing in them is a world. The word is real, and it was asked to carry a meaning it never held. The second is the orbit. The hidden planet, the books say, returns every three thousand six hundred years. And there it is. If you were here for the last story, you have been carrying it all this time, and I told you then that you would want it again. Say it to yourself, before I say anything at all. You know exactly where that number comes from. Some of you learned it at this lamp last time, in the chapter about the kings, and the rest of you are one breath away from it. It is not an orbit. It was never an orbit. It is a sar. It is sixty times sixty. It is the round counting unit of the two rivers country, the number they used the way we use a dozen or a gross or a thousand, the number the King List reckons its ancient reigns in, the number that means, in the oldest arithmetic on earth, a great and complete quantity. A man went into the tablets, and met the grandest counting word of a vanished civilization, and mistook a number for a journey. That is the entire mystery of the three thousand six hundred year orbit. If you solved it lying down, with your eyes closed, before I finished the sentence, it is not because you are cleverer than he was. It is because you heard the tablets' own story first, and he, I think, fell in love with a different one. The third is the picture. The little seal is real, and it is in Berlin, catalogued VA two four three, and on it, among figures of gods, there is a carved star with small dots about it. Scholars who study the seals read that carving the way they read a thousand other seals like it. The rayed symbol is a star, the ordinary sign for divinity in that art, drawn as that art always draws it. The dots beside it are the ordinary way of showing stars in company. The sun, in that same art, has its own quite different sign, and it is not the sign on this seal. Nothing on the stone is a planet. It is a heaven, drawn the way that world drew heavens, being asked to be a diagram it never was. And the rest of it answers the same way, quietly, if you go and look. No tablet anywhere says the gods came for gold, or that a world was dying, or that air can be mended with it. The gold in the tablets is temple gold and royal gold, worn and weighed and given. The making of people is told in the language of birth and ritual and breath, midwives and clay and a slain god's spirit, which is how that world explained every birth, and the ones who come out unable are given places and callings, not discarded as trials. Genesis is a later book by other people who lived near this one and heard its stories, and hearing is not the same as remembering. And the joined chromosome is real, and it is ours, and the biologists who found it place it in the ordinary descent of living things, alongside every other change that made us, without needing a hand in the room. Underneath each one, something true from the world of the old story, wearing a story from ours. He was not the first, for what it is worth. Books about visitors from the sky teaching the ancient world were a fashion before he wrote, and one of them, a few years earlier, had sold its own millions. The idea was in the air of that century. He gave it the tablets, and the tablets gave it a grandeur nothing else could have. And here is where I set it down, gently, and we go toward sleep. The tablets survived the fall of the empire that gathered them. They survived the fire, which baked them. They survived the burial, the forgetting of their language, the death of every hand that made them. They survived twenty five centuries under a hill, and shovels, and crates, and the sea voyage, and the drawer. The one thing they could not survive by themselves, the one hazard that clay cannot outlast, is being read to say what they do not say. But even there, they have a protection, and it is the same one it always was. The words are still on the clay. Anyone can check. The scribes wrote checked and true at the foot of their good copies, and the copies are still checkable, which is the whole of the answer, and the reason tonight's story ends in peace. Misreadings pass. They pass like fires, and like empires, flaring and cooling in a generation or three. The clay does not pass. The clay simply goes on saying what the tired careful man pressed into it, four thousand years ago, at a lamp, patient as the river, waiting for anyone who cares to look. And if someone you love believes the other story, be gentle about it, tonight and always. They came to the tablets wondering, which is more than most people ever do. The wondering was right. Only the door it went through was wrong, and the right door is not locked, and you now know where it is. The tablets have outwaited everything else. They will outwait this too.

So now you know the whole journey, and it is late, and we can walk back along it slowly, the way you walk back through a house at night putting out the lights. Count the hands with me. Drowsily. In order. There is no test. The hands of the scribe, first, pressing the wedges by lamplight, checking the copy, writing his line of thanks to the goddess at the foot of the clay. The hands of the boys in the hot room, copying their lists of trees and birds and beer, one of whom grew up to copy stories. The hands of the copyists after him, generation on generation, moving the words from dying clay to fresh clay, south to north, shelf to shelf. The hands of the king's agents, lifting tablets into baskets in the old cities, loading the carts for Nineveh. The hands of the library scribes, sorting, labelling, pressing the king's stamp of ownership at the foot: palace of Ashurbanipal, king of the world. The hands of the soldiers, torch and crowbar, who never once touched the shelves, and so delivered the library to the fire that saved it. The hands of a hundred generations of shepherd boys on the grass of the hill, none of whom ever dug. The hands of Layard, raising money and cutting trenches. The hands of Rassam, the man from Mosul, lifting the finest tablets of all out of the earth of his own home country. The hands of the crate makers and the boatmen and the dockers, carrying the library, piece by piece, across the world. The hands of Rawlinson on the rock of Behistun, and the hands of a Kurdish boy whose name we do not have, pressing wet paper into the words of a king, hundreds of feet above the road. The hands of the scholars since, four generations of them now, turning fragments under better and better lamps, still joining, still publishing, still finding new pieces in old drawers, because the library is not finished giving itself back even now. The hands of George Smith, inked at the engraving plate at ten in the morning, dusty with clay at lunch, turning a broken tablet toward the window light in the autumn of eighteen seventy two. The hands of the museum conservators, a profession our scribe would have understood at sight: people paid to keep old clay from harm, dusting, mending, renumbering, moving the trays with two hands always. The hands of the translators, carrying the words their last mile, out of the wedges and into the alphabets, so that a story locked in a dead script for two thousand years is tonight within reach of nearly every person alive. And your hands, tonight, wherever they are lying. Because listening is the last pair of hands in every chain of telling, and always has been, since the singer and the fire and the beginning of nights like this one. Four thousand years, and nobody alive ever saw the whole road. And it came through, all of it, every mile, because in every generation there was somebody, usually obscure, often tired, always patient, who kept their own short stretch of it. None of them knew about the others. The scribe never imagined the engraver. The engraver never imagined you. Say the stretch of years slowly, once, and feel how little of it anyone had to hold. The scribe held one night of it. The boy in the hot room held one morning. Smith held one lunch hour at a time. The hill held the longest watch of all, and the hill was not even trying. No single hand held the story for more than a lifetime. Most held it for less than a season. The chain is four thousand years long and every link in it is short. That is the comfort in it, if you want one to sleep on. Nothing that lasts asks any one keeper to be strong for long. It only asks that the next hand be there. And notice, one last time, how many of the hands have no names. The boy in the hot room. The copyists. The crews who dug in the heat while the famous men wrote letters home. The Kurdish boy on the rock. The boatmen, the crate makers, the cleaners who dust the case tonight. History wrote down perhaps a dozen names from four thousand years of keeping, and the keeping was done, almost all of it, by the ones it did not write down. The next hand was always there. And yet here it is, and here you are, and the chain holds. If you are still awake at all, let that be the thought you go down on. Nobody keeps the whole story. Everybody keeps a little of it, for a while, and hands it on. That is how the oldest things in the world have lasted, and it is also, if you think of the people who told you what you know, and the people you will tell, how you have lived. And the chain is not finished. It does not finish. You will speak of something you heard tonight, some morning, to someone, without planning to. The figurines under the bed, perhaps. The fire that saved a library. The boy on the rock. And whoever hears you will carry it a while, and hand it on in their turn, and never know where the road began, on a reed mat, by a lamp, tonight. The lamp is low. There is one room left to visit, and it is the quietest room in the world, and then we are done.

I promised you, at the beginning of the night, that I knew where the tablet is tonight, and that before morning I would tell you the room. Here is the room. It is in London, in the great museum, past the courtyard and up the stairs, in the galleries where the Assyrian collections are kept. By day those rooms are full: schoolchildren in crocodiles, tourists with their phones, scholars with their notebooks, the shuffle and murmur of the living going past the cases. But that is the day. We are not visiting by day. It is deep in the night now, and the museum is closed, and the galleries are empty in the way that only great public rooms after hours are empty, a hush with a high ceiling on it. The cleaners have finished and gone. A guard passes on their round, torchlight sliding briefly across the glass, and moves on, footsteps fading down the long floor. And in the case, in the dark, lies the tablet. The flood tablet itself is there, the eleventh tablet, the one that stopped a working man's breath at his table in eighteen seventy two. And near it, in cases and in drawers, its shelf mates from the buried library, the kings and the omens and the star charts, and the older, deeper telling, the poem of the gods and the baskets, the story you heard at this lamp, resting in pieces that scholars are still, gently, to this day, fitting back together. Go close to the glass, in your mind, and look at it. It is not much to look at, and that is the point of it. A palm sized piece of fired river mud, chipped at the corners, the colour of gingerbread, covered in small wedge shaped marks pressed close together in careful lines. Four thousand years ago, on a warm night, beside a river that is still flowing, a tired careful man held soft clay in his left hand, because clay must be held to be written, and pressed those exact marks, that exact deep, with a cut reed, while a lamp burned at his elbow and the river said the same soft word over and over against the reeds. The clay remembers the pressure of his hand. That is not poetry. That is simply what clay is. Every wedge holds the angle and the depth he gave it, the way sand holds a footprint, except that this footprint has outlasted the empire it was pressed in, the language it was pressed for, and every single thing its maker ever feared. The room is silent. The case is locked. The night stretches out over London the way it stretches out over you. The city outside the museum walls is doing what cities do at this hour. Late buses. Lit windows going dark one by one. Seven million sleepers turning over. Not one of them is thinking of the tablet, and the tablet, in whatever way an object can be said to mind anything, does not mind. It has been unthought of before. It was unthought of for twenty five centuries, and they were, in their way, its safest years. In other rooms of the same building, the winged bulls stand in the dark, holding up their doorway as they held up the buried gate, five legs apiece, walking and standing at once, patient as ever. The lion hunt panels hang in their long gallery with no one before them. The great lioness of the hunt is there too, at peace in the dark at last after all these centuries, still magnificent, mourned now by every visitor where once she was a king's boast. The whole buried world that came up out of the hill is bedded down in one building, silent, the way it was silent under the grass, except that now the silence has doors, and the doors will open in the morning. And the tablet does what it has done every night for four thousand years, through the shelf years and the fire and the hill and the sea and the drawer and the fame. It holds the words, in the dark, without needing anyone. Patient as the river. Sure as baked clay. Asking nothing. Keeping everything. It does not need to be watched, tonight, and neither does anything else in your keeping. Whatever you are holding onto, you can set it down on the shelf until morning. The things worth keeping keep. That is the entire lesson of the longest night in this story, and the hill kept it better than any watchman could have. The wedges in the case were pressed in one evening's work. The drying took three days. The keeping has taken four thousand years, and the tablet has done almost all of it alone, in the dark, the way it is doing it now. Rooms away, in the same dark, lie the winged bulls that sailed on the goat skin rafts. Somewhere below, in drawers, the joined fragments rest against their neighbors, the old catalogue numbers still on some of them. The whole long story is asleep in one building tonight, within calling distance of itself, quiet as the hill was quiet. The guard's footsteps have gone. The glass is dark again. And morning will come to the other city too. Across the world from that London gallery, on the banks of the same old Tigris, Mosul will wake across the river from the two mounds, as it has every morning for a thousand years. There are scholars there now as well, and students, and museums, reading the wedges in the land the wedges came from, keeping their own stretch of the road. The story that was carried away is also, slowly, in our own lifetime, being read again at home. That work is young, and it is theirs, and the river that heard the first line of all of it goes past their windows every night. Morning will come to London, and the doors will open, and the schoolchildren will pour in past the winged bulls, and some particular child will stop at a case for no reason they could name, and lean in, and begin, without knowing it, to keep their stretch of the road. But that is the morning, and the morning can wait. The scribe banks his lamp. The room in London is dark, and the room in the story is dark, and the room you are lying in is dark, and for this one moment the three of them are the same room, joined by a piece of clay and an unbroken chain of hands, and there is nothing in any of the three that needs you awake. The river goes on in the dark. Sleep well. Goodnight.

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight, the books that were left out. You have heard of one of them. It is called the Book of Enoch, and for a long time now people have been telling each other that it was lost, or hidden, or banned, and most of that is not true, and the true story is stranger and quieter and far more interesting than any of it. There is a man in it who does not die. There are two hundred of heaven's own watchmen who come down a mountain and swear an oath they will regret. There is a house whose floor is fire and whose ceiling is fire, and a man asleep beside a river who is shown it in a dream. And there is this, which nobody who says the word banned ever seems to mention: a book inside the New Testament names Enoch and quotes words found in his book as prophecy, and has done so for two thousand years. Bishops argued about these books for longer than most countries have existed. In Egypt, books survived inside a buried jar, though who hid them and why is still argued over. And the Ethiopian church kept Enoch and Jubilees among its scriptures, within its own continuing inheritance. That is where we are going tonight. Not to a cave, not yet. To a room where the book was never missing. There is a church at the top of a hill, and inside it there is a lamp. The church is round. Its walls are stone and timber and its roof is thatch, deep and steep, and tonight the rain is on it. Not a storm. The long patient rain of the highlands, the kind that comes for weeks in this part of the year and settles in and makes the whole country green, and it is falling on the thatch with a sound like a great many small hands, and it has been falling all evening, and it will fall all night. The hill the church stands on is one of a thousand hills. Beyond it the land drops away in steps, escarpment below escarpment, into valleys full of cloud, and in the daytime you can see for fifty miles, and at night you can see nothing at all except, if you go to the door, the rain, silver, and the dark shape of a juniper. Inside, the lamp. A small clay dish of oil, a wick laid in the lip of it, the flame the colour of old honey. By the lamp sits a man in white. He is not old and he is not young. He wears the white cotton that everyone wears here, wrapped at the shoulder, and across his knees there is a board, and on the board there is a sheet of parchment, pale and fine and cut from a goat skin, and on the parchment, in two neat columns, is a script that you would not be able to read. It is called Ge'ez. Say it once, slowly. Ge'ez. It is older than most of the languages of Europe, and it is written in letters that look, if you have never seen them, a little like rows of small people standing very straight. He writes it with a reed. Beside him, in two small pots, are two inks, one black and one red, and the red is for the name of God and for the headings, and nothing else. He is copying a book. This is the thing worth knowing before anything else tonight. The book he is copying is the Book of Enoch. And he is not preserving it, and he is not rescuing it, and he does not know that anybody thinks it was lost, because in this church nobody ever thought so. It is one of the books. It has always been one of the books. His teacher copied it, and his teacher's teacher, back and back, through more centuries than we will count tonight, in rooms like this one, on hills like this one, in this same rain. To him it is not a discovery. It is Tuesday. His hand aches a little, the way it does by this hour. He has copied this page before, and he knows where the hard word is, three lines down, and he slows for it. Beside him, on a low shelf against the wall, there are other books. Five or six of them, bound in wooden boards and leather, some fat, some thin, and every one of them is a book that somewhere else in the world was left off a list. Here they sit in a row in the lamplight, doing nothing, needing nothing, waiting for Sunday. Tonight we are going to take them down one at a time. There is a place for you here, in the warm part of the room, out of the rain. There is a mat, and a folded cloth for your head, and a whole night with nothing in it that you have to carry. You do not have to do anything now. Let the rain be on the roof. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool wet air of the mountains on the other, the way the whole world feels when you are almost asleep and perfectly safe. Close your eyes if they want to close. This story does not need to be watched. It only needs to be near you, the way the lamp is near you, the way the rain is near you, saying the same soft thing over and over on the thatch. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the copyist will go on without you, and he will not mind. He has copied through a great many people's sleep. And one thing, whispered like a promise. Nothing in this story will ever startle you. There are angels in it who fall, and there are giants, and there is a judgment, and I will not pretend to you that those things are gentle. But they will be told the way this room tells everything, plainly, in a low voice, at a little distance, and then set down. No storm in here will ever be louder than the rain outside. You can trust this lamp. That is what it was lit for. The copyist dips the reed. It makes a small sound against the lip of the pot, like a bird stepping on a wet leaf. Before he begins, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next tale will be waiting for you when you need it. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and let him begin. We begin.

The copyist does not begin with the book on his knees. He begins with the shelf. He sets the board aside for a moment, carefully, so the wet ink will not run, and he reaches down to the shelf and lays his hand flat on the row of books, the way you would lay a hand on the back of a sleeping animal, and he leaves it there. He is not counting them. He knows how many there are. He is doing what people do with things they have had a long time. Let me tell you what a book is, in this room, because it is not quite what a book is where you are. A book here begins as an animal. A goat, most often, or a sheep. The skin is taken and soaked and scraped and stretched on a frame and dried in the sun and scraped again, and then it is cut into leaves, and the leaves are folded, and the folded leaves are gathered into little bundles, and the bundles are sewn together with cord and bound between two boards of wood, and the wood is sometimes covered in leather, and sometimes not. Then somebody sits down with a reed and two pots of ink, and begins. A page a day, perhaps. Perhaps less. A whole book is a year of a man's life, sometimes two, and every book on this shelf was somebody's year. He learned it here, as a boy. That is how it is done. A boy is sent up the hill by his family and sits at the side of the room and learns his letters by saying them aloud, all of them, over and over, in a sing song, the whole alphabet with all its orders, because Ge'ez letters come in sevens, each one with seven shapes for its seven vowels, and there are a great many of them, and a boy learns them the way he learns to walk, by falling over them for a year. Then he learns to read. Then, if his hand is steady and his teacher is willing, he learns to write, on scraps first, on bits of skin too small for anything else, and then on a whole leaf, and the first whole leaf a boy writes is always spoiled, and everyone knows that, and nobody minds. The copyist's first leaf was spoiled. He remembers which word. He was eleven. Before a leaf is written it is ruled. Not with ink. With a blunt point, drawn along a straightedge, pressing lines into the skin so faintly that you cannot see them unless you tilt the leaf to the lamp, and then you see them all at once, a whole page of ghost lines, the two columns marked out, every line of writing waiting for its writing. He rules a leaf in the morning and writes it through the day and into the night, and if he is honest, which he is, he does not get to the bottom of it every day. That is why I picture him handling the shelf with care. You cannot throw away that much work casually. But care alone does not explain a church's books, and this imagined copyist cannot speak for every decision in its history. Enoch and Jubilees belong to the Ethiopian scriptural inheritance. That is the fact beneath the shelf I have given him. It is enough to picture him reaching for a book he values, checking one leaf against another, and taking care over the next word. A letter from another church does not tell us everything about what happened on this hill. Tonight the books are here, and his work is to make a copy. Outside, the rain. It has been raining for three weeks. This is the wet season in the highlands, and the whole country is drinking. Down in the valleys the rivers are brown and loud and the fields are the green of something that has just been born. Up here on the hill the thatch drinks the rain and holds it and lets it through in slow drops at the edges, and the juniper by the door drips, and the path down to the village is a stream. Nobody will come up the hill tonight. Nobody is expected. The copyist has the whole church to himself, and the lamp, and the row of books, and the long hours before morning, which is when the light will be good enough to check what he has written. He takes the first book down. It is not the biggest and it is not the oldest. It is the one he knows best, because it is the one he is copying, and a man knows the book he is copying the way he knows the road to his own house. Its boards are dark with handling. When he opens it the leaves make a small dry sound, and the two columns of Ge'ez stand up straight on every page, black, with here and there a line of red, and the red is where the name of God is, and he touches one of the red places with the side of his thumb, not reading it, just touching it, the way you touch a doorframe on your way in. Mashafa Henok, this book is called here. Say it once. Mashafa Henok. The Book of Enoch. Everywhere else in the world, for a very long time, people said it was lost. He turns to the first page. And we will begin where the book begins, which is not on this hill at all, and not in this century, and not even with this book. It begins with a list of names in a much older book, and one name in the list that does not behave.

His hand is on the first book, open at the beginning. But the beginning of the Book of Enoch is not the beginning of Enoch. For that we have to go to Genesis, to a page that most people turn past. It is a list. The fifth chapter of Genesis, and it is nothing but a list, one of those long patient lists of who was the son of whom, and how many years they lived, and it goes on for a page, and the rhythm of it is the rhythm of a road going over flat country, one milestone after another, all the same. Adam lived, and had a son called Seth, and lived after that, and died. Seth lived, and had a son called Enosh, and lived after that, and died. Enosh, and Kenan, and Mahalalel, and Jared. Each one lives, and has a son, and lives on for a great many years, eight hundred, nine hundred, and then the same three words at the end of every one, and the words are, and he died. It is like a bell. Every few lines the bell. And he died. And he died. You could set a clock by it. It is one of the oldest and plainest things in the whole of the Bible, this list, and it says one thing over and over with the calm of a man laying bricks, and the thing it says is that everybody dies. Then it comes to the seventh name. Jared had a son, and the son was called Enoch. And the list goes on as it has gone on, and says how long he lived, and the number is three hundred and sixty five years. Which is a small number, in this company. His father lived past nine hundred. His son, who was called Methuselah, would live past nine hundred and sixty, longer than anyone. Enoch lived three hundred and sixty five. One year for every day in a year. If you like that sort of thing you may like it a great deal, and if you do not, let it go by. The list does not stop to explain it. Seventh from Adam. That is the other thing the list tells you without meaning to, and people have been counting it on their fingers for two thousand years. Adam, one. Seth, two. Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, and then Enoch, seven. In a book where seven is never an accident, the seventh man is the one who does not die. Later readers made a great deal of that. The list makes nothing of it. It just goes on counting. And his son. I said Methuselah lived longer than anyone, and he did, nine hundred and sixty nine years, the longest life in the whole of the Bible, and if you do the sums using the ages in the traditional Hebrew text, he dies in the year of the flood. The longest life this biblical genealogy records, ending in the same year the water comes. The list does not say whether he was on the boat. He was not. His grandson was, and his grandson's name was Noah. So the man who did not die had a son who lived longer than anyone and died just as the world did, and a great grandson who floated. It is a strange family, and the list lays it out flat and walks past it. And then the bell does not ring. For the earlier ancestors the refrain was, and he died. Enoch, no. What the page says instead, and I will give it to you plainly, is this. Enoch walked with God. And he was not, for God took him. That is all. That is the whole of it. No more than that. He was not. The list picks itself up and goes on, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, and the death refrain returns before the chapter reaches Noah, and the road goes on over the flat country. But there is a place in the road now where the milestone is missing, and many readers have stopped there, and looked at the gap, and wondered. Where did he go? The page does not say. It says he walked with God, and it says God took him, and it uses a word for took that is the same word you would use for picking something up. That is all it uses. It does not say where. It does not say whether he was afraid, or glad, or whether it hurt, or whether he had time to say goodbye to Methuselah, or whether it was morning. It leaves a door open in the middle of a wall of names and it walks on. For a long time, that was the whole of Enoch. A gap in a list. A man who did not die. And then, some centuries before the birth of Christ, in a language called Aramaic that was spoken across the whole of that part of the world, somebody walked through the door. That is what the book on the copyist's knees is. It is what somebody wrote when they went through the gap in the list to see what was on the other side. Not one somebody. Several. Over a long time. The book he is copying is not one book but five, written by different hands in different generations and bound together long ago, and the oldest parts of it are older than almost anything else you will hear tonight. But all of it, every part, begins from the same small thing. A man in a list who did not die. Where did he go? And what did he see? The copyist turns the leaf. And on the other side of the door, the first thing anyone saw was a mountain.

The same book. A few pages in. His hand rests on the margin while he reads, and the rain is steady on the roof. Here is what the book says happened, as human families multiplied on the earth, and the daughters, the book says, were beautiful. There were watchmen in heaven. That is the word the book uses, Watchers, the ones who do not sleep, the ones who keep watch. And two hundred of them looked down and saw the daughters of men and wanted them. Now here is the part that a quick telling can pass over, and it is very human. The one who led them, whose name was Shemihazah, was afraid. He said to the others, I am afraid that you will not go through with it, and that I alone will pay for a great sin. The others answer by proposing that they all swear together and bind themselves by a curse. They do it. The oath is shared; the page does not make it a speech in which one leader forces every other Watcher to stay. That difference matters. Fear is there, and so is a collective answer to it. They bind themselves to the undertaking together. And they came down. They came down on a mountain, and the book names it. Mount Hermon, which is a real mountain, and you can see it today, high and white at the top for most of the year, standing at the northern edge of the land of Israel where three countries now meet. The book says they came down onto its summit and swore their oath there, and it says, in one of the oldest puns in the world, that the mountain got its name from what they did on it, because the word for the oath and the name of the mountain sound alike. Whether that is true of the name I could not tell you. It is true of the book. The book says so. Two hundred of them, on a summit of snow, binding themselves together in the cold. Then they came down the mountain into the warm country below and took wives among the daughters of men, and the book gives the names of the leaders, twenty of them, in a long roll, and I will not read you the roll. Some of the names are strange and some are lovely and all of them are in the book. I want to stay on the summit a moment before we go down, because the book does, and because it is the picture everyone remembers. Two hundred of them. Not a crowd. Two hundred is a number you could count, if you stood at the edge and were patient, and the book wants you to know it is a number you could count. They are not a storm or a plague or a host. They are two hundred watchmen who each decided, and each swore, and each came. Every one of them had a name. The book only gives you twenty of the names because twenty is enough to make the point, that these were not a force of nature, they were persons, and each of them chose, and the choosing is the whole of the story. Snow under them. The country spread out below in the dark, with its small fires. And the cold, which watchmen who do not sleep have never had to feel before, and feel now, and do not turn back. And here is where the story turns into something else, because the book is also about what follows the unions. It is about what they taught. One of the two hundred was called Azazel. And Azazel, the book says, taught men to make swords. And knives. And shields. And the plates of armour that go over the chest. He taught them how to find the metals in the ground and how to work them, and he taught the women bracelets, and ornaments, and the paint that goes around the eyes, and the dyes, and the precious stones, and all the colours. And others among the two hundred taught other things. One taught the cutting of roots and the making of charms. One taught the signs of the sun, and one the signs of the moon, and one the reading of the stars, and one the meaning of the clouds, and one the signs of the earth. Do you see what happened? It is a list of everything. Metal and medicine and make up and the weather and the stars. Everything a people would need to stop being frightened of the world and start running it. And the book says it all arrived at once, and it arrived too early, from the wrong direction, before anyone was ready, and it was not a gift. That is the whole idea of this part of the Book of Enoch, and it is one of the oldest ideas anyone ever wrote down. Knowledge can come before you are ready for it. And when it does, it is not a blessing, or not only. I am not going to tell you what to think about that. The book does judge what the Watchers have done. But we can pause over the list and look at it. Swords. And the paint for the eyes. In the same breath. There were children. The book says the children were enormous, and it gives a size, and the size is impossible, and I will not repeat it, because the size is not the point. The point is what they ate. They ate everything. All the labour of men went into feeding them and it was not enough, and when it was not enough they turned on the birds, and the beasts, and the creeping things, and the fish, and in the end, the book says, on one another. And the earth itself, the book says, the earth which had been made to be quiet and fruitful, opened its mouth and cried out. Cried out to whom? To the ones who were still watching. Four of them. The book names them. Michael, Sariel, Raphael, Gabriel, though in some copies the second name is different, and that is worth knowing only so that you do not argue with anyone about it. Four of the watchmen who had not gone down. They looked, the book says, from the sanctuary of heaven, and they saw the blood on the earth, and they heard the earth crying, and they said to one another, the sound of it goes all the way up to the gates of heaven. And they carried what they had heard upward, to the highest place there is, and they set it down there. And what was decided, and how, and what became of Shemihazah and Azazel and the two hundred and the children, is a story for another night, a long one, and the copyist knows it, and will not tell it tonight. He turns past those pages. He has his hand on one page in particular, further on, and it is the page he was always going to read you, because it is the strangest thing in the book and the gentlest. It is about a man falling asleep beside a river.

The same book, the same hand. He has turned to the page. After the cry went up, and after the answer came down, the two hundred knew what had been decided, and they were afraid. And they wanted to plead. To ask for mercy. To say that they were sorry and to ask if there was any way back. And they could not. That is the thing. The book says that shame kept them from speaking to God or lifting their eyes to heaven. So they needed somebody who could carry a message up for them. And they went to a man. They went to Enoch. Who walked with God, the list had said, and who, the book says, had been hidden away in a quiet place where no man knew where he was, and whose days were spent with the watchmen who had not fallen. Enoch speaks to the fallen ones, and they ask him, angels asking a man, please write our petition for us. Write down that we are sorry, and that we ask to be forgiven, and carry it up, because we cannot. Let that sit for a moment. Everything you have ever heard about angels and men runs the other way. Angels bring messages down. Here, the two hundred watchmen of heaven stand around one man and ask him, please, will you write this for us and take it up. Their shame has made them ask for someone to speak on their behalf. The answer will make something of that reversal. For now I want to stay with the errand. But I think it is the most human page in it. So he wrote the petition. All of it. Every request they made, and every plea, and he took it and he went, the book says, to a place by water. The waters of Dan, in the land of Dan, south and west of the mountain where the whole thing had begun. A river country, at the foot of the snow. And he sat down there beside the water, and he read the petition aloud, all of it, to the end, so that it would be heard. And then he fell asleep. That is what the book says. He read it, and he fell asleep beside the water, and the answer came to him in a dream. And I have to tell you, of all the things in all the books on this shelf, that is the one I would have chosen for this room and this rain if I had been allowed to choose. A man does the thing he was asked to do, and then he lies down by a river and sleeps, and in his sleep he is shown everything. Here is what he was shown. Clouds came and called him. And mist. And the courses of the stars, and lightning, and a wind that took him and lifted him and carried him up. And he came to a wall. And the wall was made of hailstones. Great white stones of ice, fitted together, and around the wall there was fire, and the fire was moving, and he was afraid, and he went in through the fire. And inside the wall there was a house. And the house too was built of hailstones. Its walls were like a floor of ice laid on end, and its floor was crystal, and its roof, when he looked up, was the paths of the stars, and lightning going to and fro among them, and between the stars there were burning cherubim, and the heaven above all of it was water. And the house was hot, hotter than fire, and colder than ice, both at once, and there was no life in it, and no pleasure, and he was afraid, and he fell down on his face. And in his dream he saw a second house. A house greater than the first, the book says, with its door standing open before him, and this one was built all of flames. Its floor was fire, and above it were lightning and the paths of the stars, and its ceiling was fire, and in every direction, and in the middle of it there was a throne, and the throne looked like crystal, and its wheels were like the sun, and there was a sound of cherubim, and from under the throne came streams of fire, and he could not look at it. And on the throne there was one so bright that no angel could enter that house and no flesh could look at him, and around him there stood ten thousand times ten thousand, and none of the ones who stood closest to him ever went far from him, night or day, and he needed none of them. I want to stay in that second house a little longer, because the book does, and because it is the reason this book was copied for two thousand years by people who could not have told you what a gate of the sun was. It is the description. Nobody had written anything like it. The Bible, before this, had given you a burning bush, and a mountain with smoke on it, and a throne with living creatures around it. But not a house. Not a building you could walk into, with a floor, and a ceiling, and a door standing open, and a man standing in the doorway trying to look and failing. The book measures it the way it measured the gates of the sun. The floor is of this. The ceiling is of that. The throne is here, and its wheels are like this, and from beneath it there flows that. It is architecture. It is a surveyor's report of the inside of heaven, written by somebody who was so frightened that he could only get through it by describing, one thing after another, the way you count your breaths. And Enoch lay on the floor with his face down, trembling. And a voice said, come here. And it said, Enoch. And it said, do not be afraid. It is the oldest thing anyone says to anyone in a dream. Do not be afraid. Come here, and hear what I have to say. And then the answer to the petition, which he was to carry back down to the two hundred who were waiting for it by the mountain. And the answer was no. I will tell you that plainly, once, and then set it down. The petition was refused. They were watchmen and they had left their watch, and there would be no peace for them, the voice said, and no forgiveness, and he was to go back down and tell them so, and he did. He woke beside the water, and he went, and he told them, and the book shows them gathered and weeping when he comes back, and that is the last we see of them tonight. But I want you to keep the house. Not the answer. The house. Ice and fire, floor and ceiling, hot and cold at the same time, no life in it and no pleasure, the paths of the stars for a roof, and a man lying on his face on the crystal floor in a dream by a river. It is a description I find hard to forget. And it is in a book that people tell you was lost. The copyist lifts his hand off the page. And turns forward, a long way, to a part of the same book where nothing happens at all, and everything is measured.

The same book, but a different book. I told you that the Book of Enoch is five books bound as one. Here is the third of them, and it is nothing like the others, and after the house of fire it is a glass of cool water. It is about the sun. The copyist's hand goes slower here, because the words are strange and the numbers are many, and a copyist earns his bread in a chapter like this. The book says that an angel called Uriel, whose name means the light of God, took Enoch and showed him the sky. Not the sky as a picture. The sky as a machine. How it works. Where the sun goes when it sets and where it comes from when it rises and why the days are longer in summer than in winter and what the moon is doing when it changes shape. And here is the picture the book gives, and I want you to see it, because it is beautiful and it is very old and it is completely wrong and none of that matters tonight. In the east there are six gates. Great gates in the edge of the world, standing in a row, and the sun comes up through one of them. In the west there are six more, and the sun goes down through one of those. And the sun does not use the same gate every day. It moves. The account begins with the fourth gate, thirty mornings in succession, and then the fifth, and then the sixth. Later it turns back through the row, until the shorter days lead it toward the first gate, and then the journey changes direction again. Some of the counted months have thirty mornings, and some thirty one. The whole pattern is laid out a stage at a time. That is why the sun rises in a different place on the horizon in summer than in winter. It is using a different door. And the days get long when the sun is in the far gates, and short when it is in the near ones, and Uriel shows Enoch all of this, gate by gate, and the book writes it all down, how many parts of the day are light and how many are dark in each gate, patiently, like a man counting sheep through a gap in a wall. And the moon does the same, with its own gates, and the book counts the moon too. It counts the moon more carefully than anything. How much of it is lit on the first night, and how much on the second, in parts, fourteen parts to a full moon, one part more each night going up and one part less each night going down, and which gate it comes through, and how the moon's gates and the sun's gates are the same gates used in a different order. It is pages of this. A copyist knows these pages. They are the ones where you lose your place, and count on your fingers, and find it again, and the man who first wrote them down must have sat under the real moon night after night with a tablet in his lap doing exactly that, counting, and getting it a little wrong, and writing it down anyway with the confidence of a man who has been told by an angel. And there are four days in it that have names. Not the ordinary days. The four that stand at the corners of the year, one at each turning of the seasons, the book calls them leaders, and it says that each one leads its season the way a man leads a flock, and that the stars know them, and that these four are the ones that get forgotten. And when it has all been counted, the book adds it up, and says how long a year is. And the number it gives is three hundred and sixty four days. Three hundred and sixty four. Not sixty five. Sixty four. Fifty two weeks exactly, of seven days, and no days left over, so that every year begins on the same day of the week and every feast falls on the same day of the week forever, within that counted cycle. The book is very pleased with this. It says that there are four days in the year, one at each turning of the seasons, that people forget to count, and it names them as the fault, and it says that the ones who count properly will not go wrong, and the ones who do not will find that their years slide, and their feasts wander, and their whole reckoning comes apart, slowly, like a rope untwisting. I will not tell you tonight what became of that number. I will only say what the page gives us: a year counted in whole weeks, and a confident claim that its reckoning is exact. The sun's seasonal year is longer than three hundred and sixty four days. How the people who prized this calendar dealt with that difference is a question the surviving instructions do not settle for us. We need not give them a single motive, or imagine that all of them simply refused to look at the sky. The number belongs to an argument about ordered time. I will leave it lying there, in the lamplight, and come back for it another night. But look at what the book is doing. The same account that counts gates and light also gives the stars their leaders and Uriel his authority. Observation and revelation meet on the page. It is not just a picture hung above the world; it asks to be a way of knowing the world. I find that compelling even where the model differs from what we know now. A book can offer a pattern with great confidence, and leave later readers with questions about how that pattern was used. That question can stay beside the number until another night. The copyist has stopped writing. It is late. He sets the board down across his knees and lets his hands rest on it, and for a moment the only sound in the church is the rain, which has not changed at all, which does not know about gates. Then he reaches for the second book on the shelf. And this one is different. This one is hardly a book at all. It is a bundle.

His hand is on the bundle. It is not on his shelf, in truth. It is on ours. This is a book that nobody has whole. What exists of it is fragments, pieces of skin and papyrus the size of a palm, the size of a thumb, found in a cave a very long way from here, and I will tell you about that cave another night. Tonight only what is on the pieces. It is the same story. The two hundred, the mountain, the wives, the children. But it is told from the other side. It is told by the giants. The Book of Giants, the pieces are called. And in the pieces the giants have names, and they talk to each other, and they are afraid. Two of them are brothers, Ohya and Hahya, and their father is Shemihazah, the leader who feared being left to bear the sin alone. And there is another called Mahaway, whose father was one of the two hundred too. And they have dreams. That is one of the things the fragments give us. The giants dream, and they do not understand their dreams, and their dreams frighten them. One reconstructed dream gives a garden with trees and gardeners, water and fire and destruction, with the details broken at the edges of the pieces. One dreams of a tablet, a writing tablet going down into water, its writing washed away. They wake and they tell each other the dreams and they cannot read them, and the fear passes from one to the next like a cold. And so they send Mahaway to find the one man who can read a dream. They send him to Enoch. The pieces send Mahaway across the wilderness to Enoch, to ask about the dreams. Much of the answer is missing. We cannot read every word the giants were given. But the surviving pieces speak of judgment and ruin coming upon the world. There is water in the dream, and writing washed away, and the terror of people who know that what they have done cannot simply be undone. The garden and the tablet are separate pictures. I will keep them separate, and leave the gaps where the leather leaves them. Now here is the thing about this bundle of pieces, and it is the reason I took it down tonight, and if you have been with us this season you will know why before I finish the sentence. One of the giants is called Gilgamesh. That name. In this book. On a scrap of skin written in Aramaic in the land of Israel two hundred years before Christ, among the sons of the fallen watchmen, there is a giant, and his name is the name of the king of Uruk who went to the cedar forest and killed the guardian and fought the bull of heaven and lost his friend and walked to the end of the world to ask an old man about death. If you were here for those nights, you know him. He has come a long way. A thousand years and a thousand miles, out of the clay of Mesopotamia and into a Jewish book about angels, and nobody knows exactly how, and I am not going to guess. I am only going to tell you that it is there, and that a man with a reed wrote it down, and that the scrap survived. Stories travel. That is all it means, and it is enough. And this one kept travelling. That is the last thing I will tell you about the bundle, because it is the kind of thing that only makes sense at night. Four hundred years after the pieces in the cave were written, a man in Mesopotamia, back where Gilgamesh came from, in the very country of the clay tablets, started a religion. His name was Mani. And among the books he wrote for it, he wrote his own Book of Giants, out of the same story, the two hundred and the mountain and the children who dreamed. And his religion spread east, along the roads that carried silk, over the mountains and across the deserts into the middle of Asia, and there it lasted for centuries after it had died everywhere else, and the giants went with it. Scraps of his Book of Giants have been found in languages you have never heard the names of, in the sand of oases a very long way from anywhere, and some of the names had been translated into the new tongues and some had been kept, and one of the kept ones is Mahaway, the one who was sent to Enoch. The giant afraid of his dream did not stay in the cave. He walked east, out of one alphabet and into another, and another, and was still being read by somebody, under some lamp, a thousand years after the last man on the hill in Judea had put down his pen. They go out of one country and into the next, and they change their clothes and keep their names, and they turn up in the strangest places, in a cave, on a hill, in the mouth of a giant who is afraid of a dream. There is one more piece I want to give you from this bundle, and it is very small, and then we will put it back. One surviving scene gives the giants dreams they cannot interpret. Another gives Mahaway's journey toward Enoch, with the motion compared to an eagle and a whirlwind. The pieces do not let us join every word between those moments. It is tempting to supply the missing sentence, to let one giant speak exactly the words we expect him to say. But the broken edge is part of what we have. We can keep the fear and the errand without pretending to read what the skin no longer carries. A giant has a dream, and someone goes to ask what it means. The copyist sets the bundle back on the shelf, gently, because it is only pieces. And takes down the third book, which is large, and heavy, and whole, and has been whole here for a very long time.

This one is thick. The boards are worn to a shine at the corners where hands have taken hold of it over and over. The copyist opens it near the middle, and the columns of Ge'ez stand up on the page, and there is a great deal of red on this one, because it is a book with the name of God on nearly every page. Mashafa Kufale, it is called here. The Book of Division. Everywhere else, where people have heard of it at all, they call it Jubilees. And what it is, is Genesis, told again. Not corrected. Not argued with. Told again, slowly, by a different voice, with everything that Genesis left out put back in, and all the numbers made to add up. The voice is an angel. That is the frame of the whole book. Moses is on the mountain, on Sinai, for forty days, and an angel who stands in the presence of God is beside him, and the angel is reading aloud to him from tablets. Tablets of heaven, the book calls them. Everything that has happened and everything that will happen is written on them already, and the angel reads, and Moses writes, and what Moses writes is this book. An angel with a tablet, reading. If you have been with this lamp a long time, you have met that image before, in a very old country, and I will not say more than that. And what the angel reads is the whole story from the making of the world to the coming out of Egypt, and he measures it. That is the thing this book cares about most. Measuring. Every event in it is placed, exactly, in a year, and the years are counted in sevens, and seven sevens make a jubilee, forty nine years, and the whole of history is laid out in jubilees like a field in furrows, and nothing in it is ever out of place. When was Adam made? The book knows. When did Cain kill his brother? The book knows, to the year, and the week of years, and the jubilee. It is the most orderly book on the shelf. It is a book by someone who could not bear for a thing to have happened at no particular time. And it keeps the calendar. The same one. Three hundred and sixty four days, fifty two weeks, in the book's reckoning. The angel is very clear about that, and says that the ones who use the moon to count their year will get it wrong, and their feasts will wander, and I said I would leave that lying in the lamplight, and I will. And it puts things in. That is the pleasure of it, if you know Genesis well, and the people who wrote it knew Genesis very well. All the places where Genesis goes quiet, this book fills. Genesis tells you Abraham was called out of his country and does not tell you what he was like as a boy. This book does. It says that when he was fourteen, in the city where he was born, the crows came down on the fields at sowing time and ate the seed before it could be covered, every year, whole flocks of them, so that nothing came up, and the boy went out ahead of the sowers and ran at the birds, and shouted, and drove them off, all day, from every field, so that not one crow landed, and the seed went into the ground, and the harvest came up, and after that the farmers sent for him every year at sowing time. That is in this book. A boy running at crows. It also says he was the one who thought of fitting a vessel above the plough so the seed could pass down and be covered, and I do not know whether that is true, and it does not matter. A boy in a field, with the crows going up in front of him like smoke. Nobody asked the angel for that. The angel put it in anyway. There are angels all through it, more than in Genesis, doing things Genesis never mentions. And there is one who is not on the right side, whose name is Mastema, which means something like hostility, and who is the chief of the spirits that trouble the world, and who asks, at one point, to be allowed to keep a tenth of them to do his work with, and is allowed. I tell you that only so you know the book has a shadow in it. It does. Every book here does. But it is a shadow at the edge of a very well lit room, and the angel goes on reading, and the years go on being counted. Here is what I want you to keep from this book. It was written in Hebrew, a very long time ago, about a hundred and fifty years before Christ, give or take. And it was copied and copied, and valued by readers whose manuscripts were preserved in caves, where many copies of it have been identified. And the Hebrew ceased to be available to later readers as a complete book. Fragments in the caves would eventually give some of it back. And the whole book, all of it, every year and every jubilee, survives complete in exactly one language, and it is the language on this page, and this is the second book tonight of which that is true. The copyist runs his thumb down a column of red. Then he closes the boards, and lifts the book back to its place with both hands, because it is heavy. And he reaches for the next one, and there is no next one. Not on this shelf. The next two books were never here. They were somewhere else entirely, in a jar, in the sand, in another country. And we have to leave the hill for them, briefly, and then we will come back.

Leave the church for a moment. Leave the rain. Go north and west, a long way, across the highlands and down and down into a flat hot country by a wide slow river, where rain is rare, and where the sand keeps things. There is a book that was found there. I will tell you how, another night. Tonight only what it is. It is a gospel, and it is not like the others. It has no birth in it. No stable, no star, no shepherds. It has no miracles. Nobody is healed, nobody walks on water, no bread is multiplied. It has no cross. No trial, no garden, no crown of thorns, no nails. It has no tomb, and nobody comes to it on the third day and finds it empty. None of that. Not a word of it. What it has is sayings. A hundred and fourteen of them in the usual modern numbering. Many begin with Jesus said, but others open with a question, or let a disciple speak. There are exchanges with Thomas and with Mary and with Salome. Some sayings resemble ones in the other gospels: the sower, the mustard seed, the blind leading the blind. Others are unfamiliar, and strange, and short, and some of them are beautiful and some very hard to understand. A saying may give an image and leave it there. A question may lead to an answer that opens another question. The book gives us little continuous action to carry us from one scene to the next. Its movement is between sayings and brief exchanges, and that is a different kind of listening. It is called the Gospel of Thomas, because it says at the top that a man called Thomas wrote the sayings down. Whether he did I cannot tell you. Nobody can. Let me give you one, as the book gives it, bare. He said, the kingdom is spread out over the earth, and people do not see it. That answer follows a question from his disciples about when the kingdom will come. Then the collection moves on. And another. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me. That one has been in my head for years, and I could not tell you what it means either, and I have come to think that is what it is for. One more, and then I will stop, because three is enough and the book has a hundred and eleven others. Near the beginning, he imagines leaders telling people that the kingdom is in the sky, and says, if it were in the sky the birds would get there first. And if it were in the sea, the fish. It is inside you, he says, and it is outside you. And then the next saying, which is about something else entirely. That is the whole texture of the book. A question, a turn, a door left open, and on to the next. Now here is what I want you to notice about this book, because it is the interesting thing, and it is not the thing people usually say. People usually say, here is the suppressed gospel, the one they did not want you to read, the secret truth. And I do not think that is right, and I do not think it is interesting. What is interesting is that it is a different kind of book. The other gospels are stories. They have a beginning and an end, and a man walks through them from one to the other, and things happen. This is not a story. It is a collection. It is what you would have if somebody had followed him around for a year with a wax tablet writing down only the things he said, and none of the things he did, and then died before they could put it in order. It is the sayings without the man. Or rather, it is the man made entirely of sayings. And whether that is a lesser thing or a greater thing I am not going to decide for you at this hour. Our earliest surviving scraps are in Greek. And the Greek was lost, or nearly. A few scraps of it turned up, decades before the whole book was found, in a rubbish heap in Egypt, a great mound of old papyrus that a town had been throwing its paper on for centuries, and the scraps had Jesus said on them, and sayings nobody knew, and the people who found them did not know what book they were from. They published the fragments and tried to understand them. They were from this one. The fuller text later made the identification clear, in a language called Coptic, in a jar. I said I would tell you about the jar another night. I will only say now that the familiar discovery account describes a sealed earthenware jar, though the details were recorded later and do not all agree. The surviving collection is conventionally counted as thirteen codices, twelve bound books and leaves from another, with many separate works inside them. Thomas was one of those works. We do not know whose hands put the collection away, or what that person feared or intended. And among those writings is a different view of the garden, which I want you to see before we go back up the hill.

From that same collection. Different writings, and I need to keep them distinct even while I show you their related pictures. One tells of a maker who does not understand what is above him. Another gives the snake a teaching voice in the garden. We can hold those images beside each other without turning two books into a single page. You know the garden. Everybody knows the garden. The tree in the middle, and the fruit, and the two of them, and the serpent, and the voice that says, did God really say you must not eat of it. You know how it goes. The serpent lies, and they eat, and they are sent out, and the gate is shut behind them, and that is the beginning of everything hard. Now turn it over. Look at it from the other side. That is what these related retellings invite us to do. In this book, the one who made the garden is not the highest there is. He thinks he is. He says so. He says, I am God, and there is no other, and the book says he said it because he did not know. He did not know that there was anything above him. He had been made, himself, by mistake, by a being far greater than he was who had tried to make something alone and had made him instead, and had been ashamed, and had hidden him away in a cloud, and he had grown up in that cloud thinking he was the only one there was, and he made a world, and he made two people, and he put them in a garden and told them not to eat. In another work from the collection, the snake becomes an instructor. That work is called the Hypostasis of the Archons, or the Reality of the Rulers. It says that a spiritual power came into the snake and taught the woman about the tree. The command had come from rulers who did not understand the greater will above them. The instructor promises opened eyes and knowledge of good and evil. The voice of help arrives through the creature the familiar story has taught us to distrust. That is the reversal I want you to notice. It belongs to this work, rather than to every book from the jar. The maker hidden in a cloud belongs to the Secret Book of John. That work tells of John grieving after the Savior's departure, withdrawing to a desert place, and receiving a revelation. We have it in three Nag Hammadi witnesses, as well as another Coptic witness from a different find. The copies differ. Their survival shows that more than one copy was made and kept; it does not tell us that a single owner ordered duplicates as insurance against loss. I find the repeated copying striking enough on its own. Somebody read this work, and somebody made another copy, and the voices on those pages have reached us. And the one above the maker, the one who made him by mistake, has a name too, and it is a woman's name, and it is Sophia, which is only the Greek word for wisdom. Wisdom made a mistake. That is the beginning of this book's world. Not a fall, not a sin, not a serpent. Wisdom, alone, wanting to make something without asking, and making it, and being ashamed of what she had made, and hiding it. And everything after that, the maker and his cloud and his garden and his two prisoners, is what came of one moment of wisdom acting on her own. If you have ever made something you were ashamed of and could not unmake, you know more about this book than most of the people who have written about it. That is all I am going to give you. Two related pictures: the maker who does not understand what is above him, and, in the other work, help arriving through the mouth of a snake. I am not going to tell you what to make of that, and I am not going to tell you it is true, and I am not going to tell you it is false. It is not my job tonight to decide what God is. It is my job to show you a page, and I have shown you one, and these are the related pictures the writings give us. There were readers, in that flat hot country and far beyond it, who read this and believed it, and they had a name for the maker, and the name was Yaldabaoth, and you will hear it once more some other night and then never again from me. Say it once, slowly, and let it go. Yaldabaoth. The one who did not know. These works survived inside the Egyptian collection. The familiar jar story does not give us every step of their burial. And we can go back up the hill now, into the rain, because the copyist has been waiting, and he has one more book to show you, and then a thing to tell you that is not in any of the books at all.

Up the hill. In through the door. The lamp still burning, the rain the same, the copyist in his place with the board across his knees. He has been at the hard word, the one three lines down, and he has got it right, and he is pleased in the small tired way of a man who has got a thing right at the end of a long day. He has one book left on the shelf, and it is not one of the left out ones. It is the other kind. It is the Bible. Not all of it. One small part. A letter. Near the very end of the New Testament, one page long, so short that you could read it aloud between the rain starting and the rain stopping if the rain ever stopped. It is called the Letter of Jude. And in the middle of it, there is a sentence. I am going to read it to you plainly, because it does not need anything from me. Jude is writing about people who have gone wrong, and he wants to say that this was foreseen, that somebody saw it coming a long time ago, and so he reaches back for the oldest voice he can find. And he writes this. Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints. The seventh from Adam. That is the man from the list, the one who did not die. And the words Jude puts in his mouth, behold, the Lord comes with ten thousand of his holy ones, are not from Genesis. Genesis does not have Enoch say anything. They are from the first page of the book on the copyist's knees. The Book of Enoch. Words from Enoch's book, quoted as prophecy under Enoch's name, in a letter that is inside the Bible, in the familiar twenty seven book New Testament. Let that arrive at its own speed. If you have been listening, you are already there, and you got there before I did. A book inside quotes a book outside. So the book outside was never entirely outside. It was there, in the room, when the letter was written. The man who wrote the letter had read it and believed it and called it prophecy, and the quotation assumes a voice his readers are invited to recognise. Whatever else happened to the Book of Enoch afterwards, that happened first, and it is still there, one page from the end, in the form of the New Testament many readers know. And people knew. There was a man in North Africa, about a hundred years later, a lawyer turned Christian, fierce, clever, hard to like, called Tertullian, who wrote a great many books, and in one of them, a book about what women should wear, of all things, he stopped to argue for Enoch. He said it was scripture. He said it should be read. He said that people who did not accept it were wrong, and he gave a reason for how it could have survived the flood, and he pointed at the letter of Jude and said, look, it is quoted, what more do you want. That was around the year two hundred. Enoch had friends. And the reason he gave is worth a moment, because it is the kind of reason a determined defender might think of. People had said, how can this book be real, when everything before the flood was drowned. Enoch wrote it, they said, and then the water came and took every book in the world, so whatever this is, it cannot be his. And Tertullian said, well, Noah was Enoch's great grandson, and he was on the boat, and he could have carried it, or it could have been restored by divine inspiration afterwards, and anyway if God wanted a book to survive a flood he could see to it. It is not a very good argument. He was not a very good arguer, only a very determined one. But there he is, a hard clever man in a hot city, a hundred years after Jude, pressing the case for a book that people were already beginning to leave off the lists, and pressing it despite the objections he reports. And then, slowly, over a long time, in the West, it stopped. I want to tell you how, because the way it is usually told is wrong, and the wrong way is exciting and the right way is not, and you deserve the right way at this hour. There was no single universal decision that explains every part of Enoch's reception. What we find is a history of use and argument, and also real meetings and recorded decisions. Churches in different cities read and valued different works. Writers made lists and defended them. They asked whose teaching a book carried, how old it was, and whether it agreed with what they believed true. Time mattered, but time did not work alone. Some lists were mostly alike, with differences at their edges, and a work could have authority in one tradition while remaining outside another. Enoch's history belongs to that uneven world. One Easter, in the year three hundred and sixty seven, a bishop in Egypt, in Alexandria, wrote his yearly letter to the churches, the way he did every spring, and in that year's letter he put a list. Twenty seven books, he said, and these are the New Testament, and let nobody add to them or take away. It is the first time anybody had written that exact list down. It is the list you have. And the same letter, in the same breath, said that there were a few other books that were not on the list but were good, and could still be read aloud to newcomers, to teach them, and it named some, and one of them was a book called the Shepherd, and I will show you that one before the night is over. So even the letter that closed the door left it open a crack. And men met in North Africa in the three nineties, at Hippo and Carthage, and recorded rules about scripture. Their New Testament agrees with those twenty seven books. Their Old Testament is not identical to the bishop's list. These are regional decisions, within a longer history, rather than one final meeting for every church. Enoch was outside the lists we are comparing. In many places the work of making new copies eventually fell away. Older copies wore or vanished, while quotations and translated fragments carried some material further. A book can grow quiet by more than one road, and we should not pretend to know the fate of every leaf. Why was it not on those lists? An old writer does give us a reason, though not a transcript of every church's decision. Augustine accepts that Enoch left divine writings because Jude says so. But he distrusts the writings circulating under Enoch's name: their antiquity, he says, makes the chain of transmission difficult to establish, and he rejects their tales about the giants. That is an argument about authorship and trust, as well as content. It does not explain every earlier or later reader. It lets us hear one influential objection in the writer's own terms. In one part of the world. The copyist has not looked up. He is checking his page against the old one, line by line, the way I picture him doing at the end of a leaf. I cannot tell you which distant letters he has heard of, or what every teacher before him knew. The Ethiopian church was connected to Alexandria, and its history cannot be reduced to an isolated hill that nobody remembered to address. What I can show you is the inheritance on his knees: Enoch kept among his church's scriptures, and a new copy being made from an old one. The rain stays with that smaller, firmer picture.

The rain is quieter. Not stopping. Just older, the way rain gets late at night, when it has said everything it had to say and is only keeping you company. I promised you one more book, and it is the strangest of all of them, in its way, because it is not on this shelf at all, and it is not in a jar, and in one great manuscript it was included at the back. There is a Bible in a library in London, in a glass case, and it is one of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Christian Bible. It was not made in London. It was found, most of it, in a monastery, a very old one, of stone, at the foot of the mountain in the desert where Moses is said to have gone up for forty days and come down with the law. The same mountain the angel with the tablet was standing on, in the heavy book. The manuscript survived there in a monastery, and I mention that only because it is another place tonight where people kept a manuscript, and it will not be the last. It was written in Greek, by hand, about the same time as that Easter letter, sixteen hundred years ago, on prepared animal skin, and it is enormous, and its surviving pages contain the whole New Testament, though much of the Old Testament is missing. And when you get to the end of it, past the last page of the New Testament, past the Revelation, past where you would stop, it does not stop. There are two more books. Copied after the New Testament as part of the same manuscript. And one of them is that Shepherd, the book the bishop said could still be read to newcomers. A vision. A man in Rome, a long time before, who was a slave once and then was not, and who is shown, by an old woman who is the church, and then by a shepherd who is an angel, a great many things, and the chief of them is a tower. A tower being built, by angels, out of stones. The stones are people. Some of them fit and are set in the wall, white and square, and some do not fit and are set aside, near the tower, to be looked at again, and some are thrown away far off, and the man watches the building of it for a long time and asks what everything means, and is told. That is the Shepherd. It was very much loved. It was read publicly in churches, and some writers called it scripture, while others kept it outside their canon, and there it sits at the back of one of the oldest Bibles in the world, after the end, as if whoever was making that great book got to the last page of Revelation, and stopped, and thought about it, and could not quite bear to leave it out. I tell you that because it is the truth about all of these books. The line was never a wall. It was always more like the edge of the lamplight. Bright in the middle, and then less bright, and then dim, and then dark, and no one place where you could say, here it ends. And in this room the lamplight goes all the way to the shelf. The copyist has finished his page. He lifts the board off his knees and lays it flat on the floor beside him, with the wet leaf on it, face up, so it can dry. He will not touch it again tonight. In the morning, when the light comes in at the door, he will hold it up and look at it, and if it is good he will add it to the others, and one day, not soon, there will be a whole book, and it will be sewn and bound and put on the shelf beside the one he copied it from, and somebody will read from it in this room on a Sunday, and nobody will remember which is the new one. A word about the language, since the whole night has rested on it. Ge'ez is not spoken any more. Not in the market, not in the house, not by the copyist's children, who speak other languages now, close kin to it, the way Italian is kin to Latin. It is the language of the books and of the church and of nothing else, and it has been that for a very long time, and everybody who reads it learned it on a hillside as a boy, saying the letters out loud. Which means that every book on this shelf is in a language nobody's mother spoke to them in. It is kept alive entirely by being read aloud on Sundays and copied by lamplight on the nights between. That is a fragile way for a language to live. And it has lived that way for a thousand years, and the Book of Enoch has lived inside it, whole, the entire time, while the Aramaic it was first written in went silent and the Greek it was carried in went to scraps. The book outlived two of its own languages and is alive in the third, on this hill, in this rain, in a tongue that is used for nothing else. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church traditionally speaks of eighty one biblical books. The count joins and divides material differently from many Western lists, and narrower and broader reckonings can both reach eighty one. The broader reckoning has church order writings beside the familiar twenty seven books of the New Testament. The narrower one counts the New Testament as twenty seven. Enoch and Jubilees belong in this inherited scriptural world. I do not need to make the copyist ignorant of other lists to let him value his own. He can know what his church has received, and take the next book down with care. That is the thing I wanted to tell you at the beginning, so you could go to sleep. In the tradition we are following, Enoch and Jubilees were kept through use and copying. That is different from finding a forgotten manuscript in the ground. It does not mean that no Ethiopian book was ever hidden or lost, or that every copyist had the same reason for his work. It means the whole texts reached us in Ethiopic through a living inheritance. Tonight I have given that inheritance one room, a lamp, a shelf, and a man slowing down for a difficult word. Where you are, they are called the lost books. Here they are called Tuesday.

The rain, on the thatch. It is very late now, and the church is very quiet, and the copyist has done what he came to do. He sits for a while with his hands in his lap, not because he is thinking anything, but because it is a good thing to do at the end of a page, to sit, and he does it every night, and the lamp does not mind. The books are on the shelf. Five of them, six, in their boards, in a row, the ones we took down and the ones we did not. Enoch, with the red in it. The heavy one, with the years all counted. The bundle of pieces that is not really here. And the ones from the jar, that were never here at all, and are somewhere else tonight, in glass, in a city, under a different kind of light. They are all in their places. They do not need to be looked at to keep what they hold. That is the whole point of them. The wet leaf lies on its board on the floor, face up, drying. Two columns. Black, and a little red. By morning it will be dry, and it will say what the old leaf said, near enough, and one day someone will copy it in turn, and not know which one was which. The copyist stands. His knees are stiff. He crosses the small round room to the door and stands in it and looks out, the way he does every night, at nothing, at the rain, at the dark shape of the juniper, at the place where in daylight you can see fifty miles and at night you can see the inside of a cloud. The air is cold and wet and smells of woodsmoke and thatch and, faintly, of the incense from Sunday, which never quite leaves a room like this one. Somewhere down the hill, a long way down, one dog, once, and then the rain again, closing over the sound the way water closes over a stone. On Sunday the book will come out. Not his leaf, that is years away, but the old one, the one he is copying from, with the dark boards. It will be carried in, wrapped in cloth, and unwrapped, and set on a stand, and read from, aloud, in Ge'ez, which nobody here speaks in the street any more and everybody here knows the sound of, the way you know the sound of rain before you have decided to listen to it. The people will stand. They stand for the whole of it, here, leaning on long staffs with a crosspiece at the top that were made for exactly that, for standing a long time and listening. And the reader will come to a line, and it will be a line from the Book of Enoch, and nobody will look up, or look at anyone else, or think anything about it at all, because it is one of the books, and it always has been, and the rain will very likely be falling then too. Then he comes back in, and does not put out the lamp. He never does. It is left to burn on its own, some time before morning, when the oil is gone, and nobody sees it happen, and the room goes dark, and the books go on standing on their shelf in the dark exactly as they were. Let the room be as it is. Let the rain go on. It has been going on all night under everything I have told you, and you may not have noticed it for a long while now, and that is exactly right. It was never asking for your attention. It was only there, the way it was there for the copyist, and for his teacher, and for every one of them, back and back, falling on the roof of a small round church at the top of a hill at the edge of the map, on a book handed on through the work of copying. In the morning somebody will open the door, and the light will come in across the floor, and the leaf will be dry, and the books will be where they were left. But that is the morning, and the morning can wait. Sleep well. Goodnight.

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight, how they came back. Last time we sat in a round church in the rain and took the books down off a shelf one at a time, the Book of Enoch and the angel with the tablet and the giants who dreamed and the gospel with no story in it, and I told you how Enoch and Jubilees were kept in an Ethiopic scriptural inheritance. Tonight I want to tell you about the other countries. About a Scotsman who walked out of the mountains with three books in his luggage and whose travels met both interest and ridicule. About a shepherd, and a cliff, and a jar, and a smell of old leather in the dark. About a later Egyptian account of a farmer digging for something to put on his fields, and what his spade hit. About a room full of fragments the size of postage stamps, and a scholar remembered for his work fitting pieces together. And about a cave where, when the scraps were finally laid out and read, ancient pieces of the book on the copyist's knees could be compared with his inheritance. Stay with me down to the fifth chapter for that. It is the thing the whole night is for. And then, when everything has been dug up and unrolled and read, I am going to tell you why the word we have been using for two nights is the wrong word, and I think you will already know by then. There is a church at the top of a hill, and inside it there is a lamp. If you were here last time, you know it. If you were not, you are welcome, and you have missed nothing you cannot be told in a breath. The church is round and its roof is thatch and it is raining on it, the long soft rain of the highlands, the same rain, and by the lamp there is a man in white with a board across his knees and a sheet of parchment on the board, and on the parchment, in two columns, in black ink and a little red, there is a book that he is copying. The book is the Book of Enoch. And the whole of last night was this: that the world says that book was lost, and this man has never heard that, because on this hill it never was. His teacher copied it, and his teacher's teacher, and the rain fell on all of them, and nobody was ever told to stop. That is where we left him. He has a new leaf on the board tonight. The old one dried, and it was good, and it is with the others now. He rules the new one with a blunt point, pressing the ghost lines into the skin, two columns, every line waiting, and he dips the reed. There is a place for you here, the same place, in the warm part of the room. The mat, the folded cloth, the whole night with nothing in it that you must carry. You do not have to do anything now. But tonight, before he begins, I want to ask him a question, and it is the question of the whole night. Last time I told you the book was never lost here. Its full text was preserved in the Ethiopic tradition. But here is a small hill in a large world. What about the older witnesses behind his book? Much of Enoch was written in Aramaic, an ancient language widely used in the Near East. The Ethiopic version was translated through Greek. Where were those earlier words, while generations here were making copies? Not every part has the same surviving history. Not every missing leaf has come back. But enough has returned to let us put witnesses from different centuries beside each other, and ask what the long journey changed, and what it carried. They were somewhere. That is the thing. A book is not a thought. It is skin, or reed, or paper, and it is somewhere, or it is nowhere. And tonight I am going to tell you where. Let the rain be on the roof. Let the lamp be warm. Close your eyes if they want to close. If you drift, the copyist will go on without you, the way he did last night, and you will not have missed him. He will be here, on this hill, in this rain, for as long as any of this takes. And one thing, whispered like a promise. Nothing tonight will startle you. There are no angels falling in it. There is no house of fire. There is a cliff, and there is a hole in a cliff, and there is a great deal of dust, and men bending over tables. It is the quietest story this room has ever told, and I mean that as the highest thing I can say about it. You can trust this lamp. That is what it was lit for. The copyist lays the reed against the skin. Before he begins, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next tale will be waiting for you when you need it. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and let him begin. We begin.

The same lamp. The same honey coloured flame in the same clay dish. It has been filled again, because it burned out last night some time before morning, the way it always does, and nobody saw it happen, and in the morning the leaf was dry. He is three lines into the new page. His hand is steady tonight. The rain has been lighter today and heavier tonight, and he thinks, without thinking about it, that it will be heavier still by the time the lamp goes out, and he is right, and it does not matter. The shelf is where it was. The books are on it. I am not going to take them down tonight. We know what is on them. What I want you to look at instead, for a moment, is the one on his knees, and I want you to look at it the way you would look at a coin, turning it over. On the front is the book. Enoch, on the mountain, and the house of fire, and the gates of the sun. That was last night. On the back is a question. How did it get here? Because it was not first composed here, in this language. The book on his knees gathers writings with different histories. Its oldest parts reach back to the centuries before Christ, and the caves will give us Aramaic witnesses to several of them. Greek carried Enoch into other communities, and the Ethiopic translation came through Greek. A translation of a translation: that is a useful way to picture much of the journey. It does not mean that every sentence took an identical road, or that one man made each stage in one sitting. And it does not tell us what languages this particular copyist or his teacher knew. In the room I am imagining, he is following the Ge'ez before him, checking its letters against the older volume on his knees. The earlier languages are behind the page, even though he does not need to have their surviving pieces beside him to value the book. When was the Ge'ez made? We cannot give it a certain year. It is usually placed in the early Christian centuries of the Aksumite kingdom, perhaps between the fourth and sixth centuries. That places it among the work of giving Christian books a life in this language. We cannot watch the translators choosing each volume, and we should not pretend that no choice was made. What we can see is the result: Enoch became part of an Ethiopian scriptural inheritance, and its full text survived through copying. That is the fact beneath our little room. The Greek and Aramaic witnesses took other routes. Some disappeared from view. Some remained inside quotations. Some became fragments in the ground. They did not all wait until our own lifetime to be noticed again. But the discoveries of the last two centuries have let readers bring much more of the scattered family together. Think of it as three brothers. One stayed home. Two went abroad and were not heard from. And tonight is about the two. So the question on the back of the coin is this. Those two older books, the Greek and the Aramaic, the ones behind the one he is copying. Where did they go? And the answer, for a very long time, was that nobody knew. In the West, in the countries that had left the book off their list, people knew that it had existed. They had Jude, quoting it. They had the old writers, arguing about it. They had, here and there, a few lines of the Greek, copied out by somebody as a curiosity, the way you might copy out a line of a song you half remember. And that was all. A book they had heard of and could not read. The most famous book that nobody had. For fourteen hundred years. I am going to walk you through those years tonight, and then out the other side of them, into later centuries in which, one after another, in a trunk, and a cliff, and a jar, the books came back. But the walk begins here, at this lamp, with the man who never noticed they were gone. He turns the leaf.

Let me tell you what it is like to have heard of a book and never seen it. You know the feeling, a little. There is a book you have heard about all your life, and you have never read it, and you have a picture of it in your head anyway, put together out of what people say about it, and one day you actually read it and it is nothing like the picture. Now make that fourteen hundred years long, and make it a whole civilisation, and make the book one that a letter in the Bible calls prophecy. That was Enoch, in the West. People knew writings under Enoch's name had existed. Jude had quoted Enoch's prophecy, and readers who encountered that letter could wonder about the words behind it. But Jude was not in every ancient Christian collection, and we cannot give every priest an annual appointment with this verse. It is enough to imagine one reader noticing it. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, had prophesied. The reader had the quotation. The wider book might be beyond his reach. The old writers had had it. The ones from the first few centuries, when the lists were still open. They quoted it, argued about it, defended it, doubted it. And their books survived, and were copied, and so the argument survived even after the book it was about had gone quiet. Imagine reading a long, careful review of a book that no longer exists. That is what a scholar in the year one thousand had. One influential Western reader was Augustine, in North Africa. In his book about the city of God he accepted, on Jude's authority, that Enoch had written divine things, but he distrusted writings circulating under Enoch's name. Their great age and uncertain transmission troubled him. He also rejected tales about angels and women as fables. That is more than a shrug, and it does not show us a complete Enoch lying open on his desk. It shows a judgment about authority, authorship, and the stories attached to a name. Later readers could inherit that judgment along with Jude's quotation. We cannot measure how much one passage did to the survival of a whole work. But we can hear the question it leaves: if you cannot establish whose words these are, what authority will you give them? That question was answered differently in different churches. The book on the hill belongs to a history in which the answer was different. I tell you that because the fading of a book from one tradition does not have one simple cause. A judgment about its authority can matter. So can language, copying, and which books readers continue to seek. We cannot turn that long history into one reasonable decision followed by a thousand years in which nobody thought again. Imagine, too, how different that argument sounds beside this hill, where I have put a copyist making another Enoch. He cannot stand for every earlier reader, or tell us what a fourth century congregation knew about Augustine. He can show us the contrast that survives: one author distrusting the writings, another tradition keeping the book among its scriptures. Tertullian defending it. Augustine doubting writings under its name. Different answers, carried in books of their own. And there were scraps. This is the strange part. Here and there, a monk or a chronicler had copied a few pages of the Greek into some other book, as a quotation, or a curiosity, or because it bore on something he was writing about. In the East, in the Greek speaking part of the old empire, a chronicler who was making a history of the world from the creation onward reached the part about the Watchers and the giants and copied in several pages of Enoch, in Greek, to tell it, the way a man building a wall will use whatever stones are lying about. And so those pages survived, inside his history, and people who read his history read them, and knew they were from Enoch, and could not read the rest. A few pages. Out of a book that was five books long. It was like having a handful of tiles from a floor. And I will tell you now, out of its place, because it belongs with the Greek and nowhere else tonight, that a little more of the Greek did come back, once, long after the years I am describing, and that it came back out of a grave. In Egypt, in the eighteen eighties, in a cemetery by a town on the river, somebody opened an old grave and found a small book in it, bound, in Greek, that had been buried with the dead person, and in it, along with a gospel modern readers had known chiefly by name and a vision of the end of the world, were the first thirty two chapters of Enoch. The mountain, the two hundred, the house of fire. In Greek. The middle brother, come back from abroad, with the grave dirt still on him. People say it was a monk's grave. Nobody knows that. The book was copied in late antiquity, and at some later time it was placed in a grave. We cannot give the burial a certain year, or the dead person a certain name. The ground kept the book, and that is the second time tonight I have said that about the ground and it will not be the last. Those are two important witnesses to the Greek. A chronicler's borrowed pages and a book from a grave. It is more than nothing. It is very much less than a shelf. And the strangest thing is that a full Ethiopic Enoch had continued to be copied while many readers elsewhere knew it chiefly through references and extracts. Not hidden from its own readers. Kept as scripture. The language was a barrier for many Europeans, but not for every one of them. Reports of an Ethiopian Enoch circulated before Bruce's journey. There had even been a false lead, a book acquired for a European library that proved not to be this Enoch. A rumour could therefore carry both a real possibility and a reason for caution. The book was somewhere else. Learning how to read it was another part of finding it. Fourteen hundred years. Not of a book being lost. Of a book being somewhere else. The copyist has stopped at the hard word again. There is one on every page. He looks at it in the old book, and then at the space for it on the new one, and then he writes it, slowly, and it is right.

There was a man called James Bruce, and he was very tall, and very red haired, and very sure of himself, and he went to Ethiopia. This was in the seventeen sixties and seventies. He had been a British consul in Algiers, and he prepared for travel with languages, instruments, and official help. This was more than a restless gentleman wandering until something happened. His route took him across the Red Sea to Massawa and into the highlands. He spent years in the region and learned about its languages and books. In his account, the search for the Nile's headwaters and the collecting of manuscripts belong to the same long undertaking. For tonight, the important thing is that he brought Ethiopic books back with him, and knew enough about them to identify Enoch among them. We cannot turn that into a visit to every church, or say that no European before him had known such a book existed. We can follow the volumes he reported, from the highlands toward the libraries where later readers would study them. And in his luggage, when he came home, there were three copies of the Book of Enoch. Three. In Ge'ez. On parchment, in two columns, with the red where the name of God is. Books like the one on the copyist's knees. He had had them made, or had been given them, or had bought them, the accounts differ, and I will not pick one. What is not in doubt is that he had them, and that he brought them out, over the mountains and down the river and across the sea, and that when he arrived in Europe in the year seventeen seventy three, three complete copies of the most famous book nobody had, arrived with him. One he gave to the king of France, for the great library in Paris. One he gave to the university at Oxford, to the library there. One he kept, at his own house in Scotland, and it found its way to a library too, in the end, after he was gone. And that was that. After fourteen hundred years, the book was in Europe, whole, three times over, on library shelves, where anyone could go and look at it. And readers did. Not all at once, and not all in the same way. One scholar travelled to Paris to transcribe the book. Extracts appeared before a complete English translation did. The copies did not become ordinary reading overnight, but neither did they sit in total silence until one man opened them. A manuscript can have a slow public arrival. First someone hears that it exists. Then someone asks to see it. Then a transcript, an extract, a translation. Each is a different kind of access. That is part of what I like about this story. The book's return to these readers was made of work between the famous dates. And Bruce had critics. His five volumes of travels appeared in seventeen ninety. He claimed to have reached the source of the Blue Nile, and he reported things about the highlands that startled readers. His own introduction complains of anonymous critics who said he had not made the journey at all. But he also speaks of learned readers who had wanted his account. We should hear both. Ridicule was part of his reception, not the whole of it, and it cannot by itself explain the publication history of Enoch. A person could doubt a traveller's story and still examine the manuscript he had brought. The book was a thing on a shelf, with leaves that could be turned, and a language that could be studied. The work did not have to wait for everyone to agree about the man. And the books remained available for that work. I want you to see that. Copies of the Book of Enoch had reached Europe, catalogued and shelved and available, and the work of reading them had begun. There were extracts before there was a complete English translation. The book did not move from complete silence into complete understanding in one morning. It moved by stages, from one reader to another. He died in seventeen ninety four. He fell down the stairs in his own house, a big heavy man by then, and that was the end of him, and the books were still on the shelves. And then, in the year eighteen twenty one, a man at Oxford whose name was Richard Laurence, who was a professor of Hebrew and could read Ge'ez, which almost nobody could, took one of the three books down, the one in the Oxford library, and sat with it, and read it, and put it into English. The first complete English translation appeared in eighteen twenty one. A much wider set of English readers could now approach the whole work. I want to be careful about that sentence, because it is easy to say wrongly. It was not the first time anyone in Europe had read Enoch. There were Greek extracts, Ethiopic readers, transcripts, and translated passages. It was a complete English translation, a new door into the whole book. For someone who had known the work only through Jude or an old quotation, that could be a remarkable change. A name in another author's sentence could become pages, and chapters, and an account of the mountain that went on past the few words the reader already knew. And what they found, when they held it, was stranger than the rumour. A reader who came expecting only a prophecy could find much more: the mountain, and the two hundred, and Azazel's list, and the house of fire and crystal, and the gates of the sun, and a man asleep beside a river. I cannot give every early reader the same surprise. Some had already encountered pieces of these stories. But that difference between a quotation and a whole work is one reason I want books to come back. A page can outgrow the small description that has been carrying its name. Laurence was cautious. He did not claim more than he had. He said, here is the book, in English, from the manuscript at Oxford, and here is what I think it is and when I think it was written, and he was wrong about some of that and right about more, and it did not matter, because the thing was done. The book was out. And from that day the book has never gone back into silence. Laurence gave English readers an Enoch they could read, and other translators followed him, with other manuscripts and other questions. The copies Bruce brought home were part of that return. Books carried out of Ethiopia, where they had never been missing, into libraries where readers were learning how to hear them. The copyist, who has never heard of any of them, finishes his line.

Now leave the hill. Leave the rain. Go north, and a long way, out of the highlands and down through Egypt and across the top of the Red Sea and into a country of stone and salt. There is a sea there, if you can call it that, which is the lowest water on the surface of the earth, so far below the level of the ocean that the air itself is thick and heavy and warm, and its salt water is inhospitable to ordinary freshwater life, though microorganisms do live there, because it is so salt that a body floats in it like a cork, and the shore is white with what the water leaves behind when it dries. On the western side of that sea there are cliffs. Pale limestone, dry, cracked, full of caves, rising up from a narrow strip of flat ground along the shore, and above the cliffs there is desert, and nothing else, for miles. It was there, in the winter of nineteen forty seven, that a shepherd found the jars. I am going to tell you this very simply, because the story has been told a great many ways, by a great many people, some of whom were there and some of whom were not, and the versions do not agree with each other, and I am not going to choose one and tell it to you as if it were what happened. What is agreed is this. There were shepherds, of the people who have kept flocks in that country for as long as there have been flocks. One of them, a young man, was on the cliffs above the shore. There was a cave, high up, with a small opening. He went in, or threw a stone in, or went in after a stone, the accounts differ. And inside there were jars. Stop at the jars a moment, because the jars are the reason. Some of the rolls were found with clay jars and linen, and those objects are part of the story. The jars were not all full. Not every roll from every cave had been sealed in one. Some pieces of linen were wrappers; other cloth may have covered jar mouths or padded the contents. The material gives us signs of handling and storage, but it does not let us reconstruct every last decision. A fitted lid, a folded cloth, a roll placed inside: each suggests care, even where we cannot recover the reason. Elsewhere, in the familiar story from Egypt, a jar would also hold books. That discovery is usually dated a little over a year before this one, several hundred miles away. It is tempting to give both groups the same purpose, as though there were only one reason to put writing into a jar. But protection, storage, concealment, and the disposal of worn sacred writing are different possibilities. We can look at the vessels without making them tell us more than they do. Clay jars in the dark, some broken and some whole. In the account of the first discovery, most were empty. A few held old writing, some wrapped in linen, darkened with age. Rolls of leather, written on. He did not know what they were. Why would he? He took some, and left some, and went back to his people, and the rolls went from hand to hand, the way things do, to a dealer in a town, to another dealer, to a man who knew a man at a school, and slowly, over the next months, it began to be understood what they were. Let me tell you what the first of them looked like, because it is worth knowing. There were seven rolls, in the beginning, from that first cave. They were leather, sheets of it sewn end to end, and rolled tight, and wrapped in linen that had gone the colour of tea, and some of them were so brittle that they could not be unrolled without breaking, and some were in wonderful condition, and one of them, when it was finally opened, flat, on a table, went on for twenty four feet. Twenty four feet of Hebrew, in columns, in a good clear hand, without a break. It was the book of Isaiah. All of it. From the first word to the last. I will come back to that one before the night is over, because it is the quiet thing, and it is more important than anything I am going to tell you about Enoch, and almost nobody who tells this story stops to say so. The rolls went to a school in Jerusalem, and to a university, and to a museum, and scholars bent over them, and the word went out, and the word was, these are two thousand years old. And the word was not believed, at first, by everyone, because that is not how things are found. Things that old are found in pieces, in the ground, by men with trowels, over years. They are not found whole, in jars, by a shepherd. And yet. They also tested linen associated with the scrolls. This was early in the life of radiocarbon dating, a way of estimating age from the radioactive carbon remaining in organic material. While a plant lives it exchanges carbon with its environment. Afterward, the radioactive fraction decays, and a measurement can help estimate how long that has been happening. The early result for linen from the scroll find was roughly two thousand years. It was one part of the evidence, not a magic clock that ended every argument. The method has uncertainties, and later work has refined how such ages are understood. Still, there is something striking about the comparison. A cloth that had served a book became evidence for its age. The small material thing around the writing could answer a different question from the words inside it. The scholars read the letters, and the laboratory read something in the linen. I want to say one more thing about the shepherd, and then let him go. His name is recorded. I am not going to say it, because it is not mine to make famous, and because this particular discovery opened the way to a much larger search, and he was not looking for a library and did not know he had found one, and I think that is the right way for such ancient books to be found, by someone who is not looking, and who goes home afterwards to his flock. They were books. Very old books. Books in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek, on skin and papyrus, preserved in the caves around a settlement above the Dead Sea. Some were near complete. Most would reach modern readers in pieces. How each arrived in its cave is part of the history still being discussed. That is the first jar. There were more caves. Many more. Over the next few years the cliffs were searched, cave by cave, by shepherds and by scholars and by everyone in between, and more caves had jars, and more jars had books, and some caves had no jars at all but had books anyway, in pieces, thousands of pieces, lying in the dust on the floor without a surviving container around them. And in one of those caves, the fourth one that was found, in the dust, there were pieces of the book on the copyist's knees. I will come to that. It is the next chapter, and it is the one I promised you. But I want to stop here for a moment, at the mouth of the first cave, in the winter of forty seven, with the jars still standing in the dark inside, and the young man outside on the ledge with the whole sea below him, white at the edges, and nobody in the world yet knowing what he had found. It is a good place to stop. It is very quiet there. The salt, and the heat coming up off the flat ground, and the small dark mouths of the caves along the cliff, one above another, and no sound at all but the wind, which has been blowing through those cliffs, in and out of those holes, for two thousand years without once disturbing a jar. It is one of the quietest places there is.

Cave Four was found a few years after the first one. Not by scholars. By the shepherds again, who by then knew what a cave with books in it was worth, and who had got very good at finding them. It was in the marl. Not the hard pale limestone of the first cave, but the soft crumbling stuff of the terrace below it, close to the ruins of a settlement, a huddle of stone walls and cisterns and a tower where, two thousand years before, somebody had lived, and worked, and copied, and eaten, and washed, and prayed, and kept books. The cave was just across a gully from the settlement, dug into the soft rock of the ridge on the far side, so close that the men digging the ruins could have looked up from their work and seen the mouth of it, and for a long time did, without knowing. And there were no jars. The jars had gone, or there had never been any. What there was, was the floor. And on the floor, in the dust, in the dark, were pieces. Many thousands of them. Fragments of leather and papyrus, some the size of a hand, most the size of a fingernail, dry, curled, brown, some with two words on them and some with two letters, from hundreds of different books, all mixed together on the floor of one cave, where they had lain since the year the settlement was abandoned and the people went away. It took decades to sort them. I want you to think about that. Not the finding. The sorting. Men at long tables, in a room with the windows shut against the wind, with a great many small brown pieces laid out on glass, moving them a quarter of an inch at a time, looking for the edge of a letter on one piece that might meet the edge of a letter on another. One of those men could do it faster than anyone alive, and people said so, and they said he had the fastest hands in the world, and I believe them. An edition of the Aramaic Enoch fragments appeared from Oxford in nineteen seventy six, after years of work bringing the pieces into a form other readers could study. The editor was J. T. Milik, and the volume belongs beside the earlier translations as another stage in making the witnesses available. The story did not end with that book. The larger scroll publication project remained slow for many years. The Israel Antiquities Authority describes a small early editorial team and a much wider division of the work in the nineteen nineties. By two thousand and one, most of the official editions had appeared. That matters because a discovery is not the same thing as a published text. A piece can be found, photographed, assigned to a manuscript, and still need years of comparison before readers can inspect a full argument about its place. I want to keep that work beside every quick claim about what these ancient books prove. The photographs, the letters, the proposed joins, and the readings are part of what lets another person check. The book on a library shelf is another opening, not the end of every question. And as the pieces came together, slowly, book by book, it became clear what the people in the settlement had had on their shelves. And among the things they had had, in the language it was first written in, in Aramaic, two thousand years old, older than any other copy of it anywhere on earth by a distance so great that you could put the whole of the Roman Empire inside it, was the Book of Enoch. Not all of it. Four of its five parts. The Watchers, and the mountain, and the two hundred. The sky book, with the gates of the sun. The dreams. The letter at the end. The one part that was not there was the part in the middle, the one about the Son of Man, and people have thought about that absence a great deal, and I will not, because an absence is only an absence. But four of five. In Aramaic. In pieces the size of a fingernail. On the floor of a cave near a ruin above a dead sea. And here is the thing I promised you, and it is the thing the whole of tonight has been walking toward. They laid the Aramaic beside the Ge'ez. The ancient pieces from the cave beside the later Ethiopic manuscripts. Earlier Aramaic words beside a version that had travelled through another language. These are witnesses from different stages, not a first autograph placed next to a last perfect copy. And there are gaps: places where the ancient skin has broken, where one version has more wording, where the names are difficult. The comparison can go line by line only where the surviving material permits it. That is what makes the work exacting. A reader has to resist filling the blank simply because the later version makes the missing sentence easy to imagine. And it was the same book. Not word for word. Nobody should ever tell you word for word about this comparison. The fragments let us recognize parts of the work that later Ethiopic copies preserve, but they do not certify every page of that later collection. Differences are not all small slips. Translation, different forms of a text, and copying can each leave a mark. The astronomical material raises questions of its own. The recognition is still remarkable. We can follow Enoch's world across languages and centuries without pretending that every missing edge has been restored. The mountain belongs to a story older than the surviving manuscripts on the hill. The later book has carried ancient writing. The ancient pieces can help us hear it more precisely, and sometimes show us where the journey altered it. Let me show you what that means with the roll of names. Last night I told you that the Watchers' story gives leaders for the two hundred. Later copies can make that roll look simpler than its history was. The Aramaic evidence and one Greek witness preserve numbering that helps scholars follow the list. Many Ethiopic copies merge two names and leave out another, so that eighteen stand where the numbered sequence points to twenty. That is a real change, not merely a different sound in another alphabet. But the change does not make the later copies useless. It gives readers something precise to compare. They can ask where a name divided, where another disappeared, and which witness helps recover it. The long chain of hands carried a recognizable story, and it also left work for the next reader. If you want to know what a copyist is for, the answer includes both care and the need for another pair of eyes. A surviving book is not beyond correction because it has been loved. And the comparison does not always favour the oldest surviving language at every step. Take one name associated with the stars. A Greek form became distorted, while two Ethiopic manuscripts preserve a form closer to the Aramaic. Other copies do less well. That is why readers compare witnesses rather than crown one of them perfect. The brother who stayed home sometimes keeps a detail that another branch has changed; sometimes the older piece restores something the later branch lost. The family resemblance is real, and so are the differences. Both become visible when the pieces are finally on the table. He was right. Right to keep it. That is what I mean when I say he was right. The cave does not give every copyist a certificate of perfect accuracy, or prove that an entire book crossed a thousand years unchanged. It gives us ancient witnesses to writing that the Ethiopic tradition carried on. Without the later manuscripts, much of the ancient story would be harder to recover from these broken pieces. Without the ancient pieces, some changes in the later manuscripts would be harder to see. Each helps the other. The work on the hill was worth doing, even where a letter shifted or a name was lost. Keeping a book does not mean taking it beyond the reach of questions. It means giving another reader enough to begin asking them. The man I have imagined has got the word before him right tonight. Beyond his room, the witnesses are still being read against each other. The copyist does not know any of this. He is on the fifth line of the new leaf. He has got the hard word right again. He does not look up. And there, I think, we can leave the tension of the night, such as it was. Everything from here on is downhill, and quiet, and dusk. The books are back. What is left is to look at them.

Stay at the cave a while. Not inside it. Outside, on the terrace, in the last of the light, with the settlement's walls behind you and the sea below. I told you last night that the sky book gave the year as three hundred and sixty four days, and that I would leave that number lying in the lamplight, and I am going to pick it up now for one paragraph and put it down again, because the people who lived on this terrace and kept these books believed it. They kept a year of three hundred and sixty four days. Fifty two weeks exactly, nothing left over, every feast on the same day of the week forever. And the great temple in Jerusalem, a day's walk to the west, did not. Jerusalem counted by the moon, and added a month when the moon fell behind, the way most of the world did. And so the people on this terrace and the people in the temple were, a great deal of the time, keeping the same feasts on different days. When it was the day of atonement here, it was an ordinary day there, and the other way about. Rarely, if ever, on the same day. I will not tell you tonight what that meant to them, or how much of why they were out here it explains, because I do not know and neither does anyone, and because it is a longer story than one paragraph, and it will keep. But look at the place. The terrace is marl, soft and pale, and it is dry, dry the way only a place beside a dead sea can be dry, and the walls of the settlement are low, and the cisterns are empty, and the tower is a stump. There is a long room where people sat at benches and wrote. You can stand in it. It is roofless now and the sky is very large above it and very empty, and if you stand there in the last of the light you can see, without turning your head, the whole of the sea, and the mountains on the far side going pink, and the cliffs behind you going gold, and the mouths of the caves in the cliffs, small and dark, one above another, like the holes in a flute. Who were they? I will tell you one influential interpretation, and how much room it leaves for doubt. It connects Qumran with the Essenes, a Jewish group described by Josephus. He writes about common property, communal meals, and ritual bathing. Some scrolls give rules for a group called the Yahad. Those texts and the ruins helped make the connection persuasive to many scholars, but they do not remove every question about the site's people or the origins of every scroll. Josephus does not point to these particular walls and name their occupants for us. It is a reconstruction from several kinds of evidence. We can listen to it, and still leave room for the arguments over what the buildings and the books mean together. Look at the graves, before the light goes. There are hundreds of them, on the flat ground east of the walls, toward the sea, laid out in rows, each one marked with a low heap of stones, and every one of them runs the same way, the length of the body pointing north and south, row after row, like furrows. Nobody has ever been sure why they all face the same way. It was clearly a rule. It was clearly kept. And whoever kept it is under one of those heaps, and has been for two thousand years, in the dry, with the sea going pink and grey and dark beside them every evening, exactly as it is doing now. And look at the water system, the channels and cisterns that made life possible here. This was an arid place. Water had to be gathered and stored, and some of the installations have been interpreted as ritual baths. We cannot turn that into one hour of rain a year, or say that every drop was caught, or compare every inhabitant's washing with everyone around them. What survives is enough to hold attention: a place that needed water had made arrangements to keep it. The baths matter to interpretations of the settlement, just as communal facilities and the scrolls' rules matter. But the stone does not tell us every thought of the person who stepped down into it. That is one difference from the hill I have imagined. Here I can show you remains and possible uses. There I have given one man a private life. Both deserve care, but they are different kinds of story. And look at the long room. They found ink there. Inkwells, clay and bronze, in the rubble of the floor, and long low benches, or what was left of them, and most people think this is where the copying was done, that men sat here, at these benches, with reeds, and made the very rolls that went into the jars. A room for copying, two thousand years ago, a day's walk from Jerusalem. A room like the one on the hill. That is the third one tonight. The settlement had a long history, and it was abandoned around the time of the Roman incursion in the year sixty eight. That setting has helped shape explanations for books in nearby caves. Perhaps some writing was put away in danger. But we cannot give every roll the same owner, or every deposit the same moment, or tell the last journey of everyone who lived here. The ruin, the caves, the pottery, and the writing have to be considered together. They give us a history with outlines and disputed details, not a single evening we can watch without interruption. For tonight, the thing we can hold is that ancient writing remained in these caves long after the settlement's life had changed. And the caves kept them. That is the second time tonight I have said that a place kept a book without meaning to, and it will not be the last. The hill kept it by copying. The cliff kept it by being dry. No single plan joins all these events, and if you take one thing from tonight I would like it to be that. The books came back because a cliff was dry and a hill was wet and a Scotsman was stubborn. Those are parts of the story. That is enough. The light goes off the far mountains. The sea goes grey, then the colour of pewter, then nothing.

In the usual dating, a little over a year before the shepherd found the first cave, in another country, another man found another jar. I am going out of order to tell you this, and I want you to know that I know. The jar in the cliff was nineteen forty seven. The Egyptian discovery is usually dated to December, nineteen forty five. It came first. I have told you the cliff first because it is the cave that had the copyist's book in it, and because that was the thing I promised you, and now that it is told, we can return to that Egyptian discovery, several hundred miles away and open the other one. Egypt. The upper part of it, far up the river, where the valley is narrow and the cliffs come close on either side and the fields between the river and the cliffs are thin and green and worked very hard. There was a farmer. He and his brothers had gone out to the foot of the cliff, where the ground is soft and full of old things, to dig for the kind of earth that farmers there dig for and spread on their fields, and one of them put his spade into the ground, and it hit something that was not earth. A clay jar. The later accounts do not agree about its size. He broke it. The accounts differ about how, and about whether he was afraid to, and about what he thought might be in it, and I am not going to give you any of them as fact. He broke it, and inside, not rolls this time, but books. Bound books, with covers of leather, thirteen of them, or twelve and the pieces of a thirteenth, written on papyrus in a language called Coptic, which is the old language of Egypt written in Greek letters, and which the church there still uses, the way the church on the hill still uses Ge'ez. A later story says that some leaves went into an oven. We cannot verify that loss or count its extent, and being recorded later does not turn it into an observed fact. What survived reached dealers, collectors, and the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Its movement into publication was slow and uneven. That is a real part of the return, but we should not pretend that every book simply waited untouched in a drawer for thirty years. Discovery, acquisition, conservation, and publication are different events. A find can become famous before every text is available, and a later account can grow more detailed than the evidence beneath it. The books give us ancient writing. Their modern journey gives us records with gaps. Both need reading. So I will keep the uncertainty beside the kitchen story, and follow the surviving pages rather than tell you how many were burned. They were the books from the jar. The one I showed you a page of last night. The gospel with no story in it. The garden seen from the other side. Thirteen codices, with many more works inside them, because many of the volumes held several works, fifty or so in all, many of them wholly unknown before the find, and a few remembered through names or arguments in other writers. And here is the thing about this jar, and it is a different thing from the cliff. What can the jar tell us about why the books reached the ground? Less than the familiar story sometimes asks it to tell. We do not know the identity of the person who deposited them, the exact date, or the purpose. A connection with nearby monasteries is possible. A response to a church dispute is possible. Those possibilities are not a witness to one monk receiving one letter and carrying the whole collection to the cliff that night. The uncertainty belongs here, at the beginning of the explanation, because otherwise a vivid scene can become harder to forget than the evidence that limits it. There were monasteries there. That is the thing to know about that stretch of the river. Some of the oldest in the world. The man who is usually called the father of the whole idea of monks living together in a house under a rule, rather than alone in caves, founded his first houses on that very stretch of the Nile, a little way from that cliff, a hundred years or so before the jar went into the ground. By the time of the jar there were several such houses within a walk of the place, with hundreds of monks in them, and a library in each, and a rule that said what they should read and when. The Easter letter. The one I told you about last night, from the bishop in Alexandria, with the list of twenty seven books in it. In the year three hundred and sixty seven, he distinguished the books of the canon from other books he allowed for instruction, and from writings he rejected. That is not an order to burn every book outside the list. There were monasteries near this cliff, and one theory connects the deposited books with a conflict over what should be read. We do not know whether that letter caused their placement there, or who carried them to the cliff, or why. We have the books. We do not have the hand that put them in the ground. If the books were put away to protect them, it was an act of keeping whose author we cannot name. If they reached the ground for another reason, the surviving pages will need that explanation instead. I can imagine someone reluctant to destroy work made by hand. But that is an imagined motive, not a recovered instruction. A book can represent a great deal of labour without taking exactly a year, and no such estimate proves what happened beside this cliff. The unknown hand remains unknown. The pages are what it has left us. So there are two jars now. The writing in the cliff. The books recovered from the Egyptian ground. And on the hill, the shelf, that was neither.

Come back up the hill. Into the rain. He is halfway down the first column. I want to put the three of them side by side now, because we have all three, and because it is the last thing I have to show you before the dusk. Three ways a book can come through sixteen hundred years. And none of them is what you would have guessed, and none of them is what the people who tell this story usually say, and I have come to think that the three of them together are the truest thing I know about how anything survives. The first way is to be left. That was the cliff. Ancient writing remained in the caves, and the arid conditions helped it survive. Helped is the word. The pieces did not all arrive whole, and some became extraordinarily fragile. We cannot follow every century after they were placed there, or say that no one ever knew where any of them was. We can say that their eventual discovery brought ancient witnesses back into reach. The dry environment was part of that survival, along with the material and the places in which it rested. It is tempting to make the opposite weather into a complete alternate history: one shower, no Aramaic Enoch, forever. But that is more than the fragments tell us. The actual pieces are remarkable enough. They came out damaged, and then needed another kind of care, the kind people have to choose and keep choosing. The second way is to be hidden. That was the sand. The Egyptian books may have been concealed to protect them, though their reason for being there remains uncertain. I have not recovered a person looking from a shelf to a letter, or a single night on which the decision was made. Nor can I certify the later story of leaves in an oven. What I can put beside the cliff is another group of ancient books that reached modern readers through the ground, and through a difficult modern history of finding and interpretation. A place can preserve writing without preserving the explanation for its presence. That is why the missing hand matters. We have enough to read the books, and too little to tell every step of their burial as though someone had watched it. And the third way is the hill. The third way is not to hide the book and not to leave it, but to use it. To read it aloud every year and copy it every generation and wear the boards smooth with handling, so that it is never in a jar and never in a cave and never, for one day in a thousand years, out of somebody's hands. That is the way the book on the copyist's knees survived, and it is the only one of the three that involves nobody being lucky and nobody being brave. Just a great many people, one after another, in the rain, doing Tuesday. Think about what each of them looks like now, tonight, at this hour. The pieces from the cliff now need deliberate conservation. The Israel Antiquities Authority describes climate controlled storage and careful monitoring, not a condition in which nothing can ever change. Earlier efforts to hold fragments between glass and attach them with adhesive sometimes damaged them. Better care has had to learn from that history. Photographs and digital images help readers study writing while the material itself is protected. There is a history inside those images too. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the Palestine Archaeological Museum made about twelve hundred photographic plates. Infrared photography could make writing easier to see on darkened skin. Those early records preserve a view of material before some later damage, so they can matter even when a new camera is available. A digital image and a physical fragment answer related but different needs. The image can travel to readers who cannot stand beside the object. The object still needs its own environment and care. A photograph is not a new piece of ancient skin, but it can let another reader examine a letter without turning the fragment over again. That is one more kind of copying in this story: an image made so that study can continue while handling is reduced. That is a different sort of keeping from a closed cave. It involves people watching what happens, asking whether a treatment helps, and sometimes changing the treatment. The opening of a cave does not simply let the dry out like air from a bottle. It takes fragile material into another environment, and gives its care to people who must understand it. The book on the hill has thumb marks on it. Wax on the boards, from candles. A page near the front that has been mended with a strip of skin and stitched, by somebody, a long time ago, because it tore. A smell. It has been in the rain. It has been carried in and out of this room through the years. It has been dropped, probably. And it has reached this night. Reading does not make skin or paper indestructible. What can continue beyond this particular volume is the text, if another hand makes another copy. Sand, and a lectern. A jar, and a shelf. A thing that is kept by being put away, and a thing that is kept by being taken out every Sunday. I know which one I would rather be. I know which one lasts longer, too, if you are asking, and it is the second, though it does not look it. The sand kept the Aramaic for two thousand years and gave it back as fragments the size of a fingernail. The lectern kept the Ge'ez for a thousand and gave it back whole, with the red still in it, being read aloud this coming Sunday to people standing on their staffs. One of those is a miracle of preservation. The other is just a book. He finishes the first column, and begins the second.

There is one more thing I have to tell you about the cliff, and I have saved it for here, in the dusk, because it is not exciting and it is the most important thing in the cave. Most of what came out of those caves was not lost books. I have been talking all night about Enoch and Jubilees and the giants, because those are the ones that were left off the list and those are the ones we are following, and it would be easy to leave you thinking that the caves above the dead sea were a library of forbidden books, a secret shelf, the things the bishops did not want you to read. They were not. About a quarter of the manuscripts were copies of books now in the Hebrew Bible. Among many kinds of writing. Genesis and Isaiah and the Psalms and Deuteronomy. Copies of familiar books in their ancient language, about a thousand years older than the medieval Hebrew copies scholars had relied on. Let me say that again, slowly, because it is the quiet thing and it goes past people. Before the caves, scholars already had ancient pieces of biblical writing and old translations. What they did not have was this range of early Hebrew manuscripts, beside the medieval Hebrew Bibles on which much of their work had depended. The complete Isaiah scroll was a striking addition. It gave readers the whole book in a witness roughly a thousand years earlier than the major medieval Hebrew copies. A comparison could show continuity, and it could also show differences. We should hear both. No one scroll certifies all the rest, or gives every intervening scribe the same result. What it does is make the history of the text visible farther back, in ink, on skin, in words that readers can examine rather than merely suppose. I told you about the roll of Isaiah, the one that went on for twenty four feet. It has fifty four columns, and it preserves the whole prophet. That is an extraordinary object to place beside a later Hebrew Bible. But continuity does not mean that the differences are only spelling. The scroll has many variant readings, and the wider cave finds preserve more than one form of biblical texts. A reader can recognize Isaiah and still ask why a word differs, whether a phrase belongs, and how a particular passage was transmitted. Those questions do not take the book away. They are what the older witness makes possible. The roll gives us the familiar prophet with an ancient manuscript's particular readings, not a photograph of a modern printed page sent backward through time. Its survival lets comparison replace a guess. And there was more than the familiar Hebrew biblical collection. The cave finds include Tobit in Aramaic and Hebrew, and Hebrew writing from Ben Sira, the wisdom book many call Sirach. Those witnesses matter, but not because nobody had seen Hebrew Ben Sira before: manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah had already changed that story. Then there is the Psalms scroll from Cave Eleven, found in nineteen fifty six. Its psalms and hymns stand in a different order, and it includes compositions outside the usual Hebrew collection. One surviving prayer asks for deliverance from sin and an unclean spirit, and gives thanks for mercy. We can hear a voice familiar in its need even where this particular hymn is unfamiliar. The scroll does not prove that every Psalms collection was unfinished, or that its owners recognized no boundary at all. It shows that a collection of sacred song could take a form different from the one most readers now meet. The writing has its own order. Reading it means letting that order be visible, and remembering that this roll came from Cave Eleven, not from the floor where every piece of our story is sometimes made to gather. Stay with that unfamiliar prayer for a moment. It does not ask us to visit a mountain of angels. It begins near the edge of death, asking how a grave worm could offer praise. Then it turns toward the living, even those who stumble. The speaker remembers being close to the grave and asks for forgiveness, for a spirit able to trust and understand, and for protection from the evil that can take hold within a person. Hope and bodily frailty share the same breath. Toward the broken end, brothers and a father's household are invited into the rejoicing. We do not have every last word. Even so, there is enough to hear a prayer rather than merely identify a curiosity. This is another reason the extra hymns matter. A different collection does not only alter a table of contents. It can give us another voice asking to be delivered, and another place where an ancient reader found words for need. I find that lovelier than anything about Enoch, if I am honest. The Psalms, collected differently. Another arrangement of familiar songs and other hymns. So the lost books were part of a much larger body of writing. Biblical texts, commentaries, calendars, rules, hymns, and works that later communities would place differently. Finding them together does not prove that the people who used them gave every one the same authority. A library can contain books with different roles. What the caves give us is that variety, beside physical signs of use and transmission. Enoch and Isaiah belong to the same larger discovery, but not therefore to one identical shelf or one jar. The picture is richer when we let the different caves, manuscripts, and kinds of writing keep their differences. I think that is the truest picture of the whole thing that I can give you. Not a wall with the Bible on one side and the lost books on the other. A floor, with everything on it, in pieces, mixed, waiting to be sorted by a man with fast hands. The copyist is at the bottom of the second column. It is very late.

We have called them the lost books for two nights. I have used the word myself, more times than I meant to, because it is the word everyone uses and because it is a good word for a title. And now, at the end, with everything dug up and unrolled and laid on the glass and read, I am going to say the thing I have been walking toward since the first lamp was lit. Not lost to everyone. Not all in the same way. Not to every reader. The Book of Enoch was on a shelf in Ethiopia the whole time, being read aloud every year, in a church, in the rain. It was never lost. It was in a language most of the world could not read, in a country most of the world had not been to, and that is not the same thing as lost. That is the same thing as somewhere else. The Aramaic pieces had survived in caves. That is a different kind of keeping, and a different kind of loss. They had been beyond the reach of the readers who later found them, and much of their writing was gone. We do not know every circumstance in which they were placed there. We can call them recovered without pretending that nobody hid anything, or that the people who owned them simply walked away on an ordinary afternoon. The dark and the dry preserved some of what the centuries had taken out of reach. The Egyptian books had also survived beyond the reach of later readers. Someone put them where they were found, but we do not know that person's whole purpose, or how long anyone remembered the place. If it was concealment for safety, that memory did not come down to us with the books. The ground preserved writing while keeping its own silence about the hand. That is a strange kind of keeping, and it is enough without giving the person a deathbed knowledge we cannot recover. Some things remained in use. Some survived out of reach. Some came back only in pieces. Keeping and losing can both belong to the history of the same book. I want to be fair to the word, though, before I set it down, because there are lost books. Real ones. Books of which not one copy exists anywhere on earth, in any language, in any jar, and never will. We know they existed because somebody quoted a line of them, or listed them, or argued with them, and that is all we have. The argument, and not the book. There are gospels like that. There are histories like that. There are whole libraries that burned, in cities you have heard of, and what was in them we will never know. Those are the lost books. And nobody makes videos about them, because there is nothing to show, and nobody says they were hidden, because they were not, and nobody says they were suppressed, because they were simply, plainly, gone, the way most things are gone. The works we have followed give us more than a remembered title, even where they survive only in pieces. The ones we have been talking about are the ones that are here. On a shelf. Under glass. In a case in Cairo. Many can be read in translation tonight, though not all survive complete, and that is the opposite of lost, and the word we should have been using all along is found. Or, better, kept. I will say the other thing now, once, and then set it down. If you have heard these Watchers turned into visitors from space, and the giants made into a result of that visit, keep the reading beside the page rather than let it replace the page. The ancient work gives us heavenly Watchers, forbidden unions, destructive teaching, and judgment. Those are the terms of the story we have followed. The names alone do not establish a modern account of arrivals from another planet. We can notice that distinction without pretending to know every thought of every ancient reader. The copyist in our room has not been given that argument tonight. Turn the volume down on it, and let the parchment speak. Here is what the parchment says, if you listen to the whole of it, both nights, all the way through. A man in a list did not die. Ancient writers went through that gap in imagination. Writings under his name travelled through languages, and a scriptural tradition in the highlands kept a full Enoch in use. Elsewhere Greek extracts survived inside another book. Aramaic pieces remained in caves. Coptic books reached us from the Egyptian ground, with questions still attached to their discovery and burial. Then travellers, dealers, translators, conservators, and readers brought witnesses together. The pieces do not all say precisely the same thing. That is part of what makes comparing them worth the work. Across their differences, ancient writing can be recognized, recovered, and read again. That is the story I want the parchment to tell tonight. That is not only a story about loss. It is a story about how much survives, and how strangely, and by how many hands. The copyist has finished the leaf. He lifts the board and looks at it in the lamplight, both columns, black and a little red, and it is good, and he sets it down on the floor beside him, face up, to dry.

Count them with me. Slowly. It is the kind of counting you can fall asleep in the middle of, and that is what it is for. A man, somewhere in the land of Israel, two or three hundred years before Christ, who read the list in Genesis and stopped at the seventh name, and wondered, and wrote. We do not know his name. We will never know it. He is the first hand. The men who wrote the other four parts, in other years, and the one who bound them all together as one book. We do not know their names either. The one who put it into Greek. So that it could travel. The ones who carried it. On roads, in bags, in the holds of ships, up rivers, a book going from one country to another the way a seed goes, on the wind, in the fur of animals, through deliberate journeys, with accidents along the way. The one who put it into Ge'ez. On a hill, or in a valley, or in a city that is a ruin now, a long time ago, so that it could be read in the church. The copyist's own teacher. He does know that name. He says it, in fact, every night before he begins, under his breath, the way you might touch a doorframe, and he has never once in his life thought of it as anything but a habit. The old man is dead these many years. He is under a heap of stones on the slope below the church, facing the way they face here, and the rain is on him too tonight. He copied this book twice in his life. His hands shook toward the end and the last leaf he did is a little uneven, and it is in the book on the shelf, and nobody has ever taken it out. And then the copyists. Not one. Hundreds. Every generation for a thousand years, in the rain, a boy who learned his letters in sevens and spoiled his first leaf and got better, and copied the book once, or twice, in his life, and taught a boy, and died. Hundreds of them. Back and back. The man on the hill tonight is only the newest. The people who placed writing in the caves, whose individual journeys we cannot follow. The unknown hand in Egypt, whose work survived in the jar. Jude, who quoted it. Tertullian, who argued for it. The chronicler in the East who copied a few pages into his history and saved them without knowing. The travellers whose reports brought distant books into other readers' questions. The Scotsman. The professor at Oxford with his Ge'ez grammar. The shepherd on the cliff. The farmer with the spade. The dealers, the scholars, the man with the fastest hands in the world, bending over the glass. And the ones I have not named because there are too many. The people who made the parchment, on the hill, from the goat, and stretched it, and scraped it, across the centuries, whether or not they read what went onto it. The people who made the ink. The boys who ruled the leaves. The people who wove the linen found with the rolls. The potter who made the jars. The maker of the Egyptian jar described in the discovery accounts. The men who cut the marl to make the fourth cave. The photographers, in the fifties, who made images of the fragments so that the writing could be studied without handling the pieces, and whose pictures are, in some cases, clearer now than the fragments themselves, because the early images preserve details that later damage can obscure. The people who built the museum with the roof like a lid. The people who sweep it. Every one of them a hand. Every one of them holding it for a moment and passing it on. Most of them not knowing what it was. Most of them not caring. All of them, together, without a plan and without a meeting and without ever once agreeing to anything, the reason you can hear this tonight. And you. Tonight. Listening. Or not listening, because you have gone to sleep, which is allowed, and is in fact the point. You are the last hand, for now. Somebody will come after. That is the whole of it. A chain of people who mostly never met and mostly did not know what they were carrying and mostly wanted something else, passing a book along, hand to hand, for two thousand years, until it reached a lamp in a round church on a hill in the rain, and a man who has never once thought of it as anything but Tuesday. He is not thinking about any of that. He is looking at the wet leaf on the floor, to see that it is drying flat.

The rain, on the thatch. It is the end of the second night, and the copyist has done what he came to do, and he sits for a while with his hands in his lap, the way he did last night, the way he does every night, because it is a good thing to do at the end of a page. I want to show you three rooms before I go. Three rooms, tonight, at this hour, in three countries, and in each of them a book, and then I will let you sleep. The first room is this one. The round church, the thatch, the rain. The book is on the shelf, in its boards, dark with handling, the red inside it. It can be taken down, unwrapped and read in Ge'ez. It belongs among the scriptures of this church, and nobody here needs a discovery in the desert to tell them it was kept. It is alive. That is the only word for it. It is a copy made within this inheritance and still being read inside it, and here I have placed it inside that continuing scriptural inheritance. The second room I want you to imagine is in Jerusalem, among the work of conserving the Dead Sea Scrolls. The first seven rolls have their home at the Shrine of the Book, with its roof like a jar lid. The many fragments cared for by the Israel Antiquities Authority belong to another part of this history, and the Aramaic Enoch pieces should not all be placed in a drawer inside that museum. Picture instead a conservation room: ancient skin, controlled conditions, careful hands, and images that let other readers examine the writing. The witnesses are fragile. Their care is skilled and ongoing. They are kept, and they are read. The third room is in Cairo, at the Coptic Museum, where the Nag Hammadi collection has its home. Leather covers, papyrus, Coptic writing, the gospel of sayings and the garden seen from another side. I picture the books in the quiet of a museum room, though I cannot give every volume a permanent place in a case. Conserving an old object and reading what it says are not opposites. Scholars read these writings, and other readers also seek meaning in them. They do not have the same history of use as the Enoch on our hill, but they have more than a future of being looked at. The words can still meet a person who has come to read. It is the same hour in all three. Or near enough. The rain on the thatch here. The hum of the cooling in the building in Jerusalem, which never stops, and which nobody hears any more. The traffic outside the museum in Cairo, far off, on the other side of thick walls. Three rooms in the dark with the lights low, three books in them, sixteen hundred years and more of being carried from one place to another, and all of it, tonight, still. Three rooms. One book in its living scriptural inheritance, and ancient witnesses kept in two other places. And I am not going to tell you that one is better than the others, because I think the world needs all three, and because it is late. I am only going to tell you that the one on the hill was never in a jar, and never in a cave, and never in a case, and kept across generations by people who copied and read it, and that of all the ways there are to come through sixteen hundred years, that is the one that does not look like a miracle, and is the one I would choose. The copyist stands. His knees are stiff. He goes to the door and stands in it and looks out at the rain, and the dark, and the shape of the juniper, and the cloud where the valleys are, and the air is cold and smells of wet thatch and old incense, and somewhere a long way down the hill one dog, once, and then the rain closes over it. Then he comes back in, and does not put out the lamp. He never does. It will burn a while, and go out on its own some time before morning, and nobody will see it happen, and the room will be dark, and the books will go on standing on their shelf in the dark exactly as they were, which is what they are for. Let the room be as it is. Let the rain go on. It has been going on under everything I have told you, both nights, and you may not have noticed it for a long while, and that is exactly right. It was never asking for your attention. It was only there. The way it was there for the copyist, and for his teacher, and for every one of them, back and back, and the way the dry was there for the cliff, and the ground was there for the jar. Nobody asked any of them to keep anything. They kept it anyway. In the morning somebody will open the door, and the light will come in across the floor, and the leaf will be dry. He will pick it up and hold it to the door, and look down the columns, and if it is good, and it will be, he will lay it with the others in the wooden box where the finished leaves wait. There are a great many of them in there now. Not a book yet. A book is a long way off. But the box is heavier than it was, and one day it will be heavy enough, and somebody will sew the leaves and bind them between boards and put the boards on the shelf, and there will be one more copy in the world of a book that was never lost, and perhaps someone will record the day, as scribes sometimes did. Whether or not our copyist adds a date, his work will have given the book another set of leaves. And the books will be where they were left. But that is the morning, and the morning can wait. Sleep well. Goodnight.

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight is the thirteenth night of a season that only has twelve, and it is here on purpose, and it is here because of you. For twelve nights you sat in the tablet house and heard the oldest stories in the world told the way the clay tells them. The two waters. The woman in the moon house. The three long nights of the famous king. The eagle, the seven gates, the fisherman, the queen who was left alone, the bird on the mountain, the god who could not settle. You know those stories now. You know them better than most people who have ever written about them. And all through those twelve nights there was another story standing just outside the door, and a great many of you came in through that door. It is the story most people mean when they say the word Anunnaki. It says the gods of Sumer were not gods. It says they were visitors, from a planet with a long slow orbit, who came here for gold, and who made us, in a laboratory, out of clay and their own blood, to dig it for them. It says the tablets tell this story plainly, if you know how to read them, and that a man in 1976 finally did. And if tonight is your first night here, if you came straight in through that door, you are welcome, and you need nothing from the twelve to follow this one. Everything the story rests on will be laid on the table where you can see it. I have not told that story yet. I have mentioned it. I have set it down in one chapter, at the end of a night, and moved on. That was fair to the season, which was about the tablets. It was not entirely fair to the story, and it was not fair to you, because you came for it, and you have waited, and you have been patient. So tonight is that story. All of it. Told the way the people who believe it tell it, at full length, in its own shape, with its own wonder intact, because it is a wonderful story and it deserves a whole night. And after each part of it, quietly, once, I will tell you what the object is. What the tablet says. What the word means in the dictionary. What the seal actually shows. And then I will set it down and go on, and I will not tell you what to think, because you have twelve nights of the real clay in you now, and you do not need me to. Some of you will judge it. Some of you will sleep through the judging. Both are fine. This is a sleep story. It only happens to be about a theory. Here is where we are. There is a room in a museum, after closing. It is a study room, the kind that scholars book by the hour, at the back of the building, with a long table of dark wood and a lamp with a green glass shade. The radiators tick. Somewhere down a corridor a floor polisher hums and then stops. The public galleries are dark and the big doors are locked and the only light in this whole wing is this one lamp on this one table. On the table there are two things. The first is a cylinder seal. It is a small stone, about the length of your thumb, shaped like a little rolling pin, and it has a picture carved into it backwards, so that when you roll it across soft clay the picture stands up the right way round and stays there. Somebody has rolled it out for us, on a strip of pale clay that has gone hard, and the picture is standing still. A seated figure. Others standing before him. Some writing. A star, up in the corner, with points around it. The seal has a number on a little card beside it, because everything in a museum has a number. The number is V A two hundred and forty three. The second thing on the table is a paperback book. Its spine is cracked white from being opened too many times. Its cover is dark, with a planet on it, and the title is in big letters, and the year on the copyright page is 1976. Both of these things are real. The room is not. I have made the room so that we can sit in it. But the seal is real, it lives in Berlin, in a museum, and the book is real, and it is on a shelf in nearly every second hand bookshop on earth, and tonight I am going to take them down one at a time, the way the scribe took down his tablets, and hold each one up to the lamp. There is a chair for you. It is the good one, the one with arms, at the end of the table, out of the draught. Settle into it. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool of the empty building on the other. Close your eyes if they want to close. There is nothing in tonight's story that needs watching. It only needs to be near you, the way the ticking radiator is near you, saying the same small thing over and over in the dark. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, I will go on without you, and I will not mind, and the two things on the table will still be here, being exactly what they are, whether anyone is looking or not. And one thing, whispered like a promise. Nobody gets scolded tonight. Not the man who wrote the book. Not the people who love it. Not you, whatever you came in believing. There is a way of telling this story that is a fight, and you have heard it, probably, and it kept you awake. This is the other way. It is slower and kinder and it is true, and it lands soft. Before I open the book, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next night will be waiting for you when you need it. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back. I pick up the book first, because the story begins with the man who wrote it, and he was a real man, and he had a real life, and it was a long one. We begin.

His name was Zecharia Sitchin. He was born in 1920 in Baku, which is a city on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, in what was then a very new Soviet republic and is now Azerbaijan. His family was Jewish. When he was still a small child they left, and they went south and west, to Palestine, which in those years was governed by the British, and that is where he grew up, in the heat and the dust and the old stones, in a place where the ground itself was full of history and everybody knew it. Hold that for a moment, because it matters. He was a boy in a country where you could not dig a garden without turning up somebody's broken pot. He learned Hebrew as a living language, and he learned it as the language of an old book, and he was the kind of boy who noticed when the old book said something strange, and asked about it, and was not satisfied with the answer. He went to London, and he studied economics at the university there, which is not what you would guess, and he came back to Palestine and he became a journalist, and then an editor, and he wrote for newspapers for years, in a new country that was being born around him. And then in the early 1950s he moved to New York, and he worked in shipping, and he stayed in New York for the rest of his life, nearly sixty years, and he died there in October of 2010, at the age of ninety. That is the outside of the life. Here is the inside of it. All those years, in the evenings, he read. He taught himself to read cuneiform, which is the wedge shaped writing of the tablets you have spent twelve nights with, and it is not an easy thing to teach yourself, and he did it anyway, from the published copies and the dictionaries and the grammars that were available to a determined man with a library card. He read the Sumerian King List, with its kings who reigned for tens of thousands of years, counted in the big round unit of that country, the sar, which is sixty sixties. He read the creation poem, the one about the two waters. He read the flood story, and the poem about the tired gods who went on strike, and the one about the making of people out of clay and blood. He read the same tablets the scholars read. And somewhere in those evenings, over years, he became sure that the scholars had all missed something. That the tablets were not myths. That they were records. In 1976 he published a book, and it is the book on the table. It was called The Twelfth Planet. It sold slowly and then it sold fast and then it did not stop. It went through printing after printing, and then it was translated, into more than twenty languages, and it sold in the millions, and he wrote another book, and another, until there was a whole shelf of them, seven and then more, which he called the Earth Chronicles, and the shelf is still selling, right now, tonight, somewhere, to somebody who has just discovered it and cannot put it down. He did not only write. For the last thirty years of his life he travelled and spoke, in halls and on television and at the sites themselves, and he led readers on tours to the places in the books, to the ruins and the museums, an old man in a good jacket standing in front of a case of tablets, pointing. And late in his life he did something that tells you a great deal about how he saw his own work. He wrote a book in the first person, in the voice of Enki, the god of the deep water, as if Enki himself had dictated his memoirs, so that the whole story could be read straight through as one account, from the arrival to the flood, with no scholar in the way. He called it a lost book. He was clear, in his own introduction, that he had composed it. But he composed it because he believed that somewhere, on some tablet not yet dug up, that book existed, and he was only writing down what it would say. And here, in his shape, in one breath, is what the book says. It says that the gods of Sumer, the Anunnaki, were real, and that they were people, from another world, a planet in our own solar system that swings in close to the sun once every three thousand six hundred years, and away again, on a long slow loop. It says they came to earth hundreds of thousands of years ago because their own world was in trouble and they needed gold to mend it. It says they dug for that gold themselves at first, in the south of Africa, and that they grew tired, and rebelled, and that to solve the labor problem their scientists took the creature that was already living here, a kind of early human, and mixed it with their own blood, and made a worker. Made us. It says the flood was real and that they let it happen and then repented of it. It says that everything the tablets describe, the coming down and the making and the departing, is a memory of those events, written by the people who were there, and that we have been reading it as poetry for a hundred years when we should have been reading it as a report. That is the story. You have heard pieces of it. Now you have the whole of it in one breath, the way he told it. And I want to say one thing about him before I put the book down, and then we will go on. He was not a fool, and I do not believe he was a liar. He was a self taught man with a good mind and a great deal of patience, who read the hardest texts in the world in the evenings for decades, and who saw a pattern in them, and who believed the pattern with his whole heart until the day he died. People have been wrong that way before. Great people. The story of scholarship is mostly the story of people who were sure and were wrong and were sure anyway. It is not a small thing to be that sure about something that old. It is a kind of love. I put the book down beside the seal. The lamp hums. Now. Where did the idea come from. Because it did not begin with him.

Eight years before the paperback on the table, in 1968, a Swiss writer named Erich von Daniken published a book with a question for a title. It asked whether the gods had driven chariots. Whether the winged and shining figures in the old stories, the ones who came down out of the sky in every culture on earth, might have been remembered from real visitors, in real machines, by people who had no other words for what they saw. The book was enormous. It was translated everywhere, it became a film, and for a few years in the early 1970s it was very hard to find a person who had not at least heard of it. Its author lived to ninety, and died in the winter of 2026, and I am going to leave him there, with one sentence, because this is not his night. What his book did was open a door. It made an idea respectable enough to be argued with, which is the first thing any idea needs. The chariots book was a book of pictures and questions. It pointed at the lines in the desert of Peru, at the great stone heads of Easter Island, at a carving on a tomb lid in Mexico that looked, if you turned it sideways and squinted, like a man at the controls of something, and it asked, over and over, how could they have done this, and who showed them. It did not read any ancient language. It did not need to. Its whole method was the raised eyebrow, and it was very good at it. The man from New York did something different, and it is why his book outlasted the other. He said: I have read the texts. Not the pictures, the words. In the original. And here is the story they tell, in order, with names and dates. That is a much larger claim, and a much more serious one, and it is the reason his book is on the table tonight and the other one is not. A raised eyebrow is a question. A translation is an answer. People came to the second book because it promised to close the door the first one had opened, and to tell them, finally, what was on the other side. And the idea, put plainly, was this. The old stories are not made up. They are misremembered. Strip away the awe and the poetry and you will find, underneath, an event. Now here is why the tablets of Sumer were the perfect home for that idea, and it is worth understanding, because it is not an accident. They are the oldest writing on earth. Nobody argues with that. When you read the story of the two waters you are reading something that was already old when the pyramids were new, and if you are looking for the first memory, the first event, the one everything else is a copy of, that is where you would look. They are strange. The Greek gods are people with weather in their hands. The Sumerian gods are harder to hold. They come in crowds. They are assigned jobs. They complain about the work. They hold assemblies and vote. They dig canals. There is a strangeness in those tablets that does not feel like the strangeness of a made up story, and a person reading them for the first time, alone, at night, could be forgiven for thinking they sounded less like a myth and more like minutes of a meeting. And they had almost no readers. That is the third thing, and it is the important one. When the Swiss book came out, the number of people alive who could read Sumerian and Akkadian fluently was small enough to fit in a lecture hall. The great dictionaries were half finished. The tablets sat in drawers in Philadelphia and London and Berlin and Istanbul by the tens of thousands, most of them never yet read by anyone. An ordinary person who wanted to check a claim about the Sumerian tablets could not check it. There was nothing to check it against. Into that room, that quiet room with the drawers, walked a self taught man from New York who could read the wedges, and who said: I have read them, and here is what they say. And he was, for a while, almost the only voice that ordinary people could hear. Hold on to that. Because the whole shape of the night is going to be this: what people say, and then what the thing is. And for thirty years the second half of that sentence was very hard for anyone to get hold of, and the first half was in every bookshop. The dictionaries are finished now. I will come back to that at the end, because it is a good ending. For now, we open the book to its first claim, which is a single word, and it is the word that brought most of you here.

Anunnaki. Here is what people say. They say it is not a name at all but a sentence. That in Sumerian it breaks apart into pieces, an, and nun, and na, and ki, and that the pieces mean sky, and descent, and from, and earth, and that read together, the way the book reads them, the word means those who from heaven to earth came. They say that this is the plainest evidence there is, hiding in the open, in the name of the gods themselves. That the Sumerians were not being poetic. They were being exact. The gods were called the ones who came down because they were the ones who came down. It is a beautiful reading. I want to say that first and mean it. There is a kind of pleasure that only comes from a word opening in your hand like that, and a great many people have felt it, reading that page, and it is why the word is on a million thumbnails tonight. Now here is what the dictionaries say, and I will say it once and plainly and then we will go on. The word is real. You have heard it all season. In the tablets it is a nun na, and sometimes a nun na ke ne, and it is a crowd word, a word for the great gods as a group, the way you might say the household or the court. The old scholars read it as the offspring of An, the princely seed, the children of the sky god, because An is the sky, and the nun part carries the sense of prince, or great one, and the rest is the ordinary grammar that turns a name into a belonging. The gods who belong to An. The great ones of An's line. The piece that people read as earth is the sign for earth, but it is there for its sound and not its meaning, the way a picture of an eye in a puzzle stands for the word I. It writes the little ending that means of, the hinge that makes the gods belong to An, and that ending sits on the end of a great many Sumerian words without turning any of them into a journey. There is no verb in the name. There is no came. There is no down. The Sumerian for coming down is a different word, and it is not there. That is all. That is the whole of what the object is. A word for a crowd of gods, made from the sky god's name and a word for greatness. And I said I would set it down, so I set it down. But I want to leave one thing beside it before I do, because it is fair to both sides. The reason the reading in the book feels right is that Sumerian words really do work that way. They really are made of small pieces stuck together, and a person who has learned that, and who has learned the meanings of the pieces, can build readings that sound like sentences. The trick is that a language is not only its pieces. It is the way the pieces are allowed to sit. And the way the scholars know which way the pieces sit is not a secret. It is the other ten thousand tablets, where the same pieces appear, in lists, in prayers, in letters about sheep, and where the word never once means anything but the great gods. And here is how the scholars came to know the pieces at all, because it is worth a minute and it is a lovely thing. Sumerian is a language with no relatives. Nothing spoken on earth today descends from it, and when the tablets were first dug up nobody could read a word. What saved it was the Babylonians. They spoke Akkadian, a language that does have relatives, and they kept Sumerian the way Europe kept Latin, as the language of prayer and law and school, long after nobody spoke it at home. And so their schoolboys made lists. Column after column, a Sumerian word and beside it the Akkadian word that meant the same thing, thousands of lines, on hundreds of tablets, and then lists of signs, and lists of grammar, and whole school exercises with the teacher's corrections on them. The Babylonians wrote the Sumerian dictionary themselves, four thousand years ago, for their children. The scholars did not invent the meaning of the pieces. They found it, in the homework of a dead city. That is the difference, and it is going to be the difference all night. One book and ten thousand tablets. I am not going to say it again. You will feel it, in each chapter, in the second half, the way you feel the floor of a pool with your feet. The radiator ticks. I turn the page. The next claim is not a word. It is a planet.

Here is what people say, and this is the heart of the book, and the title of it, so I will give it room. They say there is a planet in our own solar system that we have not found. Not a small one. A large world, bigger than the earth, on an orbit so long and so stretched that for most of its year it is far out in the dark beyond Neptune, beyond Pluto, beyond where our telescopes have looked, and that once in its year it swings in, through the crowd of the known planets, close enough to be seen, and then away again. They say its year is three thousand six hundred of ours. They say the Sumerians knew it and named it and counted it among the planets, which is why the book is called what it is called: the sun, the moon, the nine planets we know, and the twelfth, which is theirs. They say this is where the Anunnaki came from. That it was their home. That when it swung in close, every three thousand six hundred years, they could cross to earth, and back, and that this is why the gods in the tablets arrive and depart, and why a sar, the great number of the Sumerian counting, the one the King List reckons its ancient reigns in, is three thousand six hundred. It was never a number, they say. It was a year. Their year. The kings of the list who reigned for eight sars reigned for eight orbits of the home world, and the number was true, and it is only our small idea of time that makes it sound impossible. And they say the Sumerians had a name for the planet. They called it Nibiru. The planet of the crossing. Because it crosses. I want you to sit with that for a moment, because it is the best thing in the book, and I understand exactly why it took hold. You have spent a season with the King List. You heard kings reign for twenty eight thousand years and thirty six thousand years, and you felt what everybody feels, which is that those numbers cannot be true and must mean something. And then a man hands you a key, and the key fits, and the numbers open. Eight sars. Eight orbits. Of course. It is a wonderful feeling. It is the feeling of a locked door that has been locked your whole life swinging open, and I would not take it from anyone lightly. Now here is what the tablets say. Once, plainly. The word is real. I said that about the last word and I will say it about this one. Nibiru, or as the Akkadians wrote it, neberu, is a real word on real tablets, and it is a beautiful word, and its plain meaning is the crossing. A ford. The place where you cross a river. And from that, a crossing point in the sky. It appears in the star lists and the sky handbooks the scribes of Babylon made, and in the poem of the two waters, and it is a station in the sky, a point a bright body reaches and stands at, most often Jupiter. The men who made those lists were the same men who kept a diary of the sky, and I want to stay with that diary for a moment, because it is the truest thing in this chapter and almost nobody talks about it. For something like seven hundred years, from the middle of the eighth century before Christ down almost to the birth of Christ, the scribes of Babylon kept a diary of the sky. Every night. Where the moon rose and set and how thick it was. Which planet stood near which star. The weather, because clouds mattered. The price of barley and dates and wool in the market that month, and the level of the river, written on the same tablet under the same date, because the scribes believed the sky and the earth kept time together and they wanted the record to show it. Seven hundred years. Generations of men who never saw the beginning of the diary and knew they would never see its end, adding one night each. It is one of the longest continuous records of the sky that human beings have ever kept, nothing older matches it, and it is in the British Museum in London in pieces, and out of it, patiently, the scribes learned to predict eclipses, and the returns of the planets, and the slow wobble of the moon, with numbers so good that the Greeks borrowed them and never bettered them. That is what the Babylonians knew about the sky. It was not a secret handed down. It was seven hundred years of looking up. And in those lists neberu is not a planet nobody can see. It is a station. A point that a bright body reaches and stands at. Most often, in those lists, the body is Jupiter, the great slow wanderer, the brightest thing in the sky after the moon and the morning star, and neberu is the place where Jupiter stands when it has crossed the middle of the sky. Sometimes the name is given to Marduk's star, which is Jupiter again under another name, because Marduk was the god of Babylon and Jupiter was his lamp. Once or twice the scribes hang the word on something else, on Mercury, on a star. But it is always a crossing. It is always something you can look up and see. It never once, on any tablet anywhere, means a world beyond the last planet. And you have heard the word before, in this season, without knowing it. In the poem of the two waters, when Marduk makes the sky, he sets the stations of the stars, and he fixes a station for himself, the crossing, so that the others will know their courses by it. The listener who was here on the first night heard that line go by. It was Jupiter. It was the god's own star, put in the middle of the sky to keep the others honest. And the sar. You know what the sar is. You have known since the first Anunnaki special, when the King List was on the table and I told you, lightly, that the great unit was sixty times sixty, a counting word, on the tablets ten thousand times, in the accounts of grain and the lists of workers. You got there before I finished the sentence. You did it on the second night of the specials and you did it again just now, when I said what people say about the orbit, and you felt it, a small cool click behind the warm feeling, the sound of the key turning back. That is all. I have set it down. But I want to leave one more thing beside it, because it is the fair thing and because it is true. The feeling of the door opening was real. Nobody is a fool for having felt it. The numbers on the King List are strange and they do mean something, and the scholars have their own answers, about sacred arithmetic and the way old peoples wrote greatness as bigness, and those answers are quieter than the orbit, and less fun, and I think they are right, and you are allowed to think whatever you like, and you are also allowed to be asleep. I put the book face down on the table, open, to keep the page. Now I pick up the seal. Because the seal is the picture of the planet, they say. And it is on the table in front of us, and we can look.

Here is what people say. They say that on this little stone, carved more than four thousand years ago, is a map of our solar system. That in the top corner, where the star is, the carver has made the sun, with its rays going out, and that around the sun, in a ring, are small round marks, and that if you count the marks there are eleven of them, and with the sun that is twelve, and that the twelve are the sun and the moon and the nine planets and the one we have not found. They say the sizes are right, roughly, that the bigger dots are where the bigger planets should be. They say a Sumerian carver could not have known there were nine planets, let alone drawn them in order, unless somebody had told him. And they say the somebody was the gods. This is the most reproduced object in the whole story. It is on the cover of books and it is on a hundred thousand web pages, and nearly always it is shown cropped, so that you see only the corner with the star, blown up large, with arrows. Now. It is on the table. Let us look at the whole of it. It is a presentation scene. That is the name the scholars give to this kind of picture, and once you know the kind, you will see it everywhere, because there are thousands of seals like this one. On the right, a figure sits on a chair, a god or a king, wearing the long flounced robe that you have seen all season on the walls of the tablet house. Toward him, from the left, the others come, standing, and in pictures of this kind the one being presented is usually led forward by the hand or the wrist by a lesser god, the way you would bring a friend to meet someone important. It is a picture of somebody being brought before somebody greater. An introduction. A man being presented to a god, or to a lord, so that the lord will look kindly on him. That is what these seals were for. They were a person's signature, and the picture was a prayer. They were also jewelry. A seal was drilled through its length and worn on a pin or a cord, at the wrist or the neck, and they were cut from lapis and hematite and jasper and shell and carnelian, by craftsmen working with a bow drill and a copper point and a great deal of patience, on a surface the size of the tip of your little finger. The finest of them, from the age of the kings of Akkad, which is when this one was made, four thousand three hundred years or so ago, are among the loveliest small things human hands have made, and museums keep them in trays, thousands of them, and each one, rolled out, is a scene: a god in a boat, a hero wrestling a bull, a goddess with grain growing from her shoulders, a lord on a chair being brought a gift. The stars on them are a language of their own. An eight pointed star is the great goddess, the one you met in the moon house and at the seven gates. A disc with rays is the sun. A crescent is the moon god. Carvers put them over scenes the way a painter signs a corner, and everyone knew what they meant. Between the figures, in the space above their heads, there is writing. It is cuneiform, three lines of it, and it can be read, and it has been read, many times, and what it says is names. It names a man, and it names a second man, and it says that one of them is the servant of the other. It is the owner's name. It is what you would expect to find on a signature. It says nothing about the sky. And in the top corner, the star. Here is the thing to know about that star, and I will say it once. The Sumerians and the Babylonians had a way of drawing the sun, and they used it on thousands of seals and stones and boundary markers, over two thousand years, and it does not change much. The sun is a disc, and from the disc go rays, and the rays are wavy, or they are straight lines with wavy lines between them, so that the disc is a thing that gives off heat as well as light. When you see a disc with wavy rays on a Mesopotamian stone, you are looking at the sun god, and everyone who made it and everyone who saw it knew that. The thing in the corner of this seal has no wavy rays. It has points. Straight points, coming from a small centre, the way a child draws a star, and on Mesopotamian stones a shape like that is a star, and a star, on a seal, is the sky god, or a god in general, or simply the heavens, over the scene, the way a cross might sit over a scene in a church. Around it there are small marks, in a ring. They are part of the star. They are the way a carver fills the space around a star so that it shines. They are on other seals too, around other stars, in other numbers. That is the object. A prayer with a signature on it, and a star over the heads of the people praying, and a picture of a man being led forward by the hand. I said I would set it down and I set it down. But look at it a moment longer, not for the argument, just because it is here. It is four thousand years old. Somebody wore it on a string around their neck or their wrist, and rolled it across the wet clay of a letter or a jar seal, and their name went out into the world on it, and the name is still there, in the corner of a museum in Berlin, under glass, on a Tuesday, being looked at by nobody. The man who owned it never knew he would be the most famous seal owner on earth. He wanted the god to look kindly on him. It is a small wish, and a kind one, and I like him for it. The polisher in the corridor starts up again, far away, and stops. I turn the seal a little so the lamp catches the flounces on the seated figure's robe. Then I turn back to the book, because the next claim is about why they came, and it is about gold, and gold is a thing the tablets know a great deal about.

Here is what people say. They say the home planet was dying. That its air was thinning, or leaking, or wearing away, in the long cold of the far part of its orbit, and that its people, who were very advanced, knew of a way to mend a sky. They say it needed gold. Fine gold, ground to dust and lifted into the high air, where it would hang, and shield, and keep the warmth in. And they say there was not enough gold at home, and that they looked outward, and found a world that had it, in quantity, in the ground. This one. They say they came for it, four hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and that they landed in the south, in Africa, where the gold is, and they dug. That the diggers were the younger gods, the ones the tablets call the Igigi, and that they dug for forty sars, which they read as a hundred and forty four thousand years, in the heat and the dark, until they could not stand it, and they marched on the house of the great god and burned their tools at his door and refused to go back down. And they say that was the crisis, the moment the whole story turns on. Because the gold still had to come up. And there was nobody left to dig it. And they say this is why, ever after, human beings have loved gold past all reason. That the wanting of it was put in us. That it is a memory of the reason we were made. That is the mission of the book, and it is the engine that drives everything after it, and it is told, in the book, with real sweep. A dying world. A desperate voyage. Tired gods in the mines of the south. You can see why it became a film in people's heads. Now here is what the tablets say. And this one you know already, because you heard it on the first night of the specials, from the poem itself. The Igigi are real. The strike is real. It is the opening of the flood poem, the one the scholars call Atrahasis, and it is one of the oldest things you heard all season. The younger gods are worked too hard. And the poem is very clear about what the work is. They dig. They dig the rivers. They dig the Tigris and the Euphrates, which is to say they dig canals, they cut the channels that bring the water to the fields, and they carry earth in baskets, and the baskets are heavy, and the years are long, and the poem says forty years, and on some tablets it says a number that is a sar, and either way it is long enough, and they have had enough. They burn their tools. They march on Enlil's house at night. They surround it. And the great gods wake up frightened and hold a council. That is the poem. Canals and baskets. It is the story of the land you spent a season in, which is a land of mud and water where nothing grows unless somebody digs a channel, and where the digging never ends, and where the oldest poem about the gods is a poem about how even the gods got tired of it. There is no gold in it. Not in the strike, not in the council, not in the making of people that comes after. The word does not appear. And the place where the book puts the mines, the Abzu, which it reads as a word for the far south, for Africa, for the land below the equator where the gold is, is a word you know very well by now. You spent a night in it. The Abzu is the sweet water under the earth, the deep that the wells reach down into and the marshes rise up out of, and it is Enki's house, at Eridu, the oldest city, at the head of the gulf, in the reeds. It is not a continent. It is what is under your feet when you dig a well in the mud of Sumer and find it filling. The book takes the god's house and moves it thousands of miles south, because the gold needed somewhere to be. The tablets never moved it. It is still under Eridu, which is still there, a low mound in the desert in the south of Iraq, with the temple of the first king still under the sand. Gold appears in the tablets, of course. It appears constantly. It is on the statues of the gods and the throne of the king and the walls of the temple, and it is weighed out in the accounts, and it is given as gifts and stolen in wars and listed in dowries, and it is, in every single one of those thousands of lines, what gold is everywhere: a bright heavy metal that people love because it is bright and heavy and does not tarnish. It is never a medicine. It is never dust in a sky. The tablets know a great deal about gold and none of it is that. That is all. I set it down. And the thing I leave beside it is this, and it is not an argument, it is only something I noticed reading the book. The gold is the part of the story that comes from nowhere. Every other piece has a tablet behind it, a real word, a real seal, a real poem, that the book reads in its own way. The gold has no tablet. It is the piece the story needed in order to make the other pieces move, and so it was supplied. The author would not have put it that way. But it is worth knowing which parts of a story are found and which parts are built, and the gold was built. The radiator ticks. The lamp is steady. I turn the page, and the next one is the one most of you have been waiting for, because it is about us.

Here is what people say. They say that when the diggers refused to dig, the gods needed a worker, and that the cleverest of them, Enki, the one you know from the deep water, proposed to make one. Not from nothing. From what was here. They say there was already a creature on the earth, walking, hunting, not yet speaking, a kind of early human that the scientists would later call by a Latin name, and that Enki and his half sister, the goddess of birth, took that creature into their laboratory in the south, and mixed its essence with the essence of a god, the blood of a god, and grew the mixture in the womb of a goddess, and that the first tries went wrong, and came out crooked and blind and strange, and that at last one came out right, and they called him Adamu, and they made more, and they called the new creatures lulu, which they say means the mixed ones, the primitive workers, and they sent them down into the mines. They say this is what the tablets mean by making a man from clay and blood. That clay is a word for the raw material, the earth creature, and blood is the word for what was added, and that the goddess kneading the mixture in the poem is a scientist at a bench, and the fourteen pieces she divides it into are fourteen wombs, and the failures in the poem of Enki and the birth goddess, the ones who cannot hold their water or cannot see or cannot bear children, are the prototypes that did not work. They say the tablets describe a genetic experiment as exactly as people four thousand years ago could describe one, and that if you read them with modern eyes, you can see the lab. I will say plainly that this is the chapter of the book where a great many readers stop being interested and start being convinced. Because the poem is so strange, and because the reading fits it so closely, and because the fit feels like proof. It is a remarkable piece of reading, whatever else it is. Now here is what the tablets say. And again you have heard it, twice, and you will hear it now beside the other telling, which is the whole point of tonight. The council of the frightened gods has a problem. The diggers will not dig. And Enki says, let the birth goddess make a human, and let the human carry the basket. So they take one of the gods, a god who has a mind, whose name means something like the ear and the wit, and they kill him, and the birth goddess, whose name is Nintu and also Mami, mixes his flesh and his blood with clay. And the poem is very exact about what happens next, and it is not a laboratory, it is a ritual. The gods spit on the clay. The goddess recites over it. There is a drum. She pinches off fourteen pieces and lays seven on the right and seven on the left, and a brick between them, and after ten months the womb opens, and there are seven men and seven women, and the poem then gives instructions for what to say at a birth, and for the days a mother and father should keep apart, and it is, at that point, plainly a text that priests used, about how babies arrive and what the words are when they do. And the other poem, the one with Enki and the birth goddess at a banquet, is a drinking story. They are drunk. She makes people with faults on purpose, to show off, a man who cannot hold his water, a woman who cannot bear, a blind man, and for every one of them Enki finds a place in the world, a job, a use, a dignity. Then he makes one that she cannot find a place for, and the game ends, and the poem is about the giving of fates, about how everyone, however made, is given somewhere to stand. It is one of the kindest things on the tablets. And the word. Lulu. Or, as the Akkadians wrote it, lullu. It is on the tablets many times. It means human being, the first people, mankind as the poems say it, and it carries no sense of mixing and no sense of worker. It is us, in their language, before we had our own. That is the object. A ritual for a birth, a drinking story about fates, and a word for a person. I set it down. And I leave this beside it, and it is the thing I most want to say tonight, so I will say it carefully. The reason the reading fits so closely is that the reading is drawn from the poem. That is not a trick. It is what the book does. It takes a true and strange thing, a goddess mixing clay and blood, and it lays a modern picture over it, a bench, a vial, a womb, and because the picture was cut to fit the poem, the poem fits the picture. That will always feel like proof. It is the feeling of a key you cut yourself, opening the lock you cut it from. The tablets are real. The strangeness is real. The laboratory was brought to them. And the poem itself, read as itself, is not smaller for that. A goddess kneading clay with a god's blood while the gods spit into it and a drum beats, and seven mothers on the left and seven on the right, is not a lesser story than a laboratory. It is a stranger one. It is only that we have stopped being able to hear how strange it is, because we are not four thousand years old. The polisher hums and stops. I turn the page, and the next chapter leaves the tablets for a moment and goes to a different book, one that most of you have on a shelf.

Here is what people say. They say that the Bible remembers the same events, in a different language, from a different side of the desert. That the sixth chapter of the book of Genesis, in a few short verses just before the flood, says that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, and took wives among them, and that there were giants in the earth in those days, and that the giants were the children of those unions, and were mighty men, the men of old. They say the Hebrew word for the giants is Nephilim, and that the word means those who were cast down, or those who fell, and that it is the Anunnaki again, under a Hebrew name. The ones who came down. They say the sons of God are the visitors, and the daughters of men are the workers they made, and the giants are the children of the two, and that Genesis, being much later, kept the memory with the details worn off, the way a coin keeps a face. And they say this is the bridge. That the two oldest books on earth, the tablets of Sumer and the scroll of Genesis, tell one story between them, and that once you see it, you see it everywhere, in every flood story and every giant story in every land. Now here is what the texts are. There are two books. That is the first thing, and it is not nothing. One is written in Sumerian and Akkadian, on clay, in the land between the rivers, and the oldest of it is more than four thousand years old. The other is written in Hebrew, on scrolls, in a hill country to the west, and the oldest parts of it, on the most generous reckoning, are nearer three thousand years old. They are different books, in different languages, from different peoples, and reading one beside the other is a thing that scholars have done for a hundred and fifty years, with great care and great pleasure, because the two do speak to each other. The flood is in both. The making of a person from clay is in both. The long lives before the flood are in both. But the bridge in the book is a particular bridge, and it is built of two planks. The first plank is the name. Anunnaki means those who came down, the book says, and Nephilim means those who fell, and so they are the same. And you have already seen, three chapters ago, what the first name means in its own language, and it does not mean that. And the second word is harder than it looks. Nephilim is a word that appears only a handful of times in the whole of the Hebrew Bible, and the old scholars themselves were not sure of it, and the translators into Greek two thousand years ago rendered it as giants, and the guesses about its root are guesses, and the sons of God in that passage have been read for two thousand years as angels, as the line of Seth, as kings, as judges, by people who knew the language very well and did not agree with each other. It is a passage that has always been a doorway. The book walks through it. So did the Watchers of Enoch, whom you met a few weeks ago in another special, and so has nearly everyone who ever read those four verses, because they are strange and short and ask to be filled. The second plank is that the sons of God are the makers and the daughters of men are the made. And that plank rests entirely on the last chapter, on the laboratory, and you know what the laboratory rests on. That is the object. Two books, four verses, an old strange word, and a bridge that readers built, which is a fair thing to say about a bridge, because that is what bridges are. I set it down. And I leave this beside it. The bridge is real, in one sense. The people who wrote Genesis lived in the same world as the people who wrote the tablets. They traded with them and were conquered by them and carried off to their city, and they knew their stories, and they wrote their own. So the flood is in both, and the clay is in both, and the giants and the long lives are in both, not because a spaceship landed twice, but because stories walk, along roads, in caravans, in the mouths of exiles, and they always have. The bridge between the two books is a road. It is a very old road. You could still walk it. That is a better story too, and it is the true one. And I will tell you who first walked it, because you met him on the second night of the specials and he belongs here. In 1872, in the British Museum in London, a young man named George Smith, who had been an engraver of banknotes and had taught himself the wedges in his lunch hours, was sorting a tray of broken tablets from the library of the last great king of Assyria, and on one of the pieces he read about a boat, and a flood, and a bird sent out to find dry land, and he understood, in that instant, that the story in Genesis had an older brother. A newspaper paid him to go to Nineveh and find the missing piece, and he went, and he found it, in the rubble, in a week. That is where the bridge was first crossed. By a self taught man who read the tablets in his own way, and was right. The road between the two books was found by a man very like the man who wrote the paperback, and I want you to know that, because it means the door he walked through was a real door. Only the room on the other side was not the room he expected. The lamp is steady. Now the book on the table ends, in a sense, because the author died in 2010, and the story did not stop when he did. It grew. And the next chapter is about what grew.

When a story is loved, it does not sit still. People add to it. And in the years since the paperback was printed, and especially in the years since the author's death, the story of the Anunnaki has been carried forward by a newer generation of writers and speakers, in books and in long videos watched by millions, and they have added new pillars to it, from places the original book never went. I am going to tell you the three that people mention most, in the same shape as before. What people say. What the thing is. Here is the first, and it is the one that sounds most like science, because it is drawn from science. They say that if you look at the chromosomes of a human being, the packages the body keeps its instructions in, you will count forty six. And that if you look at the chromosomes of a chimpanzee, or a gorilla, or an orangutan, our nearest relatives, you will count forty eight. And that this difference is not scattered about. It is in one place. Our second chromosome, they say, is plainly two ape chromosomes joined end to end, and you can see the join, and there are even the worn ends of the two old chromosomes still inside it, at the seam, and the old middle of the second one, silent, like a scar. They say nature does not do that. They say a join that clean, in one place, that changed a whole species, is a signature. That somebody did it. That the tablets told us who. Now here is what the thing is, and I will say it once. All of the observation is true. The count is true. The join is true. The worn ends at the seam are true, and the silent second middle is true, and the people who found these things are the same people who study how species change over long time, and they found them by looking for them, because their own account of how we came to be predicted that a join like that would be there. Chromosomes fuse. It happens in mice, it happens in horses, it happens in people, now, occasionally, and the person is usually fine and does not know. A fusion that happened once, in an ancestor, and was carried down, is not a scar on a species. It is a family mark. It is in the ordinary story of how we are related to everything else that breathes, and it was in that story before anyone thought to look for the Anunnaki in it. There are two more claims that travel with that one, and I will give them a sentence each, attributed, and no more. It is said that the large parts of our instructions that do not seem to do anything are dormant code, placed there, waiting to be switched on. The scientists call those parts by a rude name that is now thought to be unfair to them, because more of it does something every year, and none of what it does has been found to be a message. And it is said that there is a gene for worship, put in us so that we would obey. No such gene has been found by anyone looking for it, and the search has been thorough, because it would be a remarkable thing to find. Here is the second new pillar. They say there are tablets. Not clay ones. Green ones. The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, they are called, and they say these are the words of a god of Egypt who was also a survivor of Atlantis, written in the deep past, recovered, translated, and that they tell of the same visitors, the same making, the same long orbits, from another side of the world, and so confirm the whole account. Here is what the book is. It is a real book, and you can buy it. It was written in the middle of the last century, in Colorado, by a man named Maurice Doreal, who founded a religious society there, the Brotherhood of the White Temple, and who said that he had found the tablets in the Great Pyramid in 1925 and translated them. No one else has seen them. There is no green tablet in any museum, no photograph, no fragment, no record before his. It is a modern text, from within living memory of some people alive tonight. It borrows its name from an older thing, a short Emerald Tablet, a single page of sayings, that came through Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages, under the name of Hermes, and that alchemists loved for centuries, and whose most famous line you have heard, about what is above and what is below. That one is old, and short, and says nothing about planets. The long green tablets of Thoth are from Colorado. And here is the third. The newer voices have a name that is mentioned more than any other, and it is fair to say it once, because these are his claims and he has made them in public, at length, for years. Billy Carson is an author and a speaker, and it is in his books and his broadcasts that the chromosome and the green tablets have been carried, together with the older story, to a new and very large audience. I have told you what they are and what the things are, and that is the end of it. I set them all down together. And I leave this beside them, gently, because the night is getting late and the room is getting warm. The new pillars are different from the old ones in one way that is worth noticing. The old ones, the name, the planet, the seal, the gold, the clay, were readings of real tablets. You could disagree with the reading and still hold the tablet in your hand. The new ones are not readings of tablets. One is a reading of a chromosome, which the tablets never mention. One is a book from Colorado. The story has drifted, over fifty years, away from the clay it started on, the way a boat drifts from the bank when nobody is holding the rope. That is not an accusation. It is what happens to stories. It happened to the stories on the tablets, too, over a much longer time, and that is why the flood comes down to us in so many tellings. The polisher has stopped for good now. I think the man has gone home. The building is very quiet.

Here is what people say, and it is the last of the old pillars, and it is the one that does not need a tablet at all, because it is an argument from the ground. They say that civilisation appeared too fast. That for a hundred thousand years people lived in small bands, hunting, gathering, making the same stone tools their grandparents made, and then, in one small country between two rivers, in what seems like an afternoon, there were cities. Walls. Streets. Temples the size of hills. Writing. Mathematics. Law. Kings. Astronomy. Bronze. The wheel. They say nobody invents all of that at once, from nothing, and that the tablets themselves say they did not: the Sumerians wrote that the arts of civilisation were given to them, handed down from the gods, brought to Eridu by a being who came up out of the water. They say the same is true of Egypt, where the pyramids stand, and that no one has ever properly explained how a people with copper tools and rope raised two and a half million blocks into a shape that is still the largest stone building on earth, so exactly aligned to the stars, and that the workers, if there were workers, left almost no trace of themselves. They say the gaps are the evidence. That where the record goes quiet, something was done that the record could not hold. It is a strong feeling and an honest one, and everybody who has ever stood at the foot of a pyramid has felt it, including the people who dig there for a living. Now here is what the ground says, and I am going to tell it as a story, because it is one, and it is a better one. In the villages of the land between the rivers, long before there were cities, people kept accounts. They kept them with little clay shapes. A cone for a measure of grain. A ball for a sheep. A disc for a jar of oil. Little tokens, the size of a fingernail, and they have been found by the thousand, in villages that are nine thousand years old, and for four thousand years, which is a very long time, that is how people counted what they owed each other. Then somebody, somewhere, had a problem. They needed to send the tokens with a shipment, so the receiver would know what was owed, and they needed the tokens not to be tampered with on the road. So they put the tokens inside a hollow ball of clay and sealed it. A clay envelope. And then, because you could not see inside the envelope, they pressed the tokens into the outside of it before they sealed it, so that the marks on the outside would tell you what was inside. And one day somebody noticed that if you have the marks on the outside, you do not need the tokens on the inside. You can just make the marks. On a flat piece of clay. With a reed. That, most of the people who study it now think, is where writing came from. Not from a god. From a shepherd's receipt. It took thousands of years and it happened one small step at a time, and every one of the steps is in the ground, in order, in the layers, from the tokens to the envelopes to the marked envelopes to the tablets, and the earliest tablets, from the great city of Uruk, five thousand years ago, are not poems and are not prayers. They are lists. Grain. Beer. Workers. Sheep. The first thing writing was ever used for was to make sure nobody cheated on the beer. And the city came the same way. Not in an afternoon. Over two thousand years, from villages to towns to walled towns to cities, and the walls of the older towns are under the walls of the newer ones, and you can dig down through them like the rings of a tree. The scholars who put this together did not do it to spite anyone. They did it because the tokens were there, in the drawers, thousands of them, unexplained, and one woman spent her working life sorting them by shape and asking what the shapes were for, and the answer, when it came, was the birth of writing, and it was a receipt. Her name was Denise Schmandt Besserat, and she began in the 1970s, in the same years the paperback was being written, looking at the same drawers from the other direction, and she is one of the reasons the second half of tonight's sentence can be said at all. And the city where the first tablets were found is Uruk, the city of the famous king, the one with the walls he walks along on the last tablet of his poem. Five thousand years ago it was the largest city on earth, and it had a temple on a platform, painted white, that you could see across the plain for a day's walk, and it had, in the drawers of that temple, five thousand tablets of lists. That is what the first city looked like from the inside. A very large accounts department with a view. And the pyramids. For a hundred years the people who said nobody could have built them were right about one thing. Nobody had found the builders. And then, in the 1990s, on the plateau at Giza, a little way south of the great pyramids, two men and their teams began to dig in a place where the sand had been left alone, and they found a town. Streets. Barracks, long halls where the men slept in rows. Bakeries, with the great bell shaped bread moulds still in them, hundreds of them, because you have to feed twenty thousand men and men eat bread. A cattle yard, and the bones of the cattle, young ones, good ones, which means the workers ate well. A cemetery, with the workers' own tombs, small and proud, with their names and their titles on them. Overseer of the side of the pyramid. Inspector of the builders. The two men were Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, and they dug there for twenty years, and what they found was not a camp of slaves and not a landing field. It was a company town. The bread was baked in batches for gangs of workers who rotated in from the villages of the Nile for a season at a time, in the months when the fields were under the flood and there was no farming to do, so that building the king's tomb was, for most of the men who did it, the thing you did in the wet months, for wages in bread and beer, before you went home to plant. It was a national project and a seasonal job. There are records of rations. And in the cemetery there are skeletons with bones that were broken and set and healed straight, which means that when a man fell, somebody was there whose job it was to set them. And on the stones themselves, in the places no one was meant to see, inside the sealed chambers above Khufu's burial room and on the blocks of Menkaure's temple, painted in red ochre by the gangs who hauled them, the names the gangs gave themselves. Friends of Khufu. Drunkards of Menkaure. Work crews, with team names, painted on the blocks the way men paint their names on things, for a laugh, at the end of a shift. That is who built the pyramids. Men with team names, who ate beef and slept in rows and were buried with their titles on their tombs. They left a great deal of trace. It was under the sand, in the one place nobody had dug, and now it is not. That is the ground. I set it down. And the thing I leave beside it is only this. The story of the visitors says: it is too wonderful to be ours. And I understand the feeling. But the receipt that became writing, and the bakers of Giza, and the woman who sorted the tokens, and the drunkards of Menkaure painting their name on a block in the dark, are ours, and I do not think they are less wonderful. I think they are more. A god handing down civilisation is a large thing. A shepherd pressing a token into an envelope, and his grandchild's grandchild pressing a reed into a tablet instead, is a larger one, because it is true, and because they did not know what they were doing, and did it anyway, the way we all do. The lamp is warm. The night is late. The pillars are all down now, all of them, on the table, in a row, and I am not going to build anything out of them. I am going to sit with the seal and the book a while longer, and talk quietly, and then say goodnight.

I want to ask a different question now, and it is not what people say or what the thing is. It is why. Why this story, of all the stories that have been told about the tablets, is the one that a hundred million people know. Why the book on the table is on every shelf and the dictionaries are on almost none. And I think the answer is kind, and I think it is true, and I would like to say it before we sleep. The story is loved because it is shaped like the stories on the tablets. Think about what you heard for twelve nights. Gods who come down. Gods who make people, out of clay, to do the work. Gods who hold assemblies and argue and decide our fate without asking us. Gods who send the flood and regret it. Gods who leave, and are not seen, and are remembered in stories that grow stranger the longer they are told. That is the shape of the oldest religion on earth, and it is a shape that fits the human heart so well that it has never gone out of it. We are made things. We were made for a reason. The makers went away. That is on the clay and it is in Genesis and it is in a paperback from 1976, and the paperback did not invent the shape. It borrowed it, faithfully, from the tablets it was reading, and then it did one thing that the tablets never did. It said: this is not a story. This happened. And that is the whole appeal, and it is not a foolish one. Because the tablets ask a question, on every one of their ten thousand lines, and the question is where did we come from and why. And the scholars, who know the tablets better than anyone, answer that question with a shrug and a receipt, with tokens and canals and shepherds and layers of mud, and that is an answer to a different question. Not to the one the heart is asking. The book on the table answers the question. I have told you, once, plainly, in each chapter, what the clay says instead, and set that down beside it. But it answers it. It looks at the oldest question there is and it says: here is what happened, and here is who did it, and here is why you feel the way you feel. And a great many people would rather have an answer than a shrug, and I do not think that makes them fools. I think it makes them people. So nobody is scolded. And there is one more thing I want to say, and it is about the dictionaries, because I said I would come back to them, and it is a good ending. When the book on the table was written, in the 1970s, the great dictionary of the Akkadian language, the one begun in Chicago in the 1920s, was less than half finished. Volume by volume it came out, over ninety years, each one the size of a paving stone, each one the work of dozens of scholars over decades, and the last volume was published in 2010, which is, by chance, the year the author of the paperback died. Twenty one volumes. Every word the Babylonians and Assyrians ever wrote, with every place it appears, and what it means there. And the Sumerian dictionary, which is younger, is not in volumes at all. It is on the internet. It is free. You can open it tonight on your telephone and type in the word Anunnaki, or the word for crossing, or the word for a human being, and see every tablet it is on and what it means on each one, in about the time it takes to read this sentence. That is what changed. Not the tablets. The tablets said what they said in 1976 and they say it now. What changed is that the second half of the sentence, what the thing is, used to be locked in drawers in Philadelphia, and now it is in your pocket. The scholars did not hide anything. They spent ninety years writing it all down so that they could not be accused of hiding anything, and then they put it where anyone could reach it, and then, being scholars, they did not tell anyone, and went back to work. So that is the whole of what they ask. Not that you believe them. Only that you look. The word is there. The seal is there. The poem of the birth goddess is there, all of it, in a translation you can read in an evening. Look, and decide. Or look, and do not decide, and go to sleep, which is what you are doing now, and which is also fine. The lamp is the only light in the building. The radiator has gone quiet, the way they do late, when the boiler winds down. Outside, somewhere, a city is asleep around a museum, and the museum is asleep around a room, and the room is asleep around two things on a table, and one chair, with you in it.

It is time to put things back. I pick up the seal first. It is cool in the hand, the way stone is, and a little heavier than it looks. I turn it once more under the lamp, and the flounced robe of the seated god catches the light, and the small figure being led forward catches it, and the star in the corner, with its points, catches it last. Then I lift the strip of hardened clay it was rolled on, with its picture standing still, and I carry them both to the case. The case is glass, in the dark gallery, in the middle of a room of other cases. Nobody is there. I open it, and set the seal on its little stand, on the velvet, with the card beside it, V A two hundred and forty three, and I set the rolled out clay beside that, and I close the glass, and it makes the small sound glass makes. And the seal is what it was before anyone said anything about it. A prayer, with a name on it, four thousand years old, under a star. In the morning the museum will open and people will walk past it. Most of them will not stop. A few will. A few will have read the book, and will stop, and lean in, and look at the corner with the star, and count the little marks, and feel the thing they came to feel. And that is all right. It is a seal. It has been looked at by believers and by scholars and mostly by nobody for four thousand years, and it does not mind. Things do not mind. That is the great gift of things. Then the book. I close it, and it does not quite close, because the spine is broken from being opened so often, and I press it flat with my hand. The planet on the cover. The year on the inside. I carry it to the shelf, the long shelf along the study room wall, where the dictionaries are, the paving stone volumes from Chicago, twenty one of them in a row, and I put the paperback at the end of the row, and it looks very small there, and very bright, and it belongs there as much as they do. It is part of the story of these tablets now. It is part of what people did with them. A thousand years from now, if there are museums, it will be in a case of its own, and somebody will roll it out on clay, in a sense, and look at it, and say: this is what one man saw when he looked at the oldest writing in the world. And they will be right to keep it. I turn off the lamp. And in the dark, for a moment, the room is exactly what it is. A long table. A chair with you in it. Two things put away. And outside the window, above the city, the real sky, with the real planets in it, five that you can see with your eyes, the same five the scribes of Babylon watched from their roofs, and wrote down, night after night, for centuries, in a patience that is still the most wonderful thing on any of the tablets. Jupiter is up tonight. Bright, slow, crossing the middle of the sky. Neberu. The ford. Marduk's lamp. It is exactly where they said it would be. You have heard the whole story now. Both halves of it. What people say and what the things are. That is more than almost anyone ever hears, because almost everyone stops after the first half, on one side or the other, and shouts across. You did not shout. You sat in the good chair with the arms, out of the draught, and you listened to all of it, and then you closed your eyes. That was the season. Twelve nights in the tablet house, two nights with the tablets that slept, two with the books the Bible left out, and this one, in the museum, in the dark, with the seal put away and the book on the shelf. The tablets said what they said. A man said what he said. And the sky said nothing, the way it does, and went on crossing. Goodnight.