When Iraq was not yet Iraq, it was the birthplace of the first written words.
The words look like bird tracks. Masterful hands drew them in clay with sharpened canes.
Fire annihilates and rescues, kills and gives life, as do the gods, as do we. Fire hardened the clay and preserved the words. Thanks to fire, the clay tablets still tell what they told thousands of years ago in that land of two rivers.
In our days, George W. Bush, perhaps believing that writing was invented in Texas, launched with joyful impunity a war to exterminate Iraq. There were thousands upon thousands of victims, and not all of them were flesh and blood. A great deal of memory was murdered too.
Living history in the form of numerous clay tablets were stolen or destroyed by bombs.
One of the tablets said:
We are dust and nothing
All that we do is no more than wind.
BORN OF CLAY
The ancient Sumerians believed the entire world was a land between two rivers and between two heavens.
In heaven above lived the gods who ruled.
In heaven below the gods who worked.
And thus it was, until the gods below wearied of working all the time and staged the first strike in history.
Panic ensued.
To keep from dying of hunger, the gods above modeled women and men out of clay and put them to work.
These women and men were born on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
From that clay, too, were made the books that tell their story.
The books say that to die is “to return to the clay.”
ORIGIN OF THE DAYS
When Iraq was Sumeria, time had weeks, weeks had days, and days had names.
The priests drew the first celestial maps and baptized the heavenly bodies, the constellations, and the days.
We have inherited those names, passed on from tongue to tongue, from Sumerian to Babylonian, from Babylonian to Greek, from Greek to Latin, and so on.
They named the seven stars that move across the sky for their gods. And thousands of years later we invoke those same gods for the seven days that move across time. With slight variations, the days of the week still answer to their original names: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. Saturday, Sunday, Monday. .
ORIGIN OF THE TAVERN
When Iraq was Babylonia, female hands ran the table:
May beer never be lacking,
the house be rich in soups,
and bread abound.
In the palaces and the temples, the chef was male. Not so at home. Women made the many beers, sweet, fine, white, golden, dark, aged, as well as the soups and the breads. Any leftovers were offered to the neighbors.
With the passing of time, some houses put in counters and guests became clients. The tavern was born. This tiny kingdom ruled by women, this extension of the home, became a meeting place and a haven of freedom.
Taverns hatched conspiracies and kindled forbidden loves.
More than 3,700 years ago, in the days of King Hammurabi, the gods gave the world two hundred and eighty laws.
One of those laws ordered priestesses to be burned alive if they took part in barroom plots.
RITES OF THE TABLE
When Iraq was Assyria, the king offered a palace banquet in the city of Nimrod, with twenty main dishes accompanied by forty side dishes lubricated by rivers of beer and wine. According to chronicles from 3,000 years ago, the guests numbered 69,574, all of them men, nary a woman, plus the gods who also ate and drank.
From other palaces even more ancient came the first recipes written by the masters of the kitchen. Chefs had as much power and prestige as priests, and their holy formulae have survived the shipwrecks of time and war. Their recipes are precise (“the dough shall rise four fingers in the pot”) or imprecise (“eyeball the salt”), but they all end by saying: “ready to eat.”
Three thousand five hundred years ago, Aluzinnu the jester left us his recipes. Among them, this herald of fine dining:
“For the last day of the next to last month of the year, no nectar compares to tripe from a mule’s ass stuffed with fly shit.”
BRIEF HISTORY OF BEER
One of the earliest proverbs, written in the language of the Sumerians, exonerates drink in case of accident:
Beer is good.
What’s bad is the road.
As the oldest of all books tells it, King Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu was a savage brute until he discovered beer and bread.
Beer traveled to Egypt from the land we now call Iraq. Because it gave the face new eyes, the Egyptians believed it was a gift from their god Osiris. And since barley beer was the twin sister of bread, they called it “liquid bread.”
In the Andes, it is the oldest of offerings: from the beginning, the earth has asked for a few drops of chicha, corn beer, to cheer up its days.
BRIEF HISTORY OF WINE
Reasonable doubt keeps us wondering if Adam was tempted by an apple or by a grape.
But we know with certainty there has been wine in this world ever since the Stone Age, when grapes fermented on their own.
Ancient Chinese canticles prescribed wine to alleviate the pangs of sadness.
The Egyptians believed the god Horus had one eye that was sun and one that was moon. The moon-eye cried teardrops of wine, which the living drank to put themselves to sleep and the dead drank in order to awaken.
A grapevine was the emblem of Cyrus the great, king of the Persians, and wine bathed the festivals of the Greeks and the Romans.
To celebrate human love, Jesus turned six vessels of water into wine. It was his first miracle.
THE KING WHO WANTED TO LIVE FOREVER
Time, our midwife, will be our executioner. Yesterday time suckled us and tomorrow it will devour us.
So it goes, and well we know it.
Or do we?
The very first book born in the world recounts the adventures of King Gilgamesh, who refused to die.
This epic, passed on by word of mouth beginning five thousand years ago, was written down by the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians.
Gilgamesh, monarch of the banks of the Euphrates, was the son of a goddess and a man. Divine will, human destiny: from the goddess he inherited power and beauty, from the man he inherited death.
To be mortal meant nothing to him until his friend Enkidu reached his final day.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu had shared astonishing feats. Together they entered the Cedar Forest, home of the gods, and defeated the giant guardian whose bellow made the mountains tremble. And together they humiliated the Bull of Heaven who, with a single roar, opened a hole that swallowed a hundred men.
The death of Enkidu crushed Gilgamesh and terrified him. He discovered that his valiant friend was made of clay, and that he too was made of clay.
So he set off in search of eternal life. The pursuer of immortality wandered through steppes and deserts,