A History of the World in 100 Objects (16 page)

People in the 1870s were obsessed by biblical history, and there was a great deal of controversy as to the truth of the biblical narratives. So it created a sensation when George Smith found this ancient version of the Flood story, clearly much older than the biblical version. Prime Minister Gladstone came to hear his lecture describing his new translation, and it was reported in front-page articles around the globe, including one in the
New York Times
in which they already noted that the tablet could be read in two quite different ways – does this prove the Bible is true, or show it’s all legendary? And Smith’s discovery gave further ammunition to both sides in the debate as to the truth of biblical history, debates over Darwin, evolution and geology.

What does it do to your perception of a religious text when you discover that it comes from an older society, with a very different set of beliefs? I asked the UK’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks:

Clearly there is a core event behind both narratives, which was a great flood, part of the folk memory of all the peoples of that area. What the ancient texts that tell flood stories do is talk essentially of the great forces of nature being controlled by deities who don’t like human beings very much, and for whom ‘might makes right’. Now the Bible comes along and retells the story, but does so in a unique way – God brings the flood because the world was filled with violence, and the result is that the story becomes moralized, and that is part of the Bible’s programme. This is a radical leap from polytheism to monotheism – to a world in which people worshipped power, to the Bible’s insistence that power must be just and sometimes compassionate, and from a world in which there are many forces, many gods, fighting with one another, to this world in which the whole universe is the result of a single rational creative will. So the more we understand what the Bible is arguing against, the deeper we understand the Bible.

But the Flood Tablet was important not just for the history of religion; it is also a key document in the history of literature. Smith’s tablet comes from the seventh century
BC
, but we now know that other versions of the Flood story had originally been written down a thousand years before that. It was only later that the Flood story was woven by storytellers into the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great epic poem of world literature. Gilgamesh is a hero who sets off on a grand quest for immortality and self-knowledge. He confronts demons and monsters, he survives all kinds of perils, and, eventually, like all subsequent epic heroes, he has to confront the greatest challenge of them all: his own nature and his own mortality. Smith’s tablet is just the eleventh chapter of the story. The Epic of Gilgamesh has all the elements of a cracking good tale, but it’s also a turning-point in the story of writing.

Writing in the Middle East had begun as little more than bean-counting – created essentially for bureaucrats to keep records. It had been used above all for the practical tasks of the state. Stories, on the other hand, were usually told or sung, and they were learnt by heart. But gradually, around 4,000 years ago, stories like that of Gilgamesh began to be written down. Insights into the hero’s hopes and fears could now be shaped, refined and fixed – an author could be sure that his particular vision of the narrative and his personal understanding of the tale would be transmitted directly, and not constantly reshaped by other storytellers. Writing moves authorship from the community to the individual. Hardly less important, a written text can be translated, and so one particular form of a story could now pass easily into many languages. Literature written down like this can become world literature. David Damrosch puts it in perspective:

Gilgamesh is now very commonly assigned as a very first work in literature courses, and it shows a kind of early globalization. It’s the first work of world literature that circulates widely around the ancient world. The great thing about looking at Gilgamesh today is that we see that, if we go back far enough, there’s no clash of civilizations between the Middle East and the West. We find in Gilgamesh the origins of a common culture – its offshoots go off into Homer, the 1001 Nights, and the Bible – so it is really a sort of common thread in our global culture.

The fine, small cuneiform writing of the Flood Tablet was pressed into damp clay

With the Epic of Gilgamesh, represented here by Smith’s Flood Tablet, writing moved from being a means of recording facts to a means of investigating ideas. It changed its nature. And it has changed ‘our’ nature: for literature like Gilgamesh allows us not just to explore our own thoughts but to inhabit the thought worlds of others. That, of course, is also the point of the British Museum, and indeed of the objects that make up this thread of human history that I’m attempting to trace: they offer us the chance of other existences.

Part of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus showing how to calculate the area of a triangle

In seven houses there are seven cats. Each cat catches seven mice. If each mouse were to eat seven ears of corn and each ear of corn, if sown, were to produce seven gallons of grain, how many things are mentioned in total?

This is just one of dozens of similar problems, all equally complicated, all carefully written out – with the answers and showing the working in best schoolbook manner – that are recorded in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. This object is the most famous mathematical papyrus to have survived from ancient Egypt, and the major source for our understanding of how the Egyptians thought about numbers.

The Rhind Papyrus gives us no sense of maths as an abstract discipline through which the world can be conceived and contemplated anew. But it does let us glimpse – and share – the daily headaches of an Egyptian administrator. Like all civil servants, he seems to be looking anxiously over his shoulder at the National Audit Office, eager to ensure that he is getting value for money. So there are calculations about how many gallons of beer, or how many loaves of bread, you should be able to get from a given amount of grain, and how to calculate whether the beer or the bread that you’re paying for has been adulterated.

The papyrus contains eighty-four mathematical problems. Red ink indicates the name of or answer to a problem

The whole Rhind Papyrus contains eighty-four different problems – calculations that would have been used in different scenarios to solve the practical difficulties of administrative life, for instance how to calculate the slope of a pyramid, or the amount of food necessary for different kinds of domesticated birds. It’s mostly written in black, but red is used for each problem’s title and solution. And, interestingly, it is written not in hieroglyphs but in a particular kind of scribbly administrative shorthand that’s much quicker, much simpler, to write.

The papyrus owes its name to an Aberdeen lawyer, Alexander Rhind, who took to wintering in Egypt in the 1850s because the dry heat helped his tuberculosis. There, in Luxor, he bought this papyrus, which turned out to be the largest ancient mathematical text we know, not just from Egypt but from anywhere in the ancient world.

Because it is extremely sensitive to humidity and to light, we keep it in the Papyrus Room of the British Museum. It’s pretty dry and stuffy there, and above all it’s dark, all of which suits the papyrus, which rots in the damp and fades in bright light. It’s the nearest we can get in Bloomsbury to conditions in an ancient Egyptian tomb, where the papyrus presumably spent most of its existence. The whole papyrus would originally have been about 5 metres (17 feet) long and would normally have been rolled up in a scroll. Today it’s in three pieces. The two largest ones are in the British Museum, framed under glass to protect them (the third is in the Brooklyn Museum, New York). The papyrus is about 30 centimetres (roughly a foot) high, and if you look closely you can see the fibres of the papyrus plant.

Making papyrus is laborious but quite straightforward. The plant itself – a kind of reed which can grow to about 4.5 metres (15 feet) high – was plentiful in the Nile Delta. The pith of the plant is sliced into strips, which are soaked and pressed together to form sheets, and the sheets are then dried and rubbed smooth with a stone. Conveniently, the organic fibres of papyrus mesh together without the need for glue. The result is a wonderful surface for writing on – papyrus went on being used across the Mediterranean until about a thousand years ago, and indeed gave most European languages their very word for paper.

But papyrus was expensive – a 5-metre roll like the Rhind Papyrus would have cost two copper deben, about the same as a small goat. So this is an object for the well off.

Why would you spend so much money on a book of mathematical puzzles? I think because to own this scroll would have been a good career move. If you wanted to play any serious part in the Egyptian state, you had to be numerate. A society as complex as theirs needed people who could supervise building works, organize payments, manage food supplies, plan troop movements, compute the flood levels of the Nile – and much more. To be a scribe, a member of the civil service of the pharaohs, you had to demonstrate your mathematical competence. As one contemporary writer put it:

So that you may open treasuries and granaries, so that you may take delivery from one corn-bearing ship at the entrance to the granary, so that on feast days you may measure out the gods’ offerings.

The Rhind Papyrus teaches you all you need to know for a dazzling administrative career. It is effectively a crammer for the Egyptian civil service exams around 1550
BC
. Like self-help publications today that promise instant success, it has a wonderful title, written boldly in red on the front page:

The correct method of reckoning, for grasping the meaning of things, and knowing everything – obscurities and all secrets.

In other words: ‘All the maths you need to know. Buy me, and you buy success.’

The numeracy of the Egyptians, honed by works like the Rhind Papyrus, was widely admired across the ancient world. Plato, for example, urged the Greeks to copy the Egyptians, for whom

The teachers, by applying the rules and practices of arithmetic to play, prepare their pupils for the tasks of marshalling and leading armies and organizing military expeditions and all together form them into persons more useful to themselves and to others and a great deal wider awake.