The precious core of civilisation

In 1989, two years before the Gulf war, I travelled to Baghdad to write an article on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon which the Iraqi Ministry of Culture then planned to have rebuilt. The project never materialised, but instead I was able to explore Baghdad and its intricate labyrinth. One experience was memorable above all: the discovery, in the National Museum, of two small clay tablets which had recently been unearthed in Syria, and dated back to the fourth millennium BC. Each tablet was the size of the palm of my hand and bore a few simple marks: a small indentation near the top, as if a finger had been stuck into the clay, and below it a stick-drawn animal meant to represent on one tablet a goat, on the other perhaps a sheep. Standing in the museum and staring at these ancient pieces of clay, I tried to picture how, on an unimaginably remote afternoon, a brilliant and anonymous ancestor thought of recording a transaction of livestock by drawing signs on clumps of dirt, and in doing so invented for all future times the magical art of writing.