Today's Reading
PREFACE
QAL'AT SHERQAT,
NORTHERN MESOPOTAMIA, 1853
The mound stood on a bluff high above a bend in the river. Excavation teams had peeled off densely packed layers of wind-borne sand, exposing an ancient field of stonework and mud-brick masonry. Fragments of human-headed lions and bulls and smashed bas-reliefs lay strewn across the ruins, evidence that the city had come to some apocalyptic end.
As the sun rose over a landscape of riverine tamarisk trees, thorn bushes, and desert grass, workmen gathered around a square brick platform at the center of the mound. Once, experts believed, it had been the foundations of a temple or a palace. Inscribed relics had been discovered buried deep beneath structures such as this one. One theory held that the ancients had planted them there like time capsules, preserving royal annals for future monarchs to discover. Or perhaps they were messages to be read only by the gods.
Carrying pickaxes and shovels, faces covered with handkerchiefs to protect themselves from dust, the workmen positioned themselves at a corner of the platform and began to dig. They burrowed with difficulty through the concrete-like material, keeping watch all the while for anything unusual camouflaged amid the dun-colored brick.
Four feet below the surface, they had still found nothing. Six feet down, they gazed into an empty hole. But at eight feet, an object caught their attention.
It was a terra-cotta octagon, about the size of a coffeepot. Some pieces had broken off, and a portion had crumbled into powder. A scribe had gouged hundreds of tiny signs into each of its eight sides, squeezed so close together that the markings could barely be distinguished by the naked eye. The diggers clustered around the artifact in curiosity. Its arrowhead-like characters surely conveyed a message: a glimpse of life early in recorded history, when men first formed sophisticated urban centers, made observations of the heavens, and produced an outpouring of written accounts to explain the world. But over the thousands of years that the cylinder had been sealed in darkness, empires had risen and fallen, conquering armies had swept across the land, 150 generations had lived and died, and the meaning of the markings had been lost.
The lead archaeologist—born just miles away, and now one of a handful of men engaged in a race to unearth the secrets of his mysterious forebears—cradled the pieces. He observed how the fragments fit together and noted the deep gouges in the hardened clay.
Who, he wondered, would induce it to tell its stories?
PROLOGUE
A CONTEST ON NEW BURLINGTON STREET
On a late-summer day in 1856, a letter carrier for metropolitan London's Post Office stepped from a mail coach in front of a three-story town house in Mayfair. Crossing the threshold, the courier—nattily attired in a black-silk top hat, scarlet frock coat, black-and-white-checkered vest, and dark gray trousers—handed a wax-sealed envelope to a clerk. The missive was addressed to Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
The anonymous postman had no way of knowing that the envelope he was bearing would help rewrite the story of civilization's origins and ignite a neck-and-neck contest for international renown. At stake: the immortality conferred on those who make once-in-a-century intellectual breakthroughs.
Though none had written the letter, three men—driven by boundless curiosity, a love of risk, and the distinctive demons of aspiration and ambition—were most responsible for making the contest possible.
One, Austen Henry Layard, was the son of an English colonial civil servant. At age twenty-two, he had fled the drudgery of clerkship tasks in his uncle's law office for a life of adventure on the lawless backroads of the Ottoman Empire. Bandits robbed him three times and once left him to wander half-naked and barefoot through the desert. He joined a rebellious mountain tribe in Persia and spied in the Balkans for the British ambassador in Constantinople. At last he reached the mounds of Mesopotamia, where he transformed himself into the most celebrated archaeologist of the age.
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