Ancient DMs

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. Future historians who want to learn about the 21st century will probably not lack for primary sources. As of today, approximately 30,000 hours of content are being uploaded to YouTube every hour, while Wikipedia is currently home to roughly 55 million articles and counting. For historians who want to study the previous century, the sources thin out just a bit. Archives provide access to about 2,000 daily U.S. newspapers and another 2,000 magazines. Go back to the late Middle Ages, before the invention of the printing press, and things get a lot rougher. Only a few thousand hand copied manuscripts from that time have survived. And as for the very ancient past, the situation is downright bleak. Of the over 100 plays written by Sophocles, we have seven. But the hardest stuff to find, the further back you go, are the documents that tell us something about everyday life–about what it was like to be a bureaucrat in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom or a soldier in the Persian army or a farmer in ancient Sumeria. It’s not that these ancient societies didn’t produce lots of everyday communications. Frequently, they did. But it’s often the most common, ordinary documents that don’t survive either because no one thought to preserve them or their society was conquered or they were written down on a medium that wasn’t meant to last. Ask any historian and they’ll tell you it’s called ephemera for a reason. 

JOE ROSENBERG: But today I’m here to tell you the story of some documents of everyday life that did survive. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s 99PI producer Joe Rosenberg. So, Joe, you have a story of preservation for us. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah. And it’s about a trove, you might say, found in what is now northern Iraq, of some very, very, very old texts.

ROMAN MARS: “Very, very, very?” Old times three. 

JOE ROSENBERG: That’s right, old times three. And also, very, very, very important to historians because Iraq–Mesopotamia–is famously where the first ever city states arose. But for the longest time, historians knew almost nothing about them. 

LISA WILHELMI: This society had been lost to our memory, really.

JOE ROSENBERG: Lisa Wilhelmi is an assistant professor at the Free University of Berlin, who has studied a lot of ancient history, including ancient Mesopotamia. And she says that until relatively recently, historians might have been able to tell you a lot about the Mesopotamian region, going back to roughly 2,500 years ago–around the time of the ancient Greeks. But if you tried to learn about what happened before then, in these even more ancient places like Babylon and Sumer, there was very little to go on. 

LISA WILHELMI: It was always there in the ground, but it had been forgotten about to a large extent. And for a very long time, the only references to Assyria and Babylonia came through the Bible.

ROMAN MARS: I can sense a problem with using the Bible, which uses a mix of history and mythology, as a source text. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah. I mean, there was a long period of the study of history where people were just endlessly playing precisely that game of, like, which parts of the Bible are true? But yeah. Yeah. There was a moment when this kind of profound veil of ignorance of the deep ancient past began to be lifted, which is when archaeologists began excavating the city of Nineveh. 

Nineveh was the capital of one of those mysterious biblical empires from around 600 BCE, 2500 years ago, the Neo-Assyrian Empire. But in the 1840s, archaeologists actually hit the motherlode: the Assyrians’ imperial palace complex. And once there, they started coming across this huge stash of clay tablets. So, first hundreds and then thousands, and then tens of thousands of clay tablets and fragments of clay tablets… And these 2,500-year-old tablets, for reasons that we’ll get to a little later, are in startlingly great condition. They’re all remarkably well preserved. 

ROMAN MARS: So, this find has both quantity and quality going for it.

JOE ROSENBERG: Correct. And even today, if you study ancient Mesopotamia, this find remains arguably the single most impressive collection of documents ever found. 

LISA WILHELMI: It is outstanding. It is extraordinary because there are so many tablets. As far as I know, we have about 30,000 tablets and fragments that we can assign to the collection. And this is really a lot. 

JOE ROSENBERG: And what Lisa says is that it’s actually the only ancient tablet collection they speak of as a library. And that’s because that is precisely what it turned out to be. This was the Assyrians’ official imperial library. 

ROMAN MARS: And so when you say library, what do you mean in this case? Like, are there ancient works of literature? Or are there sort of textbooks? What does it contain? 

JOE ROSENBERG: Uh, yes and yes. So, there are works of literature, mythology, history, astronomy… And not only does it have all the Assyrian stuff from, like, the 7th century BCE, it’s got stuff going back another 1,400 years. Yeah, so, like, this is where we–and I mean like the global “we” here–first found a copy of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh my god. So, like, possibly the world’s oldest written, longform narrative was first found here?

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah, it was. But what over time has turned out to be equally–if, you know, not more–fascinating in some ways are the library’s other documents because it turned out that the library also contained all these much more prosaic texts that, by virtue of their banality, almost kind of reveal the ins and outs of everyday life. 

ROMAN MARS: Wow. So what kind of everyday documents–what kind of ephemera are we talking about here? 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah, so, it just so happened that this library included the daily personal correspondence of the Assyrian court–so all of the petitions from ordinary people, all of the letters between scribes, and most important for our story, messages being written to and from the king… 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, oh, I see. So, everyday royal life?

JOE ROSENBERG: Yes, everyday but maybe not common. But what that means is that these letters tell the story of the library itself. They tell the story of its creation and its growth right up to the moment before its destruction and unexpected preservation. 

ROMAN MARS: Wow. So, tell me that story. Like, how did it unfold? 

JOE ROSENBERG: Let me take you to a precise year. It’s the year 671 BCE. And at this time, the Assyrian Empire basically covers most of the present day Middle East. It is, by many measures, the largest single empire the world has ever seen. And the Assyrians’ capital is, as mentioned, Nineveh, this great walled city on the banks of the Tigris River. And also–and this is really important to keep in mind–the Assyrians have a reputation for being incessantly, ridiculously, over the top cruel.

DAVID DAMROSCH: So, they love, in The Chronicles, to say, “Oh, I crossed this river on a bridge made of the skulls of my enemy,” for example. That’d be a fairly typical Assyrian comment. 

JOE ROSENBERG: This is David Damrosch. David is a professor of comparative literature at Harvard. And he told me that the Assyrians’ palaces actually would have these giant images of conquest etched into all the walls.

DAVID DAMROSCH: They were meant to intimidate anyone who came into the palace, particularly any foreigner. They’d see just images of tribute being given by everyone who’s been conquered. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Although Lisa is quick to point out that you should not make the mistake of thinking the Assyrians are uniquely cruel by the standards of their time.

LISA WILHELMI: I wouldn’t say that the Assyrians were more cruel than the other ones. The Babylonians were just as bad. They just didn’t write about it. 

ROMAN MARS: So, the Assyrians were kind of proud of their cruelty. And maybe the Babylonians were a little more sheepish. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah, exactly. Whether it’s better to be honest about it or sheepish and hypocritical, I suppose that’s just a matter of taste. But this cruelty–keep in mind–did serve a purpose. David says you have to think of those palace reliefs as a look that the Assyrians were consciously cultivating for strategic reasons. 

DAVID DAMROSCH: The Assyrians, because of the way they’d set up their whole economy, were truly a militaristic state. And the state really required constant warfare to bring in more and more goods. So, they wanted to project an image of almost totalitarian power. And the text that they wrote for publication project infinite power–the infinite sagacity on the part of the king–the infinite loyalty on the part of the king’s ministers. 

JOE ROSENBERG: But remember, the tablets that were found also contain the private palace records. And the story they tell is quite different than the image the Assyrians were publicly projecting because, at this specific moment in history we’ve gone back to here, there’s a king named Esarhaddon. And it turns out that the all-powerful Esarhaddon was almost hilariously neurotic. 

ROMAN MARS: His DMs reveal a different king than what was presented out front.

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah, and that’s putting it mildly. 

DAVID DAMROSCH: Esarhaddon was terminally indecisive. And he was also the most powerful person in the world. But he worries about everything. 

JOE ROSENBERG: So, just to give you the flavor of Esarhaddon, David told me about this one letter he writes to his chief scribe where, basically, Esarhaddon was getting ready to invade yet another country but then, when he was exiting the palace, a mongoose apparently passed under his chariot.

ROMAN MARS: I hate it when that happens!

JOE ROSENBERG: I know, it’s the worst. And apparently this one little thing is enough to totally freak him out because he immediately starts asking his chief priest, “What could this mean? You know, I’ve heard it said that a mongoose passing under your legs is a bad omen. So, maybe we shouldn’t invade? Then again, technically, the mongoose passed under my chariot not my legs, so maybe it’s okay. I don’t know what to do now, what do you think?” And the advisor writes back, and this is from the actual tablet, “As to what my lord the king wrote to me, does the omen, if something passes between the legs of a man, apply to something that came out from underneath the chariot? It does apply.”

ROMAN MARS: Oh… 

JOE ROSENBERG: However, he goes on to say that Esarhaddon has it all backwards and not to worry because this is actually a bad omen for his enemies. “So, should we say mercy for the Nabateans? Why? Are they not hostile kings? They will not submit beneath my lord the king’s chariot.” And this letter is basically par for the course for Esarhaddon. His whole reign was pretty much him endlessly over-interpreting omens. 

DAVID DAMROSCH: And Esarhaddon… If lightning strikes a distant town, Esarhaddon takes it personally. He writes a letter to one of his advisors who writes back, “As to what my lord the king wrote to me, why does the king look for trouble? Why does he look for it in a peasant’s hut? There’s no evil inside the palace. And when has the king ever visited that town?” So, the poor advisor is, you know… Nothing escapes the king’s worry. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, the advisor is actually surprisingly blunt with the most powerful man in the entire known world. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah, it’s true. And we actually know that the advisor who wrote that last one was a guy named Balasi, who clearly was one of the few people who can speak this frankly with the king. And his letters to him appear to grow more and more impatient. So, for example, at another point, there’s this minor earthquake, apparently, which sends Esarhaddon into one of his spirals. 

DAVID DAMROSCH: And now Balasi replies in tones of complete exasperation. “Was there no earthquake in the times of the king’s fathers and grandfathers? Did I not see earthquakes when I was small?” And you see his advisors writing to each other, saying, “Why is the king like this? What can we do? Why is he so worried about an earthquake in the south of the country? How can we stop this? How can we reassure him?” 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, the level of detail here is just amazing. Like, these are exchanges between people that are 2,500 years old. And you really feel like you’re getting a window into, like, an unhealthy level of neuroses and paranoia from Esarhaddon, which is, of course, bad for him but potentially devastating to everyone around him.

JOE ROSENBERG: Yes. Although in his defense, like a lot of pathologically neurotic people, he’s not being totally illogical either in his case when it comes to worrying about omens because Lisa says that you have to understand that, back then, no matter what you believed, the stakes around omens were really high.

LISA WILHELMI: If you live in a world where everything is influenced by the divine and there is no question as to the involvement of divinity in what happens on Earth, then the omen literature and the divination and its processes are very political. They are what drives politics. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, I see. So, there wasn’t really an option to ignore omens, even if you wanted to.

JOE ROSENBERG: Correct. And another part of Esarhaddon’s problem is he himself, as a boy, grew up in a time of plots and counterplots and splinter groups. You know, his own father was killed by one of his brothers in a coup. 

ROMAN MARS: Hmm. 

JOE ROSENBERG: But ultimately for Esarhaddon, all of these considerations only drive him, you know, deeper into his neuroses. And he just grows increasingly–and really illogically–suspicious of basically every person in his orbit. So, in addition to obsessing over omens, he is also commissioning multiple independent oracles and cross-checking the results so that the gods can tell him who on his staff might be betraying him. And the small print on Esarhaddon’s oracle requests? It’s just wild. So, here, I just want you to read this one. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. “Shamash, great lord. Give me a definitive answer to what I ask you. Will any of the eunuchs, or the bearded officials, the king’s entourage, or any of his brothers and uncles, or junior members of the royal line, or any relative of the king whatever, or the prefects, or the recruitment officers, or his personal guard, or the king’s chariot men, or the keepers of the inner gates, or the keepers of the outer gates, or the attendants and lackeys of the stables, or the cooks, confectioners, and bakers, the entire body of craftsmen, or their brothers, or their sons, or their nephews, or their friends, or their guests, or their accomplices make an uprising and rebellion against Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, and kill him? That’s a long list of people he does not trust. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah. Although I still don’t know why he has to list everyone specifically, right? He could just ask, like, “Will anyone betray me?” That seems easy. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, his writing is done in clay. Like, you should economize your words a little bit.

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah. Although it’s interesting that you’re picturing him doing the writing because actually that brings us to what was arguably Esarhaddon’s biggest problem when it came to his paranoia, which was that he may have spent all day sending these messages back and forth but–and this will be key to the story of the library–Esarhaddon himself didn’t know how to read.

ROMAN MARS: Oh, interesting. Okay. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah. Apparently, reading and writing, particularly cuneiform, was kind of like coding today. You know, it was a real skill. So, most kings just dictated letters and had letters read to them. They weren’t doing any reading or writing themselves. But this meant that they were relying on whoever’s advising them to tell them what is happening. And what’s clear from these tablets is that the readers maybe didn’t always read everything on the tablet out loud to the king. 

DAVID DAMROSCH: In one case, an out of favor official writes an appeal to the king. But he knows the king isn’t going to read it. And he has a little postscript to his appeal. “Whoever you are, oh scribe, who is reading this, do not hide it from your lord, the king! Speak for me before the king!” So, it’s quite a fascinating thing. They all know that there are these intermediaries who are extremely powerful. They can be powerful simply by what they don’t say is on the tablet. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, that is amazing–that the advisors and the intermediaries… They’re the ones with the real power! Like, they could just choose to not read part of the letter–to make up something completely–and the king would be none the wiser.

JOE ROSENBERG: Right, yeah. And from what historians can piece together, it appears that Esarhaddon very wisely reasoned, “You know what? Being illiterate sucks. So, my son will learn to read.” 

ROMAN MARS: That’s an excellent idea! 

JOE ROSENBERG: Fantastic idea. And his son’s name is Ashurbanipal. And Ashurbanipal is, in many ways, the reason why there would be a great library for archaeologists to discover in the first place because he is a totally different breed of person from his father. And he becomes one of the great Assyrian kings. He’s known for many things. And true to his father’s wishes, David says that, from an early age, Ashurbanipal not only learned to read but he loved to read. 

DAVID DAMROSCH: I think he was really a bibliophile–or a tabletophile–whatever you have to have to call it. He just loved writing. He was fascinated by it. He was proud of his abilities of being what we would later say is a kind of philosopher king. 

JOE ROSENBERG: And the thing to understand is that, prior to Ashurbanipal, the palace archive only really contained the everyday correspondence–the court records–which is how we know so much about his dad. But once Ashurbanipal is in power, he takes the existing archive and starts expanding it into what we would think of as a proper library. And this library gets big. He actually creates two new palace buildings just to house it. And he uses the size and power of his empire to collect everything he can get his hands on and expand the collection–and not just the numbers of texts but the kinds of texts. So, old Sumerian and Babylonian literature? “Let’s get that.” Astronomy texts? “Great.” Writings on statecraft? “Yes, let’s add that, too.” 

DAVID DAMROSCH: Particularly interesting is that Ashurbanipal sends out a word to scribes all around the kingdom saying, “If you know any texts about good government, send it to me.” And that’s one of the times he gets a new copy made of Gilgamesh. He was reading it as a tale about how to understand what makes a good ruler and a bad ruler and how to be better. 

JOE ROSENBERG: And so the collection actually ends up with multiple copies of Gilgamesh. And a little later it actually requires a record showing the astronomical positions of Venus, you know, going back to at least 1700 BCE. And there’s an even older Babylonian text, which is the only complete, surviving account of an ancient Near Eastern creation myth. 

ROMAN MARS: Wow. And so that’s on top of all this day-to-day minutiae of past kings and their courts. And you have that as a reference. So, it’s kind of like having the Library of Congress and a presidential library and a national archive all rolled into one.

JOE ROSENBERG: Pretty much, yeah, which is why, if I could show you one final thing from the collection, this library also contains Ashurbanipal’s own writings. And one of the things he wrote was poetry. And there’s this one poem where he’s actually addressing the patron god of writing, Nabu. And it’s just incredibly intimate. You can almost hear in it how he has inherited some of his father’s depression and anxiety, but he’s kind of channeling it through his writing. So, Roman, if you want to just Give this one a read, too. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay… 

“Often I go up to the roof in order to plunge down. 

But my life is too precious. It turns me back. 

I would hearten myself 

But what heart do I have to give? 

I would make up my mind, 

But what mind do I have to make up? 

Oh Nabu, where is your forgiveness? 

Oh son of Bel, where is your guidance?”

Wow… Heavy is the head. I mean, was this written down just for himself? Or was this meant to be, you know, taken in by a wider audience? Was this for posterity?

JOE ROSENBERG: I was about that, too. And I asked David about it, and he said that the answer is likely the latter. It was probably, at least, semi-propaganda because, in the very next stanza, Ashurbanipal says that the god, Nabu, comes to him in a dream and basically tells him, “Don’t worry, you will emerge triumphant. And your ill wishers will be squashed under your feet like flies.”

ROMAN MARS: So, even the sensitive poet who contemplates jumping off the tallest tower still builds bridges out of the skulls of his enemies. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah, there doesn’t really seem to be an off button for that kind of thing when it comes to these Assyrian kings. And so Ashurbanipal simply continued his kingdom’s policy of unending military expansion. And, you know, I asked David about that, too–about his double nature… 

JOE ROSENBERG: Do you like Ashurbanipal at all or not? Like, where do you come across in your own personal take on these figures? 

DAVID DAMROSCH: No, I think Ashurbanipal is a wonderful figure–thoughtful, reflective… He’s trying to do his best. He is a poet. And he’s responsible for a vicious, militaristic system–that is not likely to last–that he has to uphold. And I think that’s why Ashurbanipal has his suicidal moments. It’s like, “How long can this hold together?” 

JOE ROSENBERG: And that turns out to be pretty much true. I mean, the relentless expansionist system can’t last. And after Ashurbanipal dies, everything kind of starts to fall apart. All the states who the Assyrians conquered understandably loathe them. And in 612 BCE, the vassal states all band together to revolt and then sack and raze Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, and burn all of it–including Ashurbanipal’s library–to the ground.

ROMAN MARS: So, if that’s the case, then how did the library get preserved? 

JOE ROSENBERG: So, this is the final puzzle piece of this story. And it’s where one of the great oddities of historical preservation comes in because, ironically, one of the best things that can happen for the preservation of your society’s legacy is basically a sudden, terrible cataclysm that entombs everything you know and love in an instant and leaves it forgotten for thousands of years.

DAVID DAMROSCH: Cataclysmic destruction is terrible for society. But it can be really good because then what’s left there may just get left. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, this reminds me of, like, Pompeii, where the eruption of Mount Vesuvius covers everything in ash. And you get this snapshot of, you know, things as mundane as what kind of snacks people were eating that food cart owners were selling and just, like, an incredible catastrophe that just sort of just freezes everything in time.

JOE ROSENBERG: Exactly, which is why that kind of instant catastrophe is often, in a weird way, what counts as good news for historians like Lisa. 

LISA WILHELMI: Yeah. No, accidental destruction tends to preserve much more information on the actual lives of people, all of the letters, all of the accounts, and all of the debt notes. And then we get the real people–their imagination, their stories…

ROMAN MARS: So, in the case of Nineveh, how did the tablets get preserved before the invaders ransacked the place? I can’t imagine they, like, would be careful with the clay tablets in the library. 

JOE ROSENBERG: No. So, with Nineveh, weirdly, it was precisely because the invaders set fire to the libraries that the tablets were preserved because–remember–all of these tablets were made of clay. 

DAVID DAMROSCH: And these tablets fill through the floor into the basement and were buried in the rubble. But the thing with cuneiform tablets is if you cook them, it makes them last forever. They become like terracotta. 

JOE ROSENBERG: And so, the tens of thousands of terracotta-ized tablets just sit there, buried and preserved for 2,500 years–all the literature and history the Assyrians wanted preserved, but also all the everyday stuff they’d probably be mortified to know was preserved until 1849, when they were discovered. And so, that’s how we know all this wonderful history and literature and the story of Persia–why it’s there in the first place.

LISA WILHELMI: And one of the things that was part of royal ideology in the Near East was to try and get your name to be preserved for eternity. And in a way, I wouldn’t actually say that the effort failed because–here we are–two and a half thousand years later, speaking about it. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, it’s just remarkable that it took both things. Like, it took the act of creation of the library and its destruction for all this knowledge to be preserved for us to take it in, 2,500 years later. Like, if only one of those things had happened, we wouldn’t be talking about this. We would never know that name. We would never know this civilization. It’s stunning.

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah. Preserving the human legacy… It kind of turns out it takes, I guess, equal parts hard work and dumb luck.

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. Well said. Well, Joe, thank you so much for this. This is really just this unexpected way to journey back into time. I just loved our conversation. 

JOE ROSENBERG: No, thank you, Roman, for listening. I’m glad you enjoyed the journey.

ROMAN MARS: When we come back, we’ll learn more about how historians succeed and sometimes fail in piecing together all those thousands of ancient fragments…

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So, Joe, you’re back. And you have a little antechamber of this archaeological story that you want to talk about. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah, I do because I have to confess something here, which is that I was being intentionally a little vague when I said Lisa Wilhelmi was a professor who studies ancient history because Lisa actually wears a few different scholarly hats. And one of them is a very cool job with a very confusing name. She is an Assyriologist. 

ROMAN MARS: An Assyriologist. So, I take it this is someone who studies ancient Assyria? 

JOE ROSENBERG: Uh, so, no. And this is what’s confusing because Assyriology is actually the study of any ancient society that used cuneiform writing, whether you’re looking at the Sumerians or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or whoever. And your particular focus could be archaeology, it could be art history, etc. And in Lisa’s case, she spends a lot of time sorting through and interpreting texts. 

LISA WILHELMI: What we do is we look at texts. We try and piece them back together. We then try to understand them chronologically, geographically, and also content-wise so we get more information on people, society, history, culture, literature, and so on. So, really what we do is we have a giant puzzle. And we try and get more and more pieces. We try and fill in the gaps. 

JOE ROSENBERG: And, you know, although I went into the interview with Lisa intending to ask a bunch of questions about the Assyrians and the library of Ashurbanipal specifically, I really ended up spending the majority of our time talking with her about her profession because I got really fascinated with the story of what Lisa does–so not so much the archaeology and the digging up of whatever texts remain, but how Lisa and her colleagues go about putting the pieces of what does remain, you know, back together. And that actually starts with the question, which sounds kind of like a zen koan, of how can you know how much has been lost?

LISA WILHELMI: I was thinking about this, and it’s actually impossible to say how much has been lost, I think. 

JOE ROSENBERG: And it’s funny because invariably this is one of those things where you can’t help but invoke Don Rumsfeld.

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHING] Yeah, that’s right because you have the known known, the known unknown, and the unknown unknown and etc., etc.

JOE ROSENBERG: I mean, you know, you’d think his legacy would be the Iraq war. And yet, in fact, it is really this one quote. 

ROMAN MARS: I remember this line. Almost every day of my life, I think about this. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Regardless, that is also how Lisa talks about this. 

LISA WILHELMI: When it comes to the basis of texts, very often we have gaps in our texts. We don’t have the whole Gilgamesh epic. We’re missing about a third or so of the text. So, things keep coming to us. And we keep piecing it together. But we don’t have it in completion. So, in those cases, we know how much we are missing. 

JOE ROSENBERG: So, that’s probably the most straightforward problem, where they know how much they are missing. But then there’s, like, one stage more complicated than that.

LISA WILHELMI: So, these are things where we know that we are missing something. We don’t know exactly how much we are missing. An acute example, for instance, would be the fact that we have references to place names in our texts, and we don’t know where these places were. They haven’t been located yet. And interestingly enough, we also have copies of texts where the text itself says– It writes something, and then it says “hepy,” which means “broken.” so, obviously, the scribe writing this tablet found a tablet that he was copying had some missing bits. So, he would either have to get the information from a different copy of the same text or just say, “Well, actually, I don’t know.” 

ROMAN MARS: That’s so interesting. This isn’t just a modern problem. Like, tablets way back then were already breaking. And scribes were already going, “Uh, we don’t know what follows because something has already gotten broken or lost. It’s already gone.” 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah, and it actually gets worse because Lisa says that, in her particular specialty–which is an ancient society called the Hittites–their preferred medium for everyday writing possibly just completely disappeared. 

LISA WILHELMI: This may have something to do with the fact that particular types of texts might have been written on wood. So, we know this because we have… Well, we don’t know it for sure because they didn’t write down for us, “Actually, attention please, people in 2000 years. When you read these texts, we also wrote some tablets on wood. And you will not find these because they won’t be preserved.”

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, because why would it ever occur to anyone to write that down? If it was just an obvious facet of everyday life that you wrote on wood, you would not bother to remark upon it. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah, which, when I heard it, kind of made me start to wonder, like, “What is the really obvious thing we’re not telling future historians that might help them out?” But that actually brings us to my favorite category of unknowns and the one Rumsfeld famously did not mention, which is… Actually, do you want to guess which one this is? 

ROMAN MARS: I guess the unknown knowns, which are kind of hard to imagine, but… 

JOE ROSENBERG: Right. You know, they are the things that you know but you don’t realize you know. And this is due to the problem that, for all that’s missing, they actually have way too many fragments in way too many places.

LISA WILHELMI: The museums are full of texts that we haven’t read yet. There are many, many texts, and there are not so many Assyriologists. So, the human resources bit is not really adequate to making quick progress. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Is it possible that that one third of Gilgamesh that’s missing is actually just waiting around in a drawer?

LISA WILHELMI: Absolutely. It will be somewhere. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Wow. 

LISA WILHELMI: Probably not all of it because there’s bits and pieces, within the story, that we’re missing. But I’m always very hopeful, actually. I think we will get there, but it will just take time. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, that’s just an amazingly romantic thought–that the remainder of the world’s oldest written longform narrative is not actually lost forever–that you could have faith that it is surviving somewhere in a drawer. And you may not be alive to see it, but eventually it will be found.

JOE ROSENBERG: Yeah, or at least found before it’s all lost again because we wrote it down in computer code. And future historians will be like, “Why did they use such a bad medium?” 

ROMAN MARS: I can totally see that being the case. Well, this has really been a just incredibly fascinating journey that you brought us on, Joe. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. 

JOE ROSENBERG: Thank you, Roman. Take care.

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Joe Rosenberg, and edited by Emmett FitzGerald. Mix and sound design by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Additional music by George Langford. Fact-checking by Sona Avakian. 

Special thanks to our guests this week, Lisa Wilhemi and David Damrosch who recorded these interviews with us nearly three years ago and have waited patiently ever since. We’re especially thankful to David for his book about the epic of Gilgamesh, called The Buried Book, which is where we first encountered this story. His newest work is called Around the World in 80 Books. You can find both of them wherever books are sold. 

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon,, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. Home of the Oakland Roots Soccer Club, of which I am a proud community owner. Other teams come and go, but the Roots are Oakland first, always.

You can find us on all the usual social media sites. I’m on Bluesky a lot. I like Bluesky a lot. We also have our own discord server. There’s a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.