Concerning the Remainder

by John of Damascus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I. Concerning the inkwell

They tell a story in the diwan now, and the young men laugh at it. The story goes that a Greek clerk, wanting water for his ink and finding none, made water into the inkwell instead, and that when the Commander of the Faithful heard of it he swore the registers of Syria would be kept in Arabic from then on.

I knew the man. He was Theophylaktos, the son of a dyer from Bab Tuma, and his bladder was weak, and he was sixty-three years old. What he did, he did into the copper basin under the window. It was not the inkwell. The inkwell was mine, and I had filled it that morning from the jar of soot-and-gum ink we buy from the Copt behind the spice market at two fals the measure. I know what was in it. I can say so because I am a man who counts things, and I have counted the measures of that jar for thirty-one years.

The decision about the registers was not made because of a basin. It was made, as such things are, by men who had been thinking about it for a long time. But a story with a basin in it is easier to carry about than a story with a council in it, and so the basin has been promoted to the inkwell and will stay there.

I set down this account in the year one thousand and twelve of the Greeks, which the Arabs count the eighty-first. I set it down in order, the way a thing should be set down, so that whoever comes after can check it.

II. Concerning the coin

In my belt, in a fold my wife sewed for the purpose, I carried a gold piece of the old kind.

You must understand what the old kind was. When I came into the treasury as a boy, the gold that came in from the villages was Roman gold, solidi of the emperors, and on it stood Heraclius and his two sons in their crowns, and on the back a cross on three steps. Then for a time our own masters struck their gold here in Damascus, the same coin with a small difference: the cross on its steps had lost its arm and become a pole with a ball on top, like a post in a field for tethering an ass. The emperors were still standing there. Nobody minded the emperors.

Then for a few years the coin showed a standing man with his sword at his belt and his hair long, and that was meant to be the Commander himself. And then, four years before the year I am writing in, there came the new dinars, which have no man on them at all. They have letters only, around the edge and across the face. There is no god but God, alone, without partner. The letters are very well cut. I have looked at them under a lamp. The man who cut the die knew his business.

When the new gold came in, the order went out that the old gold, wherever it was paid into the treasury, should be set aside in its own sack and sent to the mint, and there melted and struck again. And this was done. I did it myself, sack after sack, for four years, and wrote it in the register in Greek: to the house of striking, so many solidi of the old figure, weight so much.

The coin in my belt came in last winter from a village in the Biqa, under the snow on Mount Hermon, with the land tax. The headman, Zakhia, brought it himself on a mule. He had been keeping it under his floor since his father's time. He paid nine new dinars and this one old piece, and he asked me, holding it out, whether it would still be taken.

I said it would be taken by weight. He said, then weigh it. I weighed it. It was good gold and a little heavy, as the old ones are. I wrote him his receipt. Then, instead of putting the coin in the sack for the mint, I put it in my belt.

I did not know why I did it. I knew only that it was the last one I was likely to see come in from a village, and that I wanted to keep it until I had decided something about it, though I could not have said what.

III. Concerning Habib

In the spring Sulayman ibn Sa'd came from the Commander with his men to put the diwan into Arabic.

They did not come with swords. They came with reed pens and a great deal of Egyptian papyrus, the good kind, laid crosswise and beaten flat, and they sat down among us at the long tables and asked us to read.

The one who sat across from me was called Habib. He was a client of the tribe of Kalb, a man of Hims, perhaps twenty-two years old, and his grandfather had been a Christian; he told me this the first day, as if to explain why he was not afraid of me. He wrote a fast, sloping hand that leaned to the left like grass in a wind from the sea, and he did not put the dots on his letters unless a word could be read two ways. He had a cough he said came from the dust of the road. It stayed all summer, so I think it was not the road.

The work was this. I took down a register, unrolled it to the place, and read it aloud: the village, the headman, the number of olive trees, the number of vines, the number of yoke of oxen, the measures of wheat, the amount assessed, the amount paid, the amount owing. Habib wrote it again in Arabic as I read. Then I read it again and he read his back to me, and if the numbers agreed we went on, and if they did not we went back.

The first morning I read too fast, as a man does who has read the same thing every year for thirty years. Habib put down his pen and coughed into his sleeve and waited. I read it again more slowly. He wrote. At the end of the morning he said, "You read the way my grandmother prayed. She did not need the book."

I did not know whether that was praise. I decided it was.

IV. Concerning the names of villages

There was a difficulty with the names of villages that nobody had thought of before we began.

In the old registers the villages were written in Greek letters. But the villages themselves did not speak Greek and never had. Their names were Syriac names, or older names under the Syriac. Kfar something. Beth something. Ayn, a spring. Deir, a monastery, or what had been one. The Greek clerks who first wrote them down, in the days of the emperors, had written what they heard as best Greek letters allowed, and Greek letters do not allow much. There is no sound in Greek for the hard breath at the back of the throat in Ayn, so they left it out. There is no letter for sh, so they wrote s.

So I would read out a village, as the register had it, and Habib would write it in Arabic as I read it, and the result was a village that did not exist anywhere in Syria.

The third day of this, Habib stopped me at a village in the Ghouta that I read as Saba.

"Where is it?" he said.

I told him: on the road to the east, past the orchards, where the water channel divides.

"I have been there," he said. "That is Shabʿa. With the ʿayn at the end." He made the sound. It was a sound I had heard all my life in the market and had never once written down.

After that we did it differently. I read out the Greek, and then I said where the place was, and if Habib or one of the others knew it, they said its name the way the people there said it, and he wrote that. If nobody knew it, I said it the way I had heard it from the headmen when they came in with their mules, which was nearer than the Greek. More than once I found that I knew a village's true name and had been writing the false one for thirty years because the false one was the one in the register.

I cannot say whether it is a gain or a loss for the villages. Their olive trees are the same number either way.

V. Concerning numbers

There was another difficulty, smaller, with numbers.

In Greek we write numbers with letters: alpha is one, beta two, iota ten, rho a hundred, and so on, with a little stroke above to show the letters are numbers and not a word. A clerk reads a column of them as fast as he reads speech, faster. Habib could not read them at all, and he had been taught no figures of his own, so he wrote the numbers out in words. Three hundred and forty olive trees. It took him longer than everything else in the line together.

I said to him, in the second month, that he could use our letters for the numbers, with the stroke above, as the clerks in Egypt did, and save his wrist. He thought about it.

"Then whoever reads it after me has to know Greek letters," he said.

"Only twenty-seven of them."

"That is twenty-seven more than they will know." He wrote out three hundred and forty in words, and blew on it, and coughed.

He was right, and I was a little ashamed, because I had been thinking of his wrist and he had been thinking of the man after him. A register is for the man after you.

VI. Concerning the master's son

One afternoon in the summer the son of the master of the diwan came through on some errand for his father. He was a tall young man then, with a careful way of walking, and he read philosophy at his father's table and argued with the guests about it, which I had heard about from the cook.

He stopped at our table and looked at Habib's page, then at my register.

"Which one is the true account?" he asked. He meant it as a riddle, I think. He was at the age for riddles.

"Both," said Habib, without looking up.

"Neither," I said, at the same moment.

The young man laughed, and asked me why neither.

I said that the true account was the olive trees.

He looked at me for a moment with his head on one side, the way his father did when a sum came out different from the way he expected. Then he said, "Yes. But you cannot carry olive trees to Damascus," and went on through the courtyard to wherever he was going.

I thought about that for the rest of the afternoon, which was not a good afternoon's work.

VII. Concerning the weight

By the end of summer the coin in my belt had begun to trouble me, as a thing does that is out of place in a ledger.

It was not mine. It belonged to the treasury. It had been paid in, and I had written Zakhia his receipt for it, so it was owed. If an account were made up, it would be found missing, one solidus of the old figure, and the shortage would be in my hand.

One evening in the month the Arabs call Rajab, when the heat had begun to go out of the stones, I stayed after the others had gone, took the small balance from its box, and weighed the old coin against one of the new.

I knew what I would find; every clerk in the treasury knew. But I wanted to see it with my own eyes, the way you want to see a man's face when you have only heard his voice.

The old one was heavier. Not by much. The emperors cut seventy-two solidi from a pound of gold, and the Commander strikes his dinar to the old Arab weight, the mithqal, which is less. In the hand you cannot tell them apart. On the balance the pan with the emperors in it went down and stayed down, gently, like a boat with one more man in it than the other.

I tried it with grains of barley, the way we did as boys learning the trade. It took four grains, and then a fifth that was too many, and a broken half of a fifth that was just right.

So when Heraclius and his sons go into the pot, and come out as letters, there is gold left over. Four grains and a half. The mint keeps a pot for such remainders; the moneyers sweep the filings into it at night. Over four years of sacks it must have come to a great deal.

I sat a long time with the balance. A lamp in the treasury costs oil, and the oil is entered against the clerk's name, so I was spending my own money to sit there. I did not mind.

VIII. Concerning the wax

The next morning I brought from home the writing tablet my son had used at school, two leaves of boxwood with a skin of black wax in each, tied with a cord. I warmed the wax a little in my hands under the table while Habib and I read the registers of the district of Baalbek.

At noon, when the others went out to eat in the shade of the courtyard, I took out the coin and pressed it, face down, into the wax.

When I lifted it the three of them were there in the black: Heraclius in the middle, taller, the sons on either side, their crowns and their long cloaks and the globes in their hands, all of it the wrong way round, as a seal is, and sunk into the wax instead of standing out from the gold. I could see every hair of the old man's beard.

I am not a fool. I know the wax is not the emperor, and the gold was not the emperor either, and the emperor is dead these sixty years near enough, and his sons too. I know the honour you give an image goes to the one it shows, and not to the gold or the wax. My confessor at the church of the Baptist has explained this to me more than once, and he is right, and I believe him. All the same, the image was in the wax now, and it would stay there until somebody smoothed it, and it was in my hands and not in the pot.

Habib came back from the courtyard with a piece of bread and a handful of figs for me, as he did most days, and saw the tablet open on my knee before I could close it.

He looked at it for some time. Then he put the figs down by my inkwell.

"Is that the Roman?" he said.

"Heraclius. And his sons."

"I have never seen one," he said. "My father had some. He took them all to the money-changer when the new ones came. He said a man should pay his tax in the Commander's gold."

"Your father was right," I said.

"May I?"

I gave him the tablet. He held it to the light from the window and tilted it so the hollows filled with shadow and the faces came up out of the black. He coughed and turned his head so as not to cough on it. Then he gave it back, closed, and tied the cord himself, a better knot than mine.

"It is a good likeness," he said. He could not have known whether it was a likeness or not. I think he meant that it was well made, and that he had seen I cared for it, and that he would say nothing. He said nothing then or afterwards.

IX. Concerning the house of striking

That afternoon I went to the mint myself, which is not a clerk's errand. I took a boy from the treasury with me so that it would be properly witnessed.

The house of striking stands near the Jabiya gate, and you smell it before you see it: charcoal, and hot clay, and the bitter smell from the vats where they clean the blanks. The moneyers work stripped to the waist in the summer, with leather on their forearms. The overseer knew me. I had sent him sacks for four years in my handwriting, and he had sent receipts back in his.

I gave him the coin and told him it had been paid in late, from the Biqa, and asked that it go to the pot with the next melting and be entered in his account as received from my hand on such a day. He weighed it on his own balance, and his came out as mine had. He wrote it down. He wrote it in Greek, because he was a Greek, from Edessa, and no one had come to put the mint into Arabic yet.

I watched him put it into a small dish with eleven others of the old kind from somewhere else. I asked if I might see it melted. He looked at me as though I had asked to see a man shaved, but he said I might, if I waited.

So I waited, and the boy waited, and in time the dish went into the furnace, and when it came out the coins had gone soft at the edges and then all at once had given up their faces and become one bright drop that shook when the dish was moved. A moneyer poured it into a mould for blanks. The overseer's assistant took a brush and swept the lip of the dish into a jar.

"For the remainder," the overseer said, seeing me look.

X. Concerning what the master said

At the end of that autumn the work of Sulayman ibn Sa'd was complete, and the registers of Syria stood in Arabic in the presses where the Greek ones had stood, and the Greek ones were tied in bundles and taken up to a room under the roof.

The master of the diwan called the Greek clerks together in the courtyard. There were nineteen of us. He was an old man by then and had served the Commanders since Muʿawiya, and his voice was dry. He thanked us for our years. Then he said: "Look for your living in some other craft than this, for God has cut it off from you." He did not say it unkindly. He said it as he would have read a total from the foot of a page.

Some of the younger men went to the clerks of the churches, or the monasteries, where Greek is still wanted. Theophylaktos, the son of the dyer, went home to his daughter's house and sits in the sun. I am kept on for the present, because there are questions about the old registers that only someone who wrote them can answer, and Habib asks for me when they come up. He asks me about the villages of the Biqa, mostly, and the Ghouta. He writes down what I say.

XI. Concerning the remainder

I have entered here what I know, and I have tried to enter it in order.

One solidus of the old figure, received from Zakhia, headman, of a village of the Biqa under Hermon, in the winter of the year one thousand and eleven: delivered to the house of striking by my own hand at the end of the same year, witnessed by a boy of the treasury, entered there in Greek by the overseer, melted in my sight with eleven others. Account closed.

Four grains of barley and a half, being the difference between the old weight and the new: to the jar, with the filings and the sweepings of the dish. Where it went after that is in the mint's books and not in mine.

One impression in black wax, the wrong way round, in a schoolboy's tablet of boxwood, tied with a cord in a knot I did not tie. Not the treasury's property, nor the emperor's, nor anyone's but mine. It stands on the shelf in my house beside the lamp, and on winter nights, when my wife lights the lamp, the faces come up out of the dark.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Iōanne Damascēnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John of Damascus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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