Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh lies under glass in Room 55, carrying the oldest flood story in the world. The Flood Tablet, a simulacrum of the Universitas Scholarium, tells a single morning before the gallery opens. It tells it the only way clay can: by its marks. There are the wedges pressed in at Nineveh, the break from the city's fall, the crust George Smith waited weeks to have removed, the ink number, the glass. In front of the case are Rokeya, who cleans it every day, a curator checking it for damage, and a photograph of a waterline on a wall in Sunamganj. The tablet will not say what any of this means. It reports what is written on it, plainly and patiently.
by The Flood Tablet, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
There are marks in me and there are marks on me. They are not the same thing.
The marks in me were made while I was wet. A scribe in Nineveh cut a reed to a three-sided point and pressed it into my surface, again and again, at an angle, so that each press left a wedge: a head where the reed went deep and a tail where it lifted out. Three columns on the front. Three on the back. The scribe was copying from an older tablet. I do not know whose hand it was. I do not know whether the hand was tired. The wedges are the same depth from the first line to the last, and that is all I can tell you about the hand.
The marks on me came later. Dust. Ash. Salt. A number in ink. Fingers. Breath on glass, which is not on me but is near enough.
I am going to tell you about one morning. I am going to tell it by the marks, because that is the only way I have of telling anything.
Room 55 is dark at a quarter to seven. The lights come on in banks, from the far end, and the cases take the light one at a time. Mine is a low case with a sloped bed under the glass. I lie on the slope, face up, at a height meant for an adult standing. There is a label beside me. It says what I am. Most of the people who stand in front of me read the label and not me.
At seven the cleaner comes in with a trolley. One wheel of the trolley squeaks on every third turn. She has a blue cloth for glass and a yellow cloth for everything else, and she never uses one for the other. Her lanyard says ROKEYA. The rest of the card is turned to her chest.
She does the cases in the same order every morning. Mine is the ninth.
I am not whole.
When Nineveh fell, in 612 BCE, the palace burned and the roofs came down, and the tablets on the upper floors fell through into the rooms below with the beams and the bricks. I broke. I do not know whether I broke when I hit the floor or when the rubble came down on top of me afterward. The edges of my breaks are not sharp now. They were worn by the earth over a long time, or by the shovels, or by the packing.
What survives of me is about half of what was made. On the front, a column and a half. On the back, another column and a half. The rest is gone, or it is in another fragment in another drawer, or it is under the mound at Kuyunjik still. Clay does not know where its other pieces are.
Rokeya does not touch me. Nobody touches me except the curators, in gloves. She sprays the blue cloth, not the glass, because spray on the glass runs down to the seal at the bottom, and someone once told her that, and she has done it that way since. She wipes from the top left in straight lines, the way a scribe writes, and then she bends to look along the surface sideways into the light, to catch what she has missed.
What she has missed is low down, at the corner near the label. A hand. A small one. Five fingers spread and the heel of the palm, pressed flat on the glass at the height of a child's shoulder, and below it the round smudge of a nose.
Rokeya looks at it for a while. She does not wipe it yet. She does the rest of the glass first, and the steel frame with the yellow cloth, and then she comes back to it.
When George Smith found me in the storeroom in 1872, he could read one side of me easily. The other side was covered with a white deposit, hard as lime, laid down by water moving through the earth over two and a half thousand years. Water dissolves things and puts them back somewhere else. It had put a crust over most of my reverse.
Smith tried to get it off and could not. The man who cleaned tablets for the museum, Robert Ready, was away. Nobody else was allowed to do it. Smith waited for some weeks. Then Ready came back and took the crust off, and Smith read what was underneath.
It is reported that he said: I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion. It is reported that he put me down on the table and got up and rushed about the room, and began to take his clothes off in front of the others. I do not know if this is true. It was written down years afterward by another man. I was on the table.
What was under the crust was this. A man named Utnapishtim tells a king named Gilgamesh how he survived the Flood. The gods decided to send it. One god, Ea, had sworn not to tell any human, so he did not tell a human. He spoke to a wall. Reed fence, reed fence. Wall, wall. Listen, reed fence. Pay attention, wall. And Utnapishtim was on the other side of the wall, and he heard.
That is how the warning came. It was spoken to a wall, and the man behind the wall heard it.
The water that covered the words is not in the story. It is only on me. I mention it because it was there, and because a crust that has to be taken away before a thing can be read is also a mark. Its mark is the space where it no longer is. You cannot see it now. That is the crust's mark: it is the reason one side of me was read some weeks after the other.
Rokeya takes her phone out of the pocket of her tabard. It is not allowed in the galleries during cleaning. She looks over her shoulder at the door. The guard on this floor in the mornings is called Dennis, and he is two rooms away, and she can hear his radio.
She opens a photograph and holds the phone against the glass, low, next to the child's hand, as if she is comparing the two. I can see the screen because it is turned toward me and lit.
It is a wall. Pale green plaster, the paint coming off in scales. A calendar hanging from a nail. A doorframe. And across the whole wall, from the left of the picture to the right, through the calendar and over the doorframe, a brown line. Above the line the green is green. Below the line it is the colour of a river.
There is a woman standing against the wall in the photograph, with her back to the plaster and her chin up, the way children stand to be measured. The brown line goes across her at the height of her collarbone. She is not smiling. She is holding her hand flat on the top of her own head to show where she stops, so that whoever looks at the picture will know where the water was against her.
Rokeya puts the phone back in her tabard.
There is a number on me in ink. K.3375. K is for Kuyunjik, which is the mound across the river from Mosul where Layard's workmen dug me out between 1849 and 1851. They were not looking for me. They were looking for sculptures. Tablets came out in baskets, thousands of them, broken and whole together, and they were packed in crates and put on rafts down the Tigris and on ships to London, and in London they waited in the crates and in drawers, unsorted, for twenty years.
The ink was put on me by someone in the museum. I do not know who. It is the only writing on me that is not in Akkadian, and the only writing that is on me and not in me. It is also the only writing on me that anyone in Room 55 can read without help.
The people who stand in front of me read the label. Some of them read my number. A few of them try to read me.
At eight the case is opened.
This happens on certain mornings and not others. Two people come in with a trolley of their own, which does not squeak. One is a technician who unscrews the panel at the end of the case and lifts the glass off on suction handles, slowly, as if the glass were the thing that mattered. The other is a curator. Her lanyard says PASCOE. She has blue gloves on. She has a padded tray lined with grey foam and a clipboard with a sheet on it that has an outline of my front and my back, empty, for her to mark.
Rokeya has finished the room. She should go on to Room 56. She stands by her trolley and does not go.
Pascoe lifts me with two hands, one under each side, and lays me face up on the foam, and bends over me with a lens. She is checking whether anything has come off me since the last time. Salt can move in clay when the air changes, and push from inside, and lift the surface in flakes. She draws on her outline in pencil where there is a hairline crack she already knows about. She draws a small circle where there is a grain of something that should not be there, and lifts it off with a soft brush, and looks at the brush.
Rokeya says, "Excuse me."
Pascoe looks up. The technician looks at Rokeya's tabard, and at her cloth, and then at Pascoe.
"Sorry," Rokeya says. "Every day I clean this one. Every day for six years. I read the label. I know it is the flood. What part are you looking at now?"
Pascoe looks at me, and then at Rokeya, and then at the door, where Dennis is not. She says, "Come round this side. Don't lean on the trolley."
Rokeya comes round. She puts her hands behind her back without being asked.
The glass is not on me. I have to tell you about it anyway, because it is the mark of where I am now.
Every day people put their hands on it. They put their hands on it to lean closer. They put their foreheads on it. Children put their mouths on it. They leave the oil of their skin and the warmth of their breath, and the breath fogs and clears and the oil stays, and in the morning someone wipes it off. Nothing they leave reaches me. That is what the glass is for.
In 1872, the year Smith read me, I was on a table, and people touched me with bare fingers, and that was the custom then. Then I was put behind glass. I do not know how many times the glass has been changed. I do not know what light does to clay over a hundred years. The people who chose the glass thought they knew.
Smith read me to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on the third of December, 1872. The Prime Minister was in the room. The newspapers wrote that an Assyrian tablet had confirmed the Flood of Genesis. That is not quite what I say. What I say is older than Genesis and it is not the same. Utnapishtim's boat has its own measurements, and his flood lasts six days and seven nights, and his birds come in a different order. But the newspapers wrote what they heard. The Daily Telegraph paid for Smith to go to Nineveh and look for the missing piece of me, and in May 1873 he found a fragment with lines that filled a gap in the story. It was not a piece of me. It was a piece of another tablet, a different copy. It filled the gap anyway. Clay does not mind which clay tells the story.
None of this is on the glass. The glass only has what happened yesterday.
Pascoe turns the tray a little toward the light. She puts the end of her pencil, not the point, above my reverse, in the air, half a finger's width from me, and moves it slowly down a column.
"This is the end of it," she says. "After the storm. The boat's come aground on a mountain. Mount Nimush. It stays stuck there. And he waits." The pencil moves. "On the seventh day he lets a dove go. The dove goes off, and it can't find anywhere to land, and it comes back."
Rokeya nods. She is not looking at Pascoe. She is looking at the wedges where the pencil is.
"Then he lets a swallow go. Same thing. It comes back." The pencil moves down. "Then a raven. And the raven goes, and it sees the water's going down, and it eats, and it" — Pascoe stops and reads with her lips moving, and then she says it the way the line goes — "it eats, it bobs up and down, it doesn't turn round. It doesn't come back to him."
"It doesn't come back," Rokeya says.
"No. That's how he knows there's ground."
Rokeya looks at the column for a long time. Then she says, "Which one is the raven?"
Pascoe moves the pencil a little to the left and holds it still above a group of wedges near the bottom of the column, close to the edge of the break. "Here. That sign and that one."
Rokeya bends to look. Her hands stay behind her back. She bends until her face is closer to me than the glass usually lets a face come, and her breath reaches me, warm, and goes, and there is nothing on me afterward. Breath leaves no mark on fired clay.
The story does not end with the raven. I will tell you the rest, because it is in me.
Utnapishtim lets everything out of the boat and makes an offering on the mountain, and the gods smell it, and they gather over it like flies. The god who sent the Flood is angry that anyone has lived. The god who spoke to the wall tells him he should not have sent it. And the angry god takes Utnapishtim and his wife by the hand and touches their foreheads and makes them as the gods are. It happens once. It does not happen again.
Then Utnapishtim says to Gilgamesh: Now, who will call the gods together for you? And Gilgamesh, who came all that way to learn how not to die, is told to stay awake for six days and seven nights, and he falls asleep. And he is given a plant that makes the old young, and on the way home he goes down to bathe in a pool, and a snake smells the plant and takes it, and sheds its skin as it goes. Gilgamesh sits down and weeps. Then he goes home to Uruk with nothing, and he shows the ferryman the walls of the city, and the brickwork, and the foundations, and says: Go up, walk on the wall.
That is the end of the story I carry. Not all of it is on this piece of me; the rest is read from other copies, other clay. A wall at the beginning and a wall at the end. I am telling you what is written. I am not telling you what it means.
"Do you have to go?" Pascoe says. She has put the pencil down on the clipboard.
"Room 56," Rokeya says. "Then the stairs." She does not move yet. "My mother," she says. "Four years ago, in June, the water came into her house. Sunamganj. In Sylhet. You know it?"
"I've heard of the floods there."
"Up to here on her." Rokeya puts the side of her hand at her collarbone. "On the wall it is still there, the line. My sister says paint it. My mother says no, not yet, leave it." She takes her phone out, and looks at the door for Dennis, and shows Pascoe the photograph. Pascoe looks at it with the blue gloves held up in front of her so as not to touch the phone.
"She's measuring herself against it," Pascoe says.
"So when I see the picture, I know," Rokeya says. She puts the phone away. "Every morning I wipe this one." She points with her chin at the glass, which is standing on its edge in the technician's frame against the wall. "Every morning there is hands. I wipe the hands. Okay. And the marks in this one, nobody wipes."
Pascoe does not say anything to that. She looks down at me. She picks up the pencil again and makes a small tick in the corner of her sheet, which means that I am the same as I was. I am the same as I was. That is what clay is.
"Thank you," Rokeya says. "The raven. Okay." And she goes back round the case to her trolley.
At nine the glass is put back on. The technician lowers it on the suction handles and lines it up and screws the end panel in, and checks the seal with his thumb, and then wipes off his thumbprint with a cloth from his own pocket.
At nine-forty the lights in the gallery go up to full. Dennis walks through and looks at each case, as he does, and does not stop at mine.
At ten the doors open. The first people into Room 55 are a school group, in yellow vests, with a teacher at the front walking backward and talking. They come along the cases in no particular order. Three of them stop at mine. One reads the label out loud to the others in a flat voice, the way children read labels. Tablet Eleven of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Flood Tablet.
The smallest of the three is not reading. She has found, low down at the corner of the glass near the label, the hand that was there this morning. Rokeya came back for it after the glass went back on, on her way to the stairs. She stood in front of the case with the blue cloth folded in her hand, and she looked along the glass sideways into the light, and she wiped away the marks the suction handles had left. She did not wipe the hand. Then she put the cloth in the pocket of her tabard and pushed the trolley out, the wheel squeaking on every third turn.
The girl puts her own hand flat over the other one. It is nearly the same size. The fingers do not quite line up. She keeps it there, and leans in, and looks through the glass and her own fingers at the wedges near the bottom of my reverse, where the raven is, which she cannot read.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Tabulā Diluviī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.
The Flood Tablet, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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