1In the days when the great kingdoms were growing old, there was a city on the shore of the western sea called Ugarit. It was a city of ships. Copper came to it from the island, tin from beyond the sunrise, grain from the Black Land, and a dozen tongues were spoken on its quay.
2In Ugarit there was a boy named Abdi, who was twelve, and the worst pupil in the house of the scribe Yasiru.
3It was not that he was stupid. But the great writing, the writing of kings, had six hundred signs. One sign might be a word, or a sound, or three different sounds, according to its neighbours. It took ten years to learn, and it was not even in his own tongue; it was the speech of Babylon, which all the kings used between themselves. Abdi sat over his clay and the wedges swam like tadpoles.
4There was another writing in Ugarit. It had thirty marks, and that was all. Each mark was one sound of the people's own speech. The pupils learned it in their first month, chanting the marks in their order, which began ox, house. Merchants used it for their tallies. Abdi could write it as fast as he could talk.
5"A toy," said Yasiru, when he caught him at it. Yasiru was a stern, dry man who had given thirty years to the six hundred signs. "Any fishwife could learn that. Therefore it is worth what a fishwife knows. Again, from the top."
6Abdi's father, Yatar, was a steersman in the king's fleet. That spring the fleet had been sent north, to the Lukka coast, at the order of the great king of the Hittites, and the soldiers had marched away inland for the same master. The city was left with old men and a wall.
7It was a hungry year. The rains had failed three times running, and not only there. And word came by sea of something worse: ships without a flag, crewed by men from no one knew where, who fell on a harbour at dawn and left nothing standing.
8One evening Yasiru was called to the palace, and he took Abdi to carry his clay. So the worst pupil in the school stood in a corner and heard the king of Ugarit speak a letter.
9King Ammurapi was not old, but he looked it. The letter was to the king of the copper island, whom he called his father. He said that enemy ships had come and burned his towns. He said that all his soldiers were in the Hittite country and all his ships on the Lukka coast, and the land lay bare. He said seven ships had done this harm, and begged to be warned if more were seen.
10Yasiru pressed it into the clay in the great writing, sign after flawless sign. Abdi watched his hand. He thought, for the first time, that it was a beautiful thing to do anything that well.
11Whether that letter ever reached the island, no one knows.
12They came two mornings later, out of the sea mist, and there were a great many more than seven. Abdi woke to a sound he did not know. It was the harbour bell, which had not been rung in his lifetime. He ran up to the roof. The lower town was burning already.
13His mother, Ahat, did not scream. She put bread in a cloth. She put his sister Pugat, who was six, on his back, and tied her there with a shawl. "The east gate," she said. "Do not stop for anything. I am behind you."
14The streets were a river of people, all running one way. Abdi was carried along like a chip. At the corner by the tablet-house he looked back, and his mother was there, ten paces behind. He looked again at the next corner, and there were only strangers. He stopped. He fought the current for a moment, shouting her name. A man knocked him down without seeing him. Pugat was shrieking in his ear. He got up, and the crowd took him on.
15He never saw his mother again. He never learned how it was. For the rest of his life he could not hear a bell without turning his head.
16The door of the tablet-house stood open as he was swept past, and Yasiru was in it. The old scribe was not running. He had a basket of tablets in his arms, the best of the house: the tales of the gods, the king's treaties. He was looking up the street and down it, and Abdi saw that he understood there was no cart, and no time, and that clay is heavy.
17Their eyes met. Yasiru set the basket down on his own doorstep, carefully, as one sets down a sleeping child. He cupped his hands and shouted over the roar. It was the last thing he ever taught.
18"Boy! Whatever is in your head! Carry that!"
19Then the smoke came down the street between them.
20Abdi went out of the east gate with his sister on his back, into the hills. From the first ridge he looked round. The whole city was one fire from the palace to the sea. It burned for two days. No one came back to rebuild it, then or ever.
21There were some hundreds of them on the road south, the leavings of Ugarit, moving along the coast from village to village. The villages had little, and shut their doors. Abdi carried Pugat until his legs shook, and when the bread was gone he stole, and was not proud of it.
22On the ninth day an old potter who had walked beside them lay down under a carob tree and did not get up. His daughter sat by him, rocking. She was not weeping for his death so much as for the manner of it. "There is no tomb," she kept saying. "There is nothing with his name. Who will know he was Ilimu the potter, who made the blue jars? I shall die too, and then it will be as if he was never born."
23Abdi had nothing to give her. Then he saw a broken pot by the road, and it came to him that he did have one thing. He picked up a shard, and a sharp flint, and he scratched on it. He used the thirty marks, since it was a name in their own tongue and he had no clay for wedges. Ilimu the potter, of Ugarit.
24He put it in the woman's hand. "It says his name," he said. "And where he came from."
25She could not read it. She turned it over and over. "Which mark is the name?" she said. He showed her. She touched it. Then she tied the shard into the corner of her shawl, over her heart, and got to her feet.
26By nightfall there were eleven people waiting where he sat, each with a shard. A husband. Two sons. A grandmother. He scratched until the light was gone. He did the same the next night, and the next. He was twelve years old, and he had become the scribe of a city that no longer stood.
27One of those nights a girl of about his own age, a dyer's daughter, watched his hand a long while. "That mark is the first sound of my name," she said. "And that one is the first of yours. I heard you say them." He looked at her. It had taken her one evening to see what the marks were. In four more she could write her own name and her dead brother's.
28He thought about that, walking. He thought about Yasiru's hand going across the king's letter, and the ten years it took to make such a hand. All of it had gone into the smoke in a morning. There was no way to give it to a dyer's daughter under a carob tree. It had been a great treasure in a house with one door.
29In the second month they came to Sur, a town built on a rock in the sea, which the raiders had not troubled. It took in those who could work. Abdi found a place with a ship's chandler, hauling rope and counting jars.
30The chandler kept his tallies in ink, on bits of broken pot. Abdi looked at them on the first day and felt the hair rise on his neck.
31They were not wedges. They were small quick drawings, made with a brush: an ox's head, the plan of a house, a wave of water, an eye. There were fewer of them than his thirty. But when the chandler read them aloud, each mark was one sound, and the sounds were his own thirty, less a few that these southerners did not use. And when the chandler's small son chanted them, as children do, they began ox, house.
32It was the same thing. It was the same thing in another coat. Somewhere, long before, someone on this coast had found out the secret, that a tongue is made of a small handful of sounds, and each needs only one mark. The scribes of Ugarit had dressed it in wedges to look like the writing of kings. Here no one had bothered. Sailors wrote it. Rope-makers wrote it. It needed no clay, no tablet-house, no ten years. It needed a bit of pot and some soot.
33He learned them in three days. He taught Pugat in a month, for a game, and after that he could not stop her. She wrote on the walls.
34Now he began to do a thing that the other boys of the quay thought was mad. Every ship that put out from Sur, north or south or west, he went to its master with a shard. On each shard he had written the same words in ink. Abdi and Pugat, children of Yatar the steersman of Ugarit, live. They are at Sur, at the house of the chandler by the north harbour.
35"Leave it where you land," he said. "On the quay. In the wine-shop. Anywhere a sailor would see it."
36"And who is to read it?" said the masters.
37"Any sailor," said Abdi. "That is the whole point of it."
38Most of them took it to be rid of him. He made more. In two years he sent out over three hundred. The old temple scribe of Sur, who knew the six hundred signs and wrote the town's letters to great kings, saw him at it one day and laughed in his beard. "Writing for fishwives," he said.
39"Yes," said Abdi. He was fourteen, and he had stopped being ashamed of it. "That is what my master called it. He was the finest scribe on this coast. What he knew burned with him, because it took ten years to hand over and he had a morning. I can hand this to a fishwife in a month. So I think a fishwife's writing may last longer than his."
40The old scribe did not laugh at that.
41In the third spring a ship came in from the copper island, a trader, much patched. A man came down its plank who walked with a limp and had grey in his hair. He stood on the quay with a shard of pot in his hand, looking from it to the row of houses along the north harbour, and back again.
42He was no scribe. He had learned the sailors' marks on a rowing bench, from a man of Gubla. He had been wrecked, and a slave, and an oarsman, and had crossed that sea six times looking for anyone who had come alive out of Ugarit. He had found the shard nailed to a doorpost in a harbour on the island. He had read it eleven times before he trusted it.
43Pugat was writing on the chandler's wall with a burnt stick. She was nine by then. She looked up and saw a strange man crying in the street. She did not know him. She had been six, and he had been at sea half her life.
44Abdi came out of the storeroom with a coil of rope on his shoulder. He knew him.
45They sat up most of that night. Yatar was told about Ahat, and the bell, and the corner by the tablet-house. He put his hands over his face for a time. Then he took them away and looked at his children, each in turn, as a man counts what the sea has left him. He still had the shard. He kept it until he died.
46Abdi stayed in Sur, and he kept the names of Ugarit. He copied every one from the shards onto a roll of reed-paper, when the survivors came to him, and there were four hundred and six. And he taught the marks to any child on the quay who wished, for nothing, and to their mothers.
47Now hear what became of the two writings.
48Ugarit lay under its own ash and was forgotten. Three thousand years on, a farmer's plough struck a cut stone, and the diggers came. They found the tablet-houses. The fire that had ended the city had baked its clay as hard as brick. The tales of the gods were there. So was the king's letter about the seven ships. And there were small tablets with thirty marks set out in order, made for children to learn from.
49No one had seen those marks before. Yet there were so few of them, and the tongue was so near to tongues still living, that the learned read them within two years. Yasiru's basket had waited on its doorstep after all.
50The sailors' marks did not need to be dug up, for they were never buried. In time they settled at twenty-two. They went out from that coast on every ship. A people far to the west took them and added marks for the sounds they sang. Another people took them from those, and another. The ox's head was turned on its side, and then upside down, and lost its eye, and it is the first letter of the page you are reading now. The house is the second.
51No king ordered that. Kings had the great writing, and it died with their kingdoms. The small marks were carried by sailors and dyers' daughters and little girls with burnt sticks. Abdi had been the worst pupil in the school.