1There is in the world today a barrel of baked clay, about the length of a man's forearm, cracked and mended. It is covered round with small wedge-shaped writing in the old tongue of Babylon. It was made in the name of Cyrus the king, soon after the gate was not broken. Men call it the Cyrus Cylinder.
2A hand wrote it. Kings do not press their own clay. The name of that hand is not known, and so this book calls him only the scribe. What he thought is imagined. What he wrote is there for anyone to read.
3He was forty-four years old in the year the city changed kings, and he was the best maker of royal words in Babylon. He had the old forms by heart, a thousand years of them. He could make a king sound like the morning star.
4He had done it for Nabonidus. For seventeen years he had written that Nabonidus was the beloved of the gods, the wise shepherd, the restorer of temples. Some of it had been so. Much had not. It had never troubled him. The words were a craft, like a goldsmith's. Did anyone ask a goldsmith whether the crown was true?
5When the Persians came, he expected to lose his head, or at least his place. He was the old king's voice. Instead, in the winter, he was sent for.
6The priests of the great temple wanted a foundation text. The new king was repairing the city wall, and in Babylon when a king built, a writing was laid in the brickwork, to be found by the gods and by whoever should rebuild in the far years to come. The priests would say what must be in it. With them sat a Persian of the treasury, a grave bearded man named Mithradata.
7The scribe was told what was wanted, and he saw at once how to do it.
8The old king must be shown as the cause of all ills: a man who neglected the feasts, who dragged the gods from their houses, who laid a yoke on the people. The great god of the city, in his anger, must be shown searching all lands for a just prince, and taking Cyrus by the hand.
9He wrote it in six days, and it was very fine. For the old king he took the same phrases he had once used for the old king's enemies. The praise was for Cyrus now. It was the same praise. He needed to change only the name.
10He read it out to the priests and they nodded. Mithradata the Persian said nothing until the end. Then he asked a question that the scribe had never been asked in twenty-five years of work.
11"Is it so?"
12The scribe did not understand him. "It is in the proper form, lord. Every phrase has good authority."
13"I do not ask if it is proper. You have written that Nabonidus did evil to his city every day. You served him. Did he?"
14The priests shifted. If he said yes, he was a man who had praised an evil king for pay. If he said no, he was the old king's man still.
15"He was a strange man," he said carefully. "He loved the moon god more than was wise, and he stayed away ten years. The feasts went unkept. The priests were angry with reason. Whether he did evil every day—" He stopped. "Lord, it is how such writings are made. One does not put in that a king was strange."
16"Among my people," said Mithradata, "a boy is taught three things from his fifth year. To ride. To draw the bow. To say what is so. Leave it as it is; the priests are content, and I am no judge of your forms. I only wished to know whether you knew the difference."
17He went home out of temper. His wife was at the loom. Her name was Ishtar-ummi, in this telling. She was not of Babylon. Her mother's people were of Der, a city beyond the Tigris toward the mountains; her mother had been brought down as a child among the taken, with the god of Der on a cart. Ishtar-ummi had been born by the canal, and the scribe had married her against his family's advice, for her quick mind.
18He told her of the Persian's rudeness. She listened without stopping her work. Then she asked what else was to be in the writing.
19"The usual. His titles. His care for the city. And a new piece the Persian gave me today, to be put in the king's own voice. That he has sent back the gods to their cities across the Tigris, to Ashur and Susa and Akkad, Eshnunna, Zamban, Meturnu and Der, as far as the land of the Guti. And that he has gathered their people and sent them home."
20The shuttle stopped.
21"Der," she said. "It says Der?"
22"Among the others."
23"Then my cousins may go? My mother's sister, who is still living? It is so?"
24"I have written it," said the scribe.
25She turned on her stool and looked at him. "Husband, you wrote that Nabonidus was beloved of the gods in the same month he ran away. I did not ask what you have written. I asked if it is so."
26It was the second time in one day. He opened his mouth to answer her, and found that he did not know. He had pressed the line into the trial clay that afternoon, neatly, and he had not the least idea whether one cart had left for Der or ever would. It had not come into his head to wonder. He had made a thousand such lines in his life.
27And then he thought of what this line was. It was not about cedar. If it was only a fine phrase, like all his others, then somewhere in the reed quarter an old woman of Der would hear that the king had sent her people home, and would pack her bundle, and sit on it, and wait.
28He did not sleep well.
29In the morning he did a thing that the best scribe in Babylon had no need to do. He put on a plain cloak, and took a lump of damp clay and a stylus in a bag, and went down to the gate.
30He went first to the Ishtar Gate and then to the gate toward the east. He was there the whole day, and the next, and for many days after. He stood by the table where the leavings were noted, and he looked.
31He had written about the taken peoples for twenty-five years. They were a phrase: the people of the lands, whom the king has settled. He had never looked at them. Now he watched them go by at arm's length. A man of Susa with a child on his shoulders. Two sisters of Eshnunna, very old, holding hands. A company going west, toward Judah, with a great train of donkeys and a boy among them who walked moving his lips, as if saying over a list. The scribe looked into each face. He was learning what the words in his own line weighed.
32He kept a tally on his lump of clay, city by city. Carts for Ashur, with the god wrapped in linen: he saw them pass. Susa: he saw them. Akkad. Eshnunna. He asked the gate clerks about the ones that had gone before he came, and he did not take one clerk's word; he asked two, apart, and saw whether they agreed.
33Twenty days went by. The priests sent to ask why the foundation text was not yet fair-copied and baked. He sent back that the clay was not ready.
34For there was one name on his tally with no mark against it. No cart had gone to Der.
35He asked at the treasury. A clerk told him the god of Der was still in the storehouse; there was a dispute among its priests, two of them claiming the right to lead it home, and nothing could move until that was settled. It might be a month. It might be a year. The clerk shrugged. What did it matter to the writing? The king had ordered it. It was as good as done.
36The scribe went to see Mithradata.
37"Lord, the text is finished but for one thing. It says in the king's voice that the gods and people of seven cities have been sent home. I have been at the gates twenty days. Six I have seen, or have two witnesses for. Der has not gone. I ask leave to hold the writing until it has. Or else to take out the name."
38The Persian looked at him for some time.
39"The priests tell me you are delaying the king's work. A rival of yours, a scribe named Nabu-zer, has been to me twice. He says you drag your feet because you are the old king's man and hope for his return. He offers to finish it in three days." "You understand that I could give him the work this afternoon, and you would be fortunate to keep your hands."
40"I understand, lord."
41"Then why are you standing here over one name in a list? No one will count the cities. The writing goes into a wall. It will not be seen again while any of us lives."
42"That is why," said the scribe. He was sweating, and he was a little amazed at himself. "Lord, when they opened the old wall for this repair, the workmen found a writing of a king who built there before, a hundred years ago. They brought it to me to read, since no one else could. I read it, standing in the trench. A dead king telling me what he had done. And I thought: I have no way to know if a word of this is so. I am the one he wrote it for, and I cannot use it. I know too well how these are made. I have made them."
43"Someone will stand in a trench and read mine. I will be dust and so will you. He will not be able to go to the gate and count. He will have only the clay. Most of what I have put in it is praise, and he will know praise when he sees it, and weigh it lightly. I cannot help that; it is the form. But this one line says that a thing was done to living people. I should like there to be one line in it he could lean on. I have never written one before. I find I want to."
44Mithradata was silent. Then he pulled a tablet toward him.
45"Two priests of Der, quarrelling over who walks in front," he said. "Yes. I can end that today. They will both walk in front, side by side, or neither will have a temple to go home to." He wrote. "Ten days. Hold your clay ten days, scribe. I will tell the priests the delay is mine."
46On the ninth day the scribe stood at the eastern gate and watched the god of Der go out on an ox cart, under a red cloth, with two sour-faced priests walking exactly abreast in front of it. Behind came the people: not many, with their bundles. Among them was a very old woman on a donkey, led by two of his wife's cousins. Ishtar-ummi walked beside her as far as the gate, and kissed her.
47He made the last mark on his tally. Then he went home, and wet the fine clay, and wrote the whole text fair around the barrel, in his best hand.
48Much of what he pressed there is what such writings always were. The old king is made blacker than he was. The new king speaks in the high style that the scribe had used for others: "I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters." It tells how the god of the city brought him in "without fighting or battle," which was so of Babylon, and says nothing of the dead at Opis. No one should take that barrel for the whole truth. It is a king's account of himself.
49But near its end, after the names of the cities, there stands a line in the king's voice: "I gathered all their inhabitants and returned to them their dwellings." And there is other clay of that same year, a plain record kept by the city's own chroniclers, which says that the gods the old king had gathered into Babylon went back to their places.
50The barrel was baked and carried to the wall. The scribe saw Cyrus once, that day, at a distance: a man no longer young, standing in the dust among the masons, saying something to the foreman about the brick. Then the barrel was set in its place in the dark, and the courses were laid over it.
51The scribe went back to his work. He wrote for the Persians for twelve more years. He asked the treasury for its figures before he would write that a canal was dug.
52The clay lay in the wall while Babylon grew old and fell down around it. It lay there for twenty-four hundred years. Then men came with spades from a country that the scribe had never heard of, and one of them lifted it out into the light, cracked, and blew the dust from it.
53It took them some years to read. When they had read it, they did what the scribe had known they would do. They doubted the praise. They weighed it against other clay, and found the dead at Opis, and said so. That was right, and he would not have minded; he knew the trade.
54And they came to the line about the people, and they went and looked. They looked in the books of the people of Judah, who had no cause to praise a foreign king and praised him. They looked in the plain chronicle of the city, which praises no one. It held their weight. It is not often that a man's words are checked after twenty-four hundred years, and less often that they stand.