The Human Cosmos. Jo Marchant
downriver by raft or canoe into the realm of the ancestors, perhaps carrying the cremated remains of selected dead, before walking up towards Stonehenge in the afternoon. From this angle, the lintelled circle would have presented a solid silhouette against the sky. The sun would have set directly behind, shining straight through a tight window between the top of that circle and the upper portion of the towering central trilithon. For anyone walking up the slope towards Stonehenge, the last glimmer of sunset would have been held there for a few moments, transformed as at Newgrange into a beam of light framed by stone.
The idea of Stonehenge as a realm of the dead, visited by the midwinter sun, makes sense in the light of theories about passage tombs such as Newgrange. In both cases, the Neolithic builders used the stones to convert their knowledge about repeating patterns of Earth and sky into dramatic moments of sensory perception. Knowing that the solstice falls on a certain day is one thing, collectively witnessing it in the depths of winter would have been quite another: during the time of greatest darkness comes the light. From their knowledge of cosmic cycles, they constructed a dramatic message about eternity – perhaps eternal afterlife – that would last for millennia.
The big innovations of the Neolithic are often said to be stone monuments and farming. Yet both of these can be traced back to a deeper shift, as humans mentally separated themselves from nature, and it became conceivable to manipulate and dominate the natural world. Instead of simply adapting to their environment people took control, shaping not just individual monuments but eventually entire landscapes to give their beliefs and desires physical form.
It’s a revolution begun at and around Göbekli Tepe, but completed 6,000 years later by the builders of Stonehenge. Here the animal spirits are gone; human ancestors rule supreme. And the dependence on caves and the underworld has been broken. The farmers of Neolithic Britain constructed a new cosmology, suitable for a larger, more complex society. People now explored their universe not through individual trance states, deep inside caves as at Lascaux or in tombs like Newgrange, but in public arenas dramatically aligned with the sky. Instead of hiding in the dark, they had stepped into the light.
1 The Neolithic begins with the introduction of farming and ends with the appearance of bronze tools.
2 Dolmen tombs are single-chamber tombs in which a large, flat capstone rests on two or more vertical stones.
3 Many of the excavation’s finds went to the archaeological museum in Sanlıurfa, where they are on display today – including the complete cult building, which has been carefully rebuilt inside the museum.
4 True henges, however, have the ditch outside the bank. Stonehenge is unusual in having its ditch on the inside.
5 Claims made in the 1960s that the stones incorporate dozens of astronomical alignments, and that the ‘Aubrey Holes’ were used to predict eclipses, are not generally accepted by scholars today.
3
FATE
In December 1853, a twenty-seven-year-old archaeologist named Hormuzd Rassam was leading excavations near Mosul, now in Iraq, on behalf of the British Museum in London. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, particularly for someone born and raised in the Middle East. But after more than a year of work, he had yet to make a big discovery, and the spot he was desperate to investigate had been promised to a rival team. He had one last-ditch idea, but the timing had to be perfect. So he watched the desert sky, waiting anxiously for the full moon.
Mosul was Rassam’s home city. Today, it’s known largely as a casualty of the war against terror, left as a pile of rubble and bones after Iraqi forces won it back from ISIS in July 2017. But in Rassam’s time, Mosul was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, with centuries-old brick walls that enclosed dusty streets, crowded bazaars and mosques with bulging domes and soaring minarets. Rickety, flat-bottomed boats ferried passengers across the River Tigris to the fertile land beyond: cornfields; melon and cucumber beds; and a series of shallow grassy hills.
Over the past few years, European adventurers digging in these mounds (and at Nimrud, 30 kilometres south) had revealed a spectacular ancient world. The largest mound, called Kuyunjik, was a mile long. In 1847, the British explorer Austen Henry Layard, with Rassam as his assistant, tunnelled into its southwest corner and unearthed the ruins of a great palace, built in the seventh century BC. The luxurious riverside residence had at least eighty rooms and passages, with stone doorways guarded by huge winged bulls and lions, and walls decorated with around 3 kilometres of carved alabaster friezes, showing victorious military campaigns across the Near East. It belonged to the Assyrian king Sennacherib: Layard and Rassam had discovered the great city of Nineveh, capital of the largest empire the world had ever known.
The Assyrians were famous from the Bible, which tells of Sennacherib’s failed siege of Jerusalem and describes Nineveh as a wicked city whose inhabitants repented after God sent Jonah there to preach. But before Layard’s excavations, no direct trace of this civilisation had ever been found. Now, after more than 2,000 years, its cities and palaces were emerging from the earth.
For a subsequent excavation in 1852, Layard stayed home to pursue a career in politics, persuading the British Museum to put Rassam in charge instead. Keen to prove himself, Rassam planned to investigate the northern corner of the huge Kuyunjik mound, which he was convinced must hold something else spectacular. But Britain and France were jostling for access to antiquities that could be shipped to museums back home, and when Rassam arrived he found that the British consul in Baghdad, Henry Rawlinson, had handed over digging rights of his favoured site to the French.
Rassam dug elsewhere, and by December 1853 his time and funds were running out. He was desperate to explore the site before returning to London, but if he crossed the French and found nothing, the British authorities would likely never trust him again. ‘So I resolved upon an experimental examination of the spot at night,’ he wrote later, ‘and only waited for a good opportunity and bright moonlight for my nocturnal adventure.’
He recruited a team of trusted workmen, and on the night of 20 December led them to Kuyunjik. On the second night, they uncovered part of a marble wall attached to a section of paved floor. The next morning, Rassam excitedly telegraphed Rawlinson and the British Museum with the news that he had discovered another Assyrian palace. But when his team dug further that night, the slabs came to an end after a few feet, surrounded by an ancient rubbish pile.
Rassam was distraught. News of his exploits had already ‘oozed out’ in Mosul, and he feared that the French would soon arrive to stop him, or that the Ottoman authorities would accuse him of looting. On the fourth night, he hired even more men, setting them to work at several sites close to the marble slab. After a few nail-biting hours, he finally heard a shout – ‘Sooar!’ – Arabic for ‘images’. As the men dug a deep trench, a large bank of earth had fallen away, revealing in the moonlight the perfectly preserved image of a muscular, bearded Assyrian king.
The chamber they had discovered turned out to be a long, narrow hall nearly 20 metres long by 5 metres wide. Its walls were covered with scenes of a lion hunt: the king chasing in his chariot, bow held high; spearing a lion with his attendants; thrusting his dagger through the animal’s neck. The reliefs are some of the most exquisite, life-like art ever discovered from the Assyrian civilisation. Rassam was moved by the portrayal of one lioness in particular: ‘resting on her forepaws, with outstretched head she vainly endeavours to gather together her wounded limbs’.
But the biggest discovery was beneath his feet. The floor of this chamber was covered with thousands of broken clay tablets: some completely smashed; others almost whole, up to 9 inches long. Their surfaces were crowded with tiny wedge-shaped indentations – a script known as cuneiform, made by pressing the end of a reed into the clay while it was still wet. Rassam really had discovered another palace – built by Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian empire’s most powerful king. And this was his library.
It was a crucial find. We heard in chapter 2 how the origin of farming, around 8000 BC, was a key turning point in human history: people were no longer part of nature; they were beginning to shape and control it. A few