To The Reader

Six thousand years ago, in the middle of the desert, an industrious and lucky tribe lived where two rivers converged. This was a rare and verdant place: dark soil, lots of fish, thousands of birds on their way to the sea perching in large and shady palms to escape from the desert’s sun. Many years later, European travelers would call this Mesopotamia, “the place between two rivers,” but the ancient people who lived there simply called the place kalam—“the land”—for they hadn’t ever known any home except this place, and because of this they assumed that they had been created for it. They believed, in fact, that they had come from those rivers, that their home was the place where the world itself was born, where the earliest piece of earth had first emerged above the waters, and where finally, out of that chaos, some intent had taken shape. The Sumerians are the people who invented civilization.  They invented agriculture, kilns, alcohol, wheels, the first cities, the first government, the first legal codes. Their inventions became so numerous, and their prosperity so abundant, that the Sumerians actually needed to invent accounting, too, and so they produced a rudimentary series of small notches in clay that we recognize today as the first system of writing:


Their earliest written accounts are therefore records of trade and commerce:


There were even the occasional contracts to protect them from their contracts:

Indeed, it’s estimated that over 90 percent of what the Sumerians wrote down only served an administrative function. Writing, in other words, began as nonfiction. But unfortunately it was the worst kind of nonfiction there is: informational, literal, nothing about it mattering beyond the place it held for facts. Nevertheless, the efficiencies that writing introduced to their markets helped the Sumerian people become the richest in the world, their home slowly growing from an outpost of huts to a kingdom of broad boulevards and giant apartment blocks. The culture grew nonstop like this for almost five centuries, their tallies, receipts, and records the only literature they produced. And because of this success the gods began to notice Sumer, looking down and seeing those many marketplaces, those huge apartment blocks, and clanging carts on paved streets, the butchers and the potters and the prostitutes and the beggars—the ceaseless shapeless clattering of the who-what-when-where-why. The gods took note of Sumer because it’d never been so noisy. And scholars agree that this is what finally did Sumer in. The rivers surrounding Sumer started suddenly overflowing, and for seven days and seven nights they overcame their banks, coursed rapidly into Sumer, dissolved everything back to mud. The home of the Sumerians was rendered once again indistinguishable from the nothing that it had emerged from. As one version of the story has described the scene for us, “The windstorms rose…and then the waves rose…and after the gods were finished there was land but nothing else.” It’s embarrassing, of course, to think nonfiction destroyed the world, especially since some readers are still suspicious of the form: a genre that is merely a dispensary of data—not a true expression of one’s dreams, ideas, or fears. But I think the misperception is prevalent today because we haven’t yet laid claim to an alternative tradition. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It’s not very clear sometimes. So this is a book that will try to offer the reader a clear objective: I am here in search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce. It begins in ancient Sumer, once the waters have receded, once a single survivor, named Ziusudra, washes onto the flattened muddy shore of this new world and begins to write a letter to its long and empty future. He’s uncertain whether his letter will ever find a recipient, but he’s compelled to write, and so he writes, cataloguing the problems that he had witnessed in the past by offering some advice about whatever’s coming next. This list that Ziusudra makes is five thousand years old—half a millennium older than the earliest known poem, a full millennium older than the earliest known story. Scholars like to say, therefore, that Ziusudra started literature. But I think that Ziusudra did something much more important. I think his list is the beginning of an alternative to nonfiction, the beginning of a form that’s not propelled by information, but one compelled instead by individual expression—by inquiry, by opinion, by wonder, by doubt. Ziusudra’s list is the first essay in the world: it’s a mind’s inquisitive ramble through a place wiped clean of answers. It is trying to make a new shape where there previously was none.

From The Lost Origins of the Essay by John D’Agata, © 2009. All rights reserved.