You Can't Read This Read online

  To those I walk with

  and to the three Morton and I watched

  as they learned to walk

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The First Readers

  2 Language Lost and Language Found

  3 The Poet and the Emperor

  4 The Made-to-Order Alphabet

  5 The Prayerful Pagodas

  6 The Stolen Story

  7 The Pillage of Baghdad

  8 Giving Books to the People

  9 Darkness upon the Deep

  10 The Cousins and the Code

  11 Books Not to be Read

  12 That Dreadful Mr. Shakespeare

  13 A Book at His Fingertips

  14 Freddy the Slave Boy

  15 The Two-Faced Treaty

  16 The Evil World of – Comic Books?

  17 Days of the Taliban

  18 Access Denied

  Source Notes

  Picture Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  WHEREVER PEOPLE CAN read, there are stories about the magic, mystery, and power of what they read. Because reading unlocks knowledge and power, people hoard it and fight for it just as they fight for treasures and gold.

  he ancient Romans told a tale about one of their kings, Tarquin, who wanted to know what fate had in store for his kingdom so that he could be a better, stronger ruler. He went to see the Sibyl of Cumae, a wise woman who lived in a cave, to ask her to read the future. As the king approached the dark cavern, the old woman looked up from where she huddled by a fire and told him that all the future was written in her own nine books of prophecy. She said she would sell these books to him – for a very high price.

  King Tarquin laughed angrily at the outrageous amount. “Ridiculous,” he said. “I’d never pay that.”

  “Very well,” said the Sibyl. She threw three of her nine books into the fire.

  “But what part of the future was that?” said the alarmed king.

  “Whatever it was, it is now unknowable,” the Sibyl replied. “Do you want the other six books?”

  This version of the Sibyl of Cumae was painted in the early 1600s by Domenico Zampieri, an artist who worked mostly in Rome and Naples. The sybil’s cave overlooked the ancient town of Cumae, which lies between the two cities.

  “That’s why I came to see you,” said Tarquin, “What is the price for six?” The Sibyl said, “The same price.” Again the king shook his head, so she picked up three more books and tossed them into the flames as well. “These visions too are now lost,” she told him.

  The king was horrified by the destruction. Was she mad? Would she burn all these precious books? He ordered his servant to bring his purse and he emptied it on the cave floor, paying the sum that, at the beginning, would have bought him all nine volumes. With a shrug the Sibyl gave him her last three books. Carefully the king carried them back to Rome, where he ordered them housed in a splendid building, to be consulted by the Senate on Rome’s most momentous occasions.

  In our own times, we too have stories about the power of books. Sometimes they are about the struggle to learn to read; sometimes they are about defying people who want to prevent others from reading.

  Another tale is of the sorcerers apprentice – there’s a version of it in the movie Fantasia (Mickey Mouse plays the apprentice). It tells of a junior wizard who works hard carrying buckets of water for his magician master. The master won’t let his apprentice see his book of spells. He tells the student to concentrate on his chores. One day, the magician goes away. Of course, the student goes straight to the forbidden book. He finds a spell to enchant a broom so that it will bring a bucket of water for him. When that works, the happy apprentice reads more spells and creates many brooms, all carrying pails of water. But the brooms won’t stop bringing water, and soon the apprentice realizes that he is going to drown in the magic pouring out of the book. He is only saved when the magician comes back, casts a new spell, and slams the book shut.

  There are stories about the power of magical texts in the Bible’s Book of Revelation, in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, in The Arabian Nights, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories. In C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a girl named Lucy opens a magician’s book because she wants to help her friends escape his spells, and she finds enchantments both dangerous and wonderful.

  What do all these stories have in common?

  The ancient idea that writing contains power, and that reading unlocks that power.

  This book you are looking at right now is a history of reading. But it is also about people who have been denied the power of reading. It’s about lost writing, forbidden books, mistranslations, codes, and vanished libraries. It’s about censors, vandals, and spies. It’s about people who write in secret. And it’s about people who devote their hearts and brains to learning what has been written.

  The First Readers

  IN ANCIENT TIMES, the precious skill of reading was reserved for rulers and priests only. But the secret wasn’t always theirs to keep.

  n summer in the Mesopotamian plain – what we now call Iraq – the sun beats down like a drum. More than four thousand years ago, it beat down on one of the world’s first great cities, Ur, not far from where Baghdad is today. It shone on Ur’s people, tens of thousands of them, all the subjects of King Sargon. As they groaned and sweated through the labor of the day, they surely found the heat unbearable. But they left no words of complaint – because they didn’t have the skills to put their thoughts into writing. There were people in Ur who could do that, however. Looking down on these workers from the temple walls and palace towers were scribes and priests and priestesses who, for the first time in human history, could read and write.

  People had been making marks to keep track of what they produced, owned, and traded even before the time of Ur. Over centuries, these marks grew more complex: drawings of wine jugs and swords, sheep and slaves. But it was in Mesopotamia, around 4,300 years ago, that a few priests, merchants, and royal servants started to simplify picture drawings into something like an alphabet. And it was in Mesopotamia that these readers and writers created some of the world’s first works of literature – poems and epic stories such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Bible’s story of Genesis: how Abraham left his home in Ur for the land of Canaan. Among the earliest of works from Ur are hymns written in honor of Inana, goddess of love and war.

  Imagine Ur in those days. The city streets are like an oven, but it’s cooler in the shade of the Giparu, a complex of temples and the official home of the En, or high priestess. Inside the Giparu, with her head bowed and her eyes cast down, a servant girl silently pads across the floor in her bare feet to wait on En-hedu-anna (En = high priestess, hedu = ornament, and anna = of the Sky God).

  This four-thousand-year-old stone disk shows En-hedu-anna in her pleated robes, flanked by servants. It was discovered during excavations at Ur by a British-American team in 1925-26. “En-hedu-anna” was the great lady’s title; we do not know her birth name.

  En-hedu-anna – daughter of mighty King Sargon I, conqueror of Ur – pays no attention to mere servants. In carvings from that time, she looks intimidating. She’s middle-aged and heavyset, and magnificent in her pleated linen robe. She has huge eyes, lined with age, rimmed in black.

  En-hedu-anna’s eyes glitter at the approach of a bald scribe, a temple writer, who bows and prostrates himself at En-hedu-anna’s feet. The priestess greets him by raising her arm across her face, a gesture known as “letting the hand be at the nose.”

  Then the two, scribe and priestess, get down to the strange process of writing, while the servant girl quietly watches. The girl knows what writing is
; it’s the marks priests refer to when they say with great authority, “As it is written. …” Writing is the marks that royal messengers consult when they bring word from the king: “Say unto So-and-so,” the marks command, and the messenger speaks.

  When the ordinary people of Ur – like the girl – pass walls and temples inscribed with writing, they’re awe-struck. They can’t make writing themselves, but they know that it has power over their lives (some modern people feel this way about computers). Out of more than ten thousand people in Ur, perhaps only a few hundred can actually look at these marks and say the words they represent. But everyone knows that the marks are heavy with knowledge, and that they can carry knowledge from one person to another, or from the past into tomorrow.

  The scribe shows the high priestess a clay tablet small enough to sit on the palm of his brown hand. En-hedu-anna studies it. It is lined with writing marks, like the tracks of small birds, in row on orderly row.

  High Priestess En-hedu-anna reads aloud from the tablet. It is a poem she composed when her father’s enemy, a king of Uruk, rebelled against King Sargon. “Let silence fall onto the rebel land…. Until it submits, let spit be poured on it!” Her poem, ferocious and exultant, tells of how rebels are crushed when the goddess of war herself appears, “joyfully beautiful, armed with the seven maces!”

  En-hedu-anna dictates the ending of her latest poem to the scribe, who records the words by pressing a stylus (stick of wood) with a sharpened tip into the clay’s soft, wet surface. The resulting marks look like wedges with long tails, which is why archeologists call this writing cuneiform, or wedge-writing, Cuneus is Latin for “wedge,” Then En-hedu-anna commands the scribe to pass the stylus to her, and she adds something, firmly pressing the stylus into the clay, “There, it is finished,” she declares. The scribe studies what she has written and reverently reads it out loud: “The compiler of these tablets was En-hedu-anna, My king, something has been created that no one has created before,” (Nowadays, some scholars at the University of Pennsylvania Museum say En-hedu-anna was right to claim that she had created something new. As far as we know, the high priestess was the first person in history to write a poem – and to sign her name to it.)

  The servant girl looks away. She is hiding a terrible, wonderful secret. She has seen the marks for En-hedu-anna’s name so many times that she can pick those special cuneiform characters out from the rest. She well knows that lowly servants like herself are not supposed to understand the sacred mysteries of reading. But she can read an author’s name. She has pressed open the door, just a little.

  Language Lost and Language Found

  SOME OF THE ancient world’s greatest cultures had the skill of reading and then lost it. The history of reading is full of dead ends, forgotten voices, and mysteries.

  ittle Arthur Evans, small for his seven years of age but very strong, looked proudly at the deep hole he had dug all by himself in the garden of the Evans family home – Nash Mills, in Hertfordshire, in England. No one had seen him dig – except perhaps the ghost of his dear mother, who had died the year before, in 1857. From a piece of special fabric Arthur unwrapped an old doll, and laid it in the hole in the ground. Delicately he placed a dead butterfly on top. Then he unfolded a piece of paper on which he had printed KING EDWARD SIXTH AND THE BUTTERFLY AND THEIR CLOTHS AND THINGS. He gently covered his diggings with earth.

  Not long after, Arthur’s father – John Evans, a wealthy paper manufacturer – was walking by the garden and noticed the toy grave. He removed the earth, examined Arthur’s note, and later wrote to one of his friends about his son’s strange passion for digging and making up stories about what was buried there: “He is a very odd child.”

  John Evans also liked digging. He was an amateur geologist and anthropologist. (Geologists study rocks and the structure of our planet; anthropologists unearth the structure of human societies.) Sometimes he took Arthur on his expeditions. Often, he invited scientists over for dinner parties and discussions of the latest findings of fossils, bones, and ancient tools. When little Arthur wasn’t hanging around listening to the grown-ups talk about Roman pottery or buried weapons, he read. He particularly liked books such as Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes, which retold ancient Greek myths – including the story of Theseus.

  All his long life, Arthur would think about this tale: how Theseus, a brave prince, sailed from Greece to the island of Crete to fight the Minotaur, a monster with a bulls head who lived in a labyrinth, or maze. The monster’s master, King Minos of Crete, was very cruel. He used to send strangers into the labyrinth, knowing that they would get lost in its twisting passages, and that his Minotaur would leap out of the shadows and kill them. But the king’s daughter, Ariadne, fell in love with Theseus and didn’t want him to die. She gave him a long thread so that he could find his way through the labyrinth and slay the Minotaur.

  This story haunted Arthur. So did other Greek myths that he read when he went off to boarding school. In the 1800s, most European schoolboys studied the Greek poet Homer’s story of the Trojan War – of how in ancient times Greek warriors besieged the city of Troy, but could not get inside its walls. At last, the cunning Odysseus told his fellow Greeks to build a giant, hollow wooden horse and leave it on the beach. The Trojans thought the horse was a gift, so they opened their gates and dragged it inside the city walls. At night, some Greeks hiding inside climbed out of the hollow horse, opened the city gates to their companions, and burned mighty Troy to the ground.

  Arthur Evans’s teachers told him that the tale of Theseus, and Homer’s story of the fall of Troy, were myths, important mostly because they inspired real people. When Alexander the Great had set out to conquer the world, he had carried copies of Homer’s two great heroic poems, the Iliad (about the Trojan War) and the Odyssey (about the travels of Odysseus), But Alexander was fact and the Trojan War was fiction, insisted the scholars. In a twelve-volume history of Greece published in England in 1856 – when Arthur was five – one British expert had written of the Trojan War, “It is, in the eyes of modern inquiry, essentially a legend and nothing more.”

  Then one June morning in 1871, Arthur, not yet twenty years old, snapped open his newspaper and read that an eccentric German millionaire, Heinrich Schliemann, was claiming he’d found the real, historical city of Troy.

  Schliemann was self-educated, neither a scholar nor historian, and no one could convince him that Homer had written this great poem about something that had never happened. Because Homer had written that Troy was built on a windy plain near the coast of the “wine-dark sea,” Schliemann looked for such a place, and started digging up a rubble-covered mound in northwest Turkey called Hissarlik, Within days, Schliemann, his young Greek wife, Sophia, and their team of diggers had unearthed huge stone walls. And then more walls, and more. They’d found not just Troy but many Troys – destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again. Signs of fire, signs of war. Ancient cities in layers, each built on the ruins of the last. Homer’s Troy, the Schliemanns announced, was the ruin that dated from twelve hundred years before the time of Christ.

  The world was thunderstruck.

  Heroes of modern archeology, the Schliemanns moved on to Mycenae, in Greece, and dug up what they said was the city of King Agamemnon, who had led the Greeks in the Trojan War, In 1877, the Schliemanns exhibited their Trojan and Mycenaean treasures – necklaces, earrings, headdresses – in London, People lined up for hours, to see them.

  Arthur was among them. What he saw only made him wonder more about these long-ago civilizations. The jewelry and pottery shards and weapons on display made it clear that Mycenae and Troy had been sophisticated cultures of laws and learning. But where was the writing? Where were the tablets or scrolls written at the time of Troy’s great wars? Why couldn’t we learn about these events from the people who lived through them?

  Sir Arthur Evans with the walking stick he called Prodger, in the Palace of Minos, Crete, in 1922. it must have been winter, Crete’s rainy season; almost no rain
falls on the island in the broiling hot summer months.

  Arthur Evans made this question the challenge of his life. In 1883, on a trip to Greece, he dropped in on the Schliemanns in Athens. The famous German told his young English visitor that archeology’s next great challenge would be to find the palace of King Minos in Crete. Alas, it was too dangerous to go there, because of a savage civil war Even so, after Schliemann died in 1890, Arthur Evans and his father decided to spend the family fortune to see if more Greek legends were true. The Schliemanns had already proved that Homer’s stories were based on history. Arthur Evans wanted to see that history in writing.

  Don’t bother, the experts told him. They said that when the Trojan War had occurred, around 1200 BCE, no one in Europe had been able to read or write. Yes, a few people around Ur had been literate, and there was evidence of writing among the ancient Chinese and Egyptians. But the Jews hadn’t written anything down until around 800 BCE. Why would the Greeks have been any faster? Besides, the scholars agreed, Homer had lived some five hundred years after the Trojan War, and his poems had been composed for oral performance – to be recited for people who could not read. Like songs, oral poetry repeats a lot of phrases over and over to help the reciters remember, and to help the listeners follow. Homer had his formulas, like “cunning Odysseus” or “wine-dark sea,” because his listeners weren’t able to go leafing back through a book to remind themselves of who someone was, or what had happened earlier in the story. They had no books, and surely their ancestors half a millennium earlier had had none.

  The experts‘ arguments didn’t stop Arthur Evans. He was stubbornly convinced that whoever had made the treasures of Mycenae and Troy must have been able to read and write. When he’d visited Athens’ antique shops, he’d bought stones engraved with odd marks – lettering that wasn’t Greek, or Egyptian, or the language of Ur, for that matter. No one knew what civilization the writing came from. But some of these stones had come from the island of Crete. So Arthur Evans went to Crete and, like Schliemann, he let Homer be his guide.