The codex fragments are fragile to the touch, having been on the roof of my house since early in the last century. Dislodged from their rest during repairs, they fluttered to the ground in a shower of dust that I fear may have been other fragments, now lost to time. Two of the pieces in my possession fit together. The third does not, but is clearly part of the same narrative. Or, more aptly, narratives, as each fragment is two-sided, each displaying the work of a different artist. There are no signatures, but the styles are quite distinctive. Browned by years of exposure, the colors are still fairly clear, as are the black lines of the main figures. Their meaning is elusive.
One seems to be about a grandfatherly man, bald with a large white mustache that covers his mouth, who struggles in vain to reason with someone on the phone. The other party says “Tell Ashur to fetch my tennis racket when he comes to the club.”
The old man says, “Listen, gal, Ash ain’t…” but the other, presumably female, party ends the conversation before he can make his point. The rest is too fragmentary to make sense. Who is Ashur? Who is the old man? And who is the mysterious “gal” on the other end of the line? One part stands out: a few words are set in type rather than drawn by hand, but they are incomplete. All I can make out are the words “and Her Pa”… the last letter is truncated, but seems to be the main stem of a lowercase K, B or perhaps an L.
And her Pak? And her Pab? And her Pal?
The last one makes more sense than the others. If that’s the case, who is “her Pal”? Ashur? The old man? The “gal” on the phone? Without further evidence, I cannot even begin to speculate. As for who “her” is, there is not a single clue.
Turning the fragments over with tweezers while wearing white gloves in a cleanroom, I examine the other side. The weight of this artist’s line is much thinner, and the colors more subdued. The adjacent fragments fit together to form an almost complete image. Two men sit together, their words (like those of the old man on the obverse) written out in black-bordered circles which trail off into short lines that indicate which man is speaking. The only full figure on either side is of a large man in a gray-and-black striped garment, leaning back in a green chair with his rather large feet up on a kettle hanging from a hook jutting from a gray brick wall. This, and the large brown jug behind him, suggests a non-urban setting, although this is, of course, only a layman’s wild guess.
The other figure, a much shorter man, is seen in profile. This figure is not complete, but the head is clearly visible, as is his right arm, which seems to be resting on his knee. He appears to be wearing orange suspenders over a black shirt, or perhaps orange overalls. His profile clearly displays an outlandishly large, round nose with a few scraggly whiskers beneath it.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this specimen is the fact that each man’s dialogue is complete.
The large man seems a bit long-winded, as he goes on for quite a while:
“What’s this country coming to, Snuffy?? Is it right — sending an innocent man to prison for 20 years for picking a few flowers??? Of course — the governor was down on me — the cad!! I’d like to have seen the expression on his face when they told him I escaped — haw — haw –”
The other man, presumably “Snuffy,” replies in a rather strange manner. This may be some sort of dialect, or merely the result of the corncob pipe stuck in his mouth:
“I swow, Brother Ambrose — hit’s downright shameful –”
Clearly, there is a lot to be learned about the culture that produced these artifacts. I have reason to suspect that it was a monarchy, for printed on one of the fragments in a very small typeface is the phrase “Copr 1938 King Feature”. Regrettably, nothing in these codices gives me the slightest hint as to how to further my research into this mystery. This keeps me awake at night, tortured by my own ignorance, until I am forced to wash down a fistful of Restoril with a swig of Balvenie, and fall into a deep and mindless slumber.
© 2011 by Dan Whitworth. All rights reserved
Then there’s this, but I feel as if this is taking us in the wrong direction:
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Aššur (also Ashur, Assur; written A-šur, also Aš-šùr,ܐܫܘܪ in Neo-Assyrian often shortened to Aš) is the head of the Assyrian pantheon. His origins are unknown but he is one of the Mesopotamian city gods, namely of the city Assur (pronounced Ashur), once the capital of the Old Assyrian kingdom. It might therefore be that he was a personification of the city itself. From about 1300 BC priests attempted to replace Marduk with Ashur in Enuma Elish. From the reign of Sargon II he was identified with Anshar[citation needed] (An-šàr) the father of An or Anu, probably because the similarities of the names. In this version of the Enuma Elish Marduk does not appear and instead Ashur slays Tiamat as Anshar. Some scholars have claimed that Ashur was represented as the solar disc that appears frequently in Assyrian iconography. However evidence points out that it is in fact the sun god Shamash. Many Assyrian kings had names that included the name Ashur, including, above all, Ashurnasirpal, Esarhaddon (Ashur-aha-iddina), and Ashurbanipal.