A script

Very unusually this is a picture from yesterday because yesterday I fitted in two days' worth of exhibitions. Forgive me. Before going to see Don McCullin I spent a couple of hours at 'I am Ashurbanipal' at the British Museum, a magnificent view of the Assyrian Empire in the seventh century BC. Extraordinary artefacts given context and beautifully displayed. 

Most people will at some point have seen photos of those huge gypsum plaques from the walls of the royal palace in Nineveh (now Mosul) with low-relief carvings of lions, warriors, spirit-forms, houses, gardens, trees, rivers, fish, boats, chariots and other depictions of the king's battles and achievements. What this exhibition did was to use precision light to pick out, in sequence, small sections of carving, to put the story on the plaques in order (extra). Utterly engaging.

But even better, for me, was the palace library: 10,000 books written in tiny cuneiform script onto clay blocks. (They made me feel quite guilty about sometimes choosing not to read my current book because it's too thick and heavy.) The 'books' on the right in this blip are literature and the smaller tablets on the left are letters.

Ashurbanipal's vast empire was, like all empires, threatened by the consequences of information and edicts not reaching the periphery quickly. These small clay letters were carried as fast as possible along royal roads by a relay of messengers on horseback and I was absurdly delighted to learn that each had its own clay envelope (main picture).

All this was nearly 3,000 years ago but brought very much home to me when I read that some messages were written in Phoenician script in Aramaic, the language spoken by one of the refugees I work with who comes from Mosul. While I was watching the short film at the end of the exhibition about how very much of Iraq and Syria's archaeology has been turned into rubble by Daesh, I couldn't help thinking of him and his smashed arm. 

How empires rise and fall and how the ordinary - the people who enable the empire to function, whatever the grandiose claims of its head - are abused and forgotten.