This week: a jump into the past that returns us to an eerily modern place. You\u2019ll see what I mean a little later.<\/p>\n
But first, let\u2019s play, \u2018Who\u2019s the oldest?\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n The oldest surviving book in the world is, probably, the Codex Sinaiticus<\/em>. The word codex<\/em> just means book: that is, it calls attention to the specific physical structure, involving binding on one side only of a set of loose leaves. The \u2018Sinaiticus\u2019 bit just refers to the book\u2019s location, in the Sinai Peninsula.<\/p>\n This codex is approximately square. The text is hand-written. And it\u2019s huge. The whole thing has about four million letters. It took the hides of about 360 animals, mostly calves, to make it. The book, unsurprisingly given its age and location, is a bible. The surviving text contains an entire New Testament, and most of the Old Testament as well.<\/p>\n But in our quest for anciency, I think we need to drop our concern with the physical structure of the document. We\u2019re looking for ancient texts, and don\u2019t really mind if that comes in the form of animal skins sewn together, or gold sheets bound together (like the 2500-year-old Pyrgi gold tablets), or marks on stone, or impressions in clay.<\/p>\n Ptahhotep<\/strong><\/p>\n Thus liberated, we can leap back further. The oldest complete text written by a named individual is the Instructions of Ptahhotep, first found near Karnak in Egypt. The text itself is \u201conly\u201d about 36-40 centuries old, but Ptahhotep himself lived in about 2400 BC, or 44 centuries back. If you hopped onto a time machine and set it for that era, you\u2019d know you\u2019d be almost halfway once you hit the birth of Jesus.<\/p>\n The text begins thus:<\/p>\n The Governor of his City, the Vizier, Ptahhotep, said: ‘O Prince, my Lord, the end of life is at hand; old age descends; feebleness comes and childishness is renewed. The old lie down in misery every day. The eyes are small; the ears are deaf. Energy is diminished, the heart has no rest \u2026 The bones are painful; good turns into evil. All taste departs.<\/em><\/p>\n That\u2019s quite an intro, though the text itself is disappointingly bland. (\u2018Quarrelling in place of friendship is a foolish thing,\u2019 is a fair sample of the content.)<\/p>\n But we\u2019re not done. We said we didn\u2019t want to get stuck on the codex as a physical structure, but nor should we get too hung up on the completeness of the text in question.<\/p>\n The oldest text in the world<\/strong><\/p>\n What we\u2019re after, really, is the oldest surviving text of any sort and it\u2019s another set of ancient Egyptian advice which claims the prize: the Instructions of Shuruppak.<\/p>\n This text is about 4600 years old, and if you thought that Ptahhotep\u2019s words of wisdom were a bit dull, you\u2019ll nevertheless find them a whole class above these zingers from Shurruppak:<\/p>\n You should not locate your field in a road.<\/em><\/p>\n You should not buy a donkey that brays.<\/em><\/p>\n Or my favourite:<\/p>\n You should not abuse a ewe; otherwise you will give birth to a daughter.<\/em><\/p>\n That\u2019s pretty much as ancient as we can get in terms of hard physical text, but I haven\u2019t yet told you how that ancient clay tablet actually begins its list of inanities. It opens like this:<\/p>\n In those days, in those far remote days, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years, at that time the wise one who knew how to speak in elaborate words lived in the Land.<\/em><\/p>\n How to open a book<\/strong><\/p>\n I promised you something eerily modern, right, and there it is. What does Shurruppak’s opening remind you of? Maybe something like this:<\/p>\n Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen \u2026 (Grimm Brothers \/ Sleeping Beauty)<\/em><\/p>\n A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away \u2026 (Star Wars, opening crawl)<\/em><\/p>\n Listen! We of the Spear-Danes in the days of old \u2026(Beowulf)<\/em><\/p>\n In other words, the opening text of the world\u2019s oldest text starts the exact same way as a modern sci-fi blockbuster, or a poem composed by a bunch of Anglo-Saxons. That sense of a time beyond our knowledge, a land where rules could be a little different. It\u2019s like our portal into fiction.<\/p>\n And, given that the author of, say, Beowulf certainly didn\u2019t know about the way Shurruppak handled his intro, or the way the Grimm Brothers would handle theirs, you have to say that this isn\u2019t about copying. It\u2019s not a meme that went viral. What we\u2019re looking at here is something deeply embedded in the way we tell stories. Something hardwired.<\/p>\n I like that as a thought. Like it enough that I\u2019d be happy to dedicate this email to that and nothing else.<\/p>\n Desperate attempt to make this whole post relevant to you<\/strong><\/p>\n And in a way, that kind of opening to a story is useless to you. Novels don\u2019t start that way. They search for the specific \u2013 something wholly exact in terms of character, time, place, situation. The deliberate murk of the \u2018in those far remote days\u2019 formula is pretty much anti-novel in style.<\/p>\n But, but, but \u2026<\/p>\n I think novels do still use that sense of a story-telling portal. It\u2019s not quite as formlised, as ritualised, but we still want to take the reader by the hand and help them to cross that threshold. We do it differently today, but that moment of transition is still jewelled, still magical. And that\u2019s a first page, or first chapter essential right? A little tingle of magic. You want all your reader-Dorothys to say or think, \u2018Toto, I\u2019ve a feeling we\u2019re not in Kansas anymore.\u2019<\/p>\n Succeed in that, and you\u2019re halfway to succeeding, period. You and Shuruppak, both.<\/p>\n Over to you. What do you think? How does your book start? Why do you think that ‘long, long ago’ type opening works so well? Why don’t we use it today? Or have we cunningly adopted those tricks in disguise. Tell me what you think and let’s all have a Heated Debate.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week: a jump into the past that returns us to an eerily modern place. You\u2019ll see what I mean a little later. But first, let\u2019s play, \u2018Who\u2019s the oldest?\u2019 The oldest surviving book in the world is, probably, the Codex Sinaiticus. The word codex just means book: that is, it calls attention to the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":6049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n