The world’s oldest book

This week: a jump into the past that returns us to an eerily modern place. You’ll see what I mean a little later.

But first, let’s play, ‘Who’s the oldest?’

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 specific physical structure, involving binding on one side only of a set of loose leaves. The ‘Sinaiticus’ bit just refers to the book’s location, in the Sinai Peninsula.

This codex is approximately square. The text is hand-written. And it’s 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.

But in our quest for anciency, I think we need to drop our concern with the physical structure of the document. We’re looking for ancient texts, and don’t 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.

Ptahhotep

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 “only” 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’d know you’d be almost halfway once you hit the birth of Jesus.

The text begins thus:

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 … The bones are painful; good turns into evil. All taste departs.

That’s quite an intro, though the text itself is disappointingly bland. (‘Quarrelling in place of friendship is a foolish thing,’ is a fair sample of the content.)

But we’re not done. We said we didn’t 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.

The oldest text in the world

What we’re after, really, is the oldest surviving text of any sort and it’s another set of ancient Egyptian advice which claims the prize: the Instructions of Shuruppak.

This text is about 4600 years old, and if you thought that Ptahhotep’s words of wisdom were a bit dull, you’ll nevertheless find them a whole class above these zingers from Shurruppak:

You should not locate your field in a road.

You should not buy a donkey that brays.

Or my favourite:

You should not abuse a ewe; otherwise you will give birth to a daughter.

That’s pretty much as ancient as we can get in terms of hard physical text, but I haven’t yet told you how that ancient clay tablet actually begins its list of inanities. It opens like this:

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.

How to open a book

I promised you something eerily modern, right, and there it is. What does Shurruppak’s opening remind you of? Maybe something like this:

Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen … (Grimm Brothers / Sleeping Beauty)

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away … (Star Wars, opening crawl)

Listen! We of the Spear-Danes in the days of old …(Beowulf)

In other words, the opening text of the world’s 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’s like our portal into fiction.

And, given that the author of, say, Beowulf certainly didn’t know about the way Shurruppak handled his intro, or the way the Grimm Brothers would handle theirs, you have to say that this isn’t about copying. It’s not a meme that went viral. What we’re looking at here is something deeply embedded in the way we tell stories. Something hardwired.

I like that as a thought. Like it enough that I’d be happy to dedicate this email to that and nothing else.

Desperate attempt to make this whole post relevant to you

And in a way, that kind of opening to a story is useless to you. Novels don’t start that way. They search for the specific – something wholly exact in terms of character, time, place, situation. The deliberate murk of the ‘in those far remote days’ formula is pretty much anti-novel in style.

But, but, but …

I think novels do still use that sense of a story-telling portal. It’s 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’s a first page, or first chapter essential right? A little tingle of magic. You want all your reader-Dorothys to say or think, ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’

Succeed in that, and you’re halfway to succeeding, period. You and Shuruppak, both.

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.