The Stone From Beyond The Slavs

An Nasiriyah, Iraq: I have been seeking, against the lethal assurances of others, the ancient "Tablet of K'dhor" (see: May, 1996, vol. 3, Issue #5). The stone, brought to Iowa circa 900 A.D. by Vikings, has a long and tangled history. My search through Sumerian antiquities to ascertain its origins naturally led me to the British Museum where by the kind permission of an old friend, Sir Robert McPhearson, Head of Near Eastern Anitquites, I was allowed to prowl through thousands of cataloged artifacts. The search took days and I was aided by Sir Robert's two young assistants, Nancy Wheeler and Herbert Threlkeld.

     I purposely neglected to explain why I was I was searching for artifacts associated with "K'dhor". Herbert, the more bookish of the two, seemed oblivious to the reason for my search. Nancy, on the other hand, acted resentful at being excluded from the kabals of two 'old boys' by making snide comments about searching for Atlantis.

     But the two did know their Sumerian archeology and quickly isolated the artifacts of the period in which I was searching: the Early Dynastic Period of 2500 B.C.-the Royal Tombs of Ur.

     The Tombs discovered in 1923 by Sir Leonard Woolley were filled with treasures of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli. But what I sought turned out to be nothng more than a triangular clay tile scarely 6 cm long x 4 cm wide x 2 cm thick.

     It was Herbert's whose voice echoed down the high shelf-lined corridor when he found it. It was in a carboard box and had been left uncataloged since 1940 when Oliver Steed, the technician in charge, joined the British Army and died at Dunkirk.

     The box had a dreadful musty smell to it, but the contents were dry. Herbert drew out the tile as I came near. It was a curious wedge-shaped thing, and on one face had cunieform markings tinted with bright blue glaze flowing around a peculiar glyph:

     "I can't make out all of it," Herbert said. "Much of it uses very old symbols we can't even comprehend; this glyph could be one. The text concerns an object or a place named K'dhor which was the house or womb of The New Ones."

     "What New Ones?" I asked Herbert.

     "It's very old. Pre-Sumer, maybe even Al 'Ubaid. Maybe an early form of a name of a god that fought Tiamat in the Enuma Elish -Marduk and his allies," Herbert suggested.

     "Probably," I nodded, though sensing he was very wrong.

     Herbert let me make a rubbing of the tile and take a few pictures. I thanked them and bid them good bye, and headed for the Iraqi Embassy to enquire about the dim possiblity of a cultural visa.

     But I'd only gone four blocks in the cab, when I mysteriously felt a panicky need to get out. I shouted, banging on the back of the driver's seat uncontrollably. Cursing loudly, he pulled over and let me go. I hadn't gone twenty meters down the street when the cab suddenly blew up!

     I spent the next four hours at New Scotland Yard being questioned by a pair of CID and MI5 officers, neither of whom suspected me of the bombing. The driver had been connected with Ulster Unionists in Belfast and was a natural target. Satisfied, they released me. Who was waiting for me in the parking lot, but Nancy.

     Suffice it to say, I was still jittery and on edge when I got into her car. Phantoms darted just outside the periphery of my vision and I was at a loss to explain to Nancy the panic which over took me in the cab. Suffice it to say, she took me to a pub, we got drunk, and went back to her apartment. We did it on her kitchen floor.

     The next day, we went to the airport and together boarded a flight for Bagdad. I was naturally surprised when Nancy said she wanted to come with me. Also surprising was the speed and ease with which Sir Robert provided us with a pair of Swiss passports; almost, it seemed to me, that he expected to do so. I grew uneasy about this as we waited for our flight to board, but busied myself with reading a banal journal piece on Sumerian pottery. I wanted to ask Nancy about the passports but I knew that was probably something I really didn't need to know about.

     The flight was long, we changed planes in Zurich and Damascus. Nancy filled me in on those gaps in what I knew of Sumerian and pre-Sumerian culture. When we arrived in Bagdad we visited the Ministry of the Interior and they arranged for a guide to meet us the next afternoon in An Nasiriyah.

     We headed out early in a rented Toyota 4x4 and drove southwest through Mesopotamia. I was tempted to take a detour to see Sadam Hussein's version of the rebuilt Babylon, but decided we were late. So we plunged on along the eastern bank of the Euphrates. After two hours or so, we rolled into An Nasiriyah and found the cafe where we were to meet our guide.

     He wasn't difficult to find; he was the only civilian in the place with an AK-47 and a worn army field blouse. The other men stared at us, particually Nancy, then went on with their talk.

     "Mustafa Qabal," he stood offering his hand, "The Ministry said you wanted to visit Ur, the City of Ibrahim?"

     We nodded and sat. He looked at his watch, "We should leave soon, but there is time enough for coffee." He looked at us intently and smiled broadly, which spread his great black mustache across his face like vulture's wings. "I am told you are Swiss? But one of you is obviously American and the other-English? Oh, but we are not here to dwell on the pathetic politcial sturggles of nations, but on mysteries of the Ancient World, eh?" He turned and demanded something about coffee in arabic. An old man shuffled forth with two small cups, set them before us, and shuffled away. "Now, what are you looking for at Ur? More Royal Tombs? The House of Ibrahim?"

     "A place call 'K'dhor'." I said.

     Mustafa frowned and blinked, "Ah, yes! It is a 12th century well within the city wall. It was excavated back in '49. It contains a few liters of water but nothing else. Not even enough for a goat."

     "Should we follow you?" Nancy asked, rising from her seat.

     "I shall go with you. My half-brother brought me to town this morning. I am not a good muslim, so he will not lend me his truck."

     An old man yelled out something at the end of the room. Mustafa jumped to his feet and roared back what can only have been a blue-streak of arabic curses.

     "Someone else seems to agree with your half-brother," I said.

     "Just as long as it is not an important someone else," he smiled.

     Soon enough, we were on the road again, heading south. We crossed the Euphrates and rumbled over a road made of little more than packed sand. It wound this way and that, skirting little dunes heading for a large collection of sand-covered mounds on the baked horizon: the City of Ur.

     We crossed the old bed of the Euphrates and drove through the decayed entrance of the west harbor into the richest city . Before us lay the sand-blasted ziggurats; the largest of which belonged to Nannar, God of the Moon. Mustafa guided us around to a gap in the worn wall separating the Temenos, or sacred distrinct, from the rest of the town and we parked at the foot of the ziggurat of Nannar. Some preservation work had been going on in the mid-seventies, but later abandoned during the war with Iran. A large section of stairs leading to the top of the tower was still in good shape-left over from Woollsey's dig in the '20's.

     We got out into the midday sun-a staggering 120 degrees. Mustafa unlsung his AK-47 and warily surveyed the area. Then he pointed it at a series of low walls at the base of the tower.

     I walked over rapidly, but halted as I heard Nancy talking in rapid arabic to the man. She smiled when she saw me, shrugged her shoulders, and continued.

     I came onto the remains of chambers surrounded by the knee-high remains of mud brick walls. The floor was of flat, broad paving bricks, some of which were broken. A large rectangular hole a meter wide by two meters long dominated the center of the chamber and may have been once ringed by mud brick. I heard Mustafa and Nancy come up behind me.

     I turned, saying, "This is K'dhor?"

     Mustafa slammed the gun butt into my stomach and as I doubled over, he deftly kicked out my legs from beneath me and I toppled into the well.

     I fell about two meters, hit an angled wall and slid another three meters into shallow pool of cold water. Enough daylight filtered down that I was able to see I was in a small room bounded with blue-glazed mud brick. The water was up to my knees.

     Suffice it to say, I shouted and swore for some time to no avail. I tried climbing out, hoping that if I reached the place where the incline met the vertical shaft, I could more easily wedge my bag to a wall with my legs and climb that way. But I slid back down. I tried one more time and nearly made the angled turn in the shaft when I lost my footing and fell into the water. I hit the bottom of the pool quite hard. Suddenly, the water began draining and as it did the floor crumbled away. An instant later I slid down a steep incline and landed in heap on a pile of fresh mud. While I lay there reconsidering ever undertaking the search and trying to decide whether or not anything was seriously injured, my sight adjusted to the dark. Dimmly, I saw shapes, possibly objects, but I couldn't tell. I thought of walking about, but the sudden realization that I had fallen into a significant archeological find I could easily destroy by stumbling about in the dark trying to find a way out froze me where I lay. I laughed at the bitter irony.

     For a while, I toyed with trying to climb back up the incline. Suffice it to say, result was always the same, I slid back down countless times. And so, worn out with scraped, bleeding knees, I sat down to collect a few handfuls of water as it trickled down the wall and shortly fell asleep.

     I was awakened much later by a coil of rope hitting me in the head and a familiar voice calling: "Dr. Hyde, please take the rope! I'm sorry about hitting you, but it was the only way to save your life."

     "Mustafa, you son of a bitch!" I yelled, then dove aside remembering the AK-47.

     "Dr. Hyde, I assure I am taking great personal risk helping you!"

     "Why should I trust you?"

     "I have the rope. Hurry, I am in great danger the longer we delay."

     "From who, goddamnit? Some guy called 'Hinge' or Nancy?"

     "Much worse. My brother in law. I have much to explain. Take the rope!"

     "Send down a flashlight!"

     "What?"

     "I'm going to make you famous, Mustafa, if you just send down that flashlight."

     "I should have shot you!" he complained, "We must go soon, Massud will miss his truck."

     A moment later, the light clunked down the shaft, bundled up in Mustafa's kafia. I turned it on and shone it around the room until its beam fell upon a large bas relief of the glyph I'd seen in London. Forming a raised dais pointing to it was a triangle pattern made of small wedge-shaped blue tiles each exactly like the one I saw in London.

     The objects I thought I'd seen were only piles of mud brick that had fallen out from the ceiling. I walked to the triangles' point and found three newspaper-sized niches in the wall below the glyph. Below two of them on the floor, were two large mounds of what looked like some sort of melted brown resin. There was no trace of the one in the middle but as I moved my foot, I brushed something that scraped against the floor. It was a copper cylinder covered in cuneiform. It was big enough so I slipped it on my wrist. I then noticed the small up-turned earthen bowl lying in the midst of the triangle. I was about to look under it when the sudden foreboding which overtook me in London made me reconsider. I scanned about one more time, for anything else, then climbed up the rope into the night air.

     Once again, I am back in Iowa. And my quest to find the Tablet of K'hdor consumes me with a new urgency for I have had the cylinder translated:

     they lie aged and desolate whithered and spent

     They give no bread nor beer nor wine, but linger and watch on.

     The New Ones come to K'dhor's summons

     and plows them under, to clay and to earth.

     Marduke shall not resist them, nor his fifty minions,

     Nor the abominations of his name.

     The News Ones come to K'dhor's summons."