Well I want to start by saying welcome. Welcome to this fantastic location. The audience has got
the best of it because you're looking at these great Lamassus sculptures and I am looking at
the crouching Venus back there who's not quite as impressive I have to say I'm Mary Beard and
I am a trustee of the British Museum and that is why I have had the real good luck to be able to
get this gig talking to Elif who is a leading light of contemporary fiction and in her new
book which you all I hope have a copy for there a rivers in the sky she gives more than a cameo role
to the Museum and to the Assyrian collection and to the original home of the Assyrian sculptures
so there is no better place whatsoever to be discussed in the book than right here and we
feel very very privileged Just for the bit of housekeeping which I'll do to begin with
we're going to talk for about 40 minutes and then there'll be about 20 minutes discussion
and then there's more to consume just back to the right so we hope that you'll stay and enjoy
I should also because I mustn't forget this at the end thank the publishers Viking for helping
with this and all the staff of the British Museum including Sebastien Rey who knows much more about
Assyrian sculptures I would guess than anybody else in the room had really helped us get this
together and we're absolutely delighted to be here in what I hope will be the first of
many such pop-up events here talking about things that resonate with the BM collection
so it's great and Elif was the catalyst to this and the excuse so it's wonderful
I want to start though by asking if to as it were get us in the groove because this novel is what
I would now call classic Shafak that there are three main interwoven story lines that go across
time and place and in order that those who haven't yet read it but you'll be able to take it home and
read it tonight I thought it would be helpful if we just got what those three storylines are and
then we can have a more general discussion but El the kind of protagonist of the BM storyline
is a guy in your book that you call Arthur Smyths who goes right through the book can you tell us a
little bit about him first of all thank you thank you so much I am to be honest not only excited
a little bit overwhelmed this place has so much soul so much energy to be here to do this event
together to be on the stage with the great Mary Beard it's just remarkable and I'm very grateful
so thank you so much for making this happen and I know we will be discussing some difficult issues
as well but I really think this is the right place to have these discussions and literature is also
the right space for that so that we can hold more nuanced conversations so I'm really really looking
forward to this as you kindly mentioned there are three characters in this book or maybe I can say
this is the story of three characters two rivers and one ancient poem so 3 2 1 and everything in
this book is connected via a tiny drop of water so basically I think I wanted to know or see if
I could build an entire novel on a single droplet something that is seemingly insignificant but of
course is not you know we cannot take water for granted I come from the Middle East and as we're
speaking our rivers are drying and our rivers are dying of the most ten water stressed nations in
the world seven are in the Middle East and in North Africa and this has massive consequences
of course for everyone but particularly for women because women are water carriers they bring water
to their communities when there's no water the distance that a woman has to walk in order
to fetch water increases unfortunately increasing the possibility of gender violence on the way or
on the way back so all these issues are connected and I thought you know water was perhaps a good
story to see how connected we are and the reason why I mentioned this is because the
three characters in the book are connected as if in a water molecule so they're my H2O there
are the two hydrogen molecules we will come to those characters and there's oxygen at the
center which is Arthur yes just tell us a little bit about Arthur because Arthur is Loosely based
on a real character George Smith who worked in the British Museum and was revolutionary in actually
decoding the epic of Gilgamesh and he's an unsung hero of world literature actually and you start
with Arthur at the very beginning you have to think we'll sometimes say Arthur and sometimes
say George yes same Elif starts with Arthur at the very beginning of his life yes so I call him in
the book King Arthur of the sewers and the slums and there's a reason why he has given this unusual
name he's born in the slum tenements of Chelsea at the time by the river he's a river's child
and in the story he also dies by the river and basically as Mary pointed out I loosely based
this character on an actual historical figure who was George Smith and if I may add this I peered Dr
Sebastien Rey with so many questions when I was writing this book and he always kindly answered
my my questions George Smith is a fascinating character maybe it's an unusual thing for an
author to say this but I really really fell in love with this character I love the character
and I maybe I wanted more people to know about him I think if he had been born today we're
talking about a boy who was born into poverty he has never been given a proper education and he
has an amazing visual memory which if you were alive today we would probably respect we might
have recognized the divergence of his mind the beauty of his mind and this remarkable visual
memory that he had with very little education the actual George Smith he comes to the British Museum
during his break time you know just lunchtime lunch break and he just keeps looking at these
shattered cuneiform tablets if I may open a parenthesis very quickly now these cuneiform
tablets clay tablets it's it's a remarkable story so we go thousands of years back remember when I
talked about this drop of water at the beginning thousands of years back in the beginning of the
book it falls on the head of a mighty king King Ashurbanipal who changed the course of history
because he had this very important library and in that library we're talking about thousands of
cuneiform tablets among those tablets is the story of Epic of Gilgamesh now the actual George Smith
in Victorian era is the person who discovers the Epic of Gilgamesh and who decodes in particular
the flood tablet he falls in love with the poem and in order to find the missing lines in the poem
he comes to the region twice he loses his life there and today he's buried between Syria and
Turkey and there's one thing I just want to add at this point there are many things which stimulate
young Arthur in your book but one of those is coming across because his employer shows it to
him coming across lead's 1849 book Nineveh and its remains and it combined with the actual the
tablets the extraordinary impact of the sculpture is the idea that leard can decode that ancient
city of Nineveh and Sebastien very kindly brought down not just a copy of it but lead's own copy of
that in which he has annotated his book when he goes back to Nineveh and has different experiences
so we're not allowed to hand it around but if anybody wants to look at it I can show there's
two volumes they're quite extraordinary and it comes up as a sort of leimotif in a Elif’s book
indeed and I think El’s book is quite important for the story as well because he not only writes
of course about his y the cultural artifacts which make a huge groundbreaking moment in in
in history but also he writes about the people he meets along the way right the people of the
region the minorities of the region including the Yazidis and when we talk about the Yazidis maybe
we will come at that later we're talking about one of the most persecuted minorities in the world
unfortunately sometimes many times called as quote unquote devil worshippers in the region the Eidi
law talks about 72 massacres throughout history of course the 204 genocide happened in front of
the eyes of the world but before that there are multiple massacre so is also a witness to the
struggles of the minorities of the region and in that regard he's an important name for me in what
people like me call Mesopotamia but other people don't it was it was Leo that got these creatures
back here we can talk about the rights and wrongs of that later but what about the other
two threads Elif what about the Yazidi thread how does that fit so the third character is a
little Yazidi girl and this story starts in a place in Turkey called Hassan K the old name
was Kea we're talking about the 12,000 year old civilization in in Southeastern Anatolia today in
Turkey and if you go there today that place does not exist anymore what you see in in instead it's
just water because it has been flooded in order to build a dam that has the lifespan of only 50
years in order to build that they have destroyed 12,000 years old history they have destroyed
biodiversity and the entire ecosystem so it was a very controversial project and the story starts
there they travel she and her grandmother towards Iraq and unfortunately this is the Smyth of 2014
when Isis starts its horrible genocide against the Yazidi minorities if I may add this two points the
very first thing Isis did when they started the attack was to poison the wells they killed the
water first and the second thing they did was to kill the elderly the Yazidic communities don't
I don't want say they don't have rely on written culture much it's a it's a minority that transmits
memory through oral storytelling right so ballads stories so the second thing Isis did was to kill
the elderly which means they killed collective memory then they killed the men and they kidnapped
women and children as we're speaking right now there's more than 3,000 women and girls missing
and something happened when I was writing this book I read about a Yazidi girl who was saved
from from a house in Ankara in a neighbourhood very close to the neighbourhood where I grew up
my maternal grandmother's house literally two or three streets away this girl was saved and
these children are kept as sexual slaves so these are questions that are very very difficult but I
think must be raised you know how come that kind of numbness sing in how come in these so-called
ordinary neighbourhoods there are still 3,000 women missing so you've got Arthur and then
your second character is Narin who is going to be and becomes spoiler alert here the victim of
the Yazidis genocide but then you're back in the UK right up to date and you have another woman
he's also deeply connected with water yes and her name is Zeleekhah it's she's a she's a the
child of immigrants and she's a water scientist and while I was writing her character I had to
do so much research into water science and I loved every moment of it so basically Zeleekhah research
is is studying rivers but not only the rivers that we see but also the rivers that we do not
see for instance there are atmospheric rivers in the sky we don't talk about them we don't
see them but they're there they're the biggest rivers actually in our planet but also there are
underground rivers lost rivers or buried rivers and I think that metaphor of things being buried
but still being alive still continuing to shape US is an important metaphor in my writing so she's
studying those lost rivers of which London has so many this is a city of lost rivers isn't it
but so is New York so is Moscow so is Tokyo for instance or Athens beautiful Athens when you go
to Athens today you don't see rivers but actually there are three buried rivers under the city so
we built our cities above these rivers thinking they were unnecessary or they were filthy they
were dirty but of course there's no such thing and with rising water levels I think that system
cannot be sustainable anymore we're going to see more and more flush floods so now there's
a counter movement to bring those lost rivers into daylight and they call it daylighting they started
in South Korea and so she's a scientist who is very much into this kind of work I think what's
I mean I found you know mind-blowing about the book was how you've got these three story lines
these three characters they are linked by place most of it takes place either on the banks of
the Tigris or on the banks of the Thames and so you've got two main rivers that link these people
and they they link in this I'm not going to do a spoiler here they link in all kinds of different
ways and there are all sorts of surprising connections between these people between
now and Victorian period and there are lots of wonderfully satisfying bits I I pointed to lead's
book on Nineveh well actually the hydrologist the final character Zaleekhah she borrows Leon Neva
from her uncle because he's been reading it partly because he's about to buy a probably smuggled bit
of a Syrian antiquity and she's also interested in in it because this is just a BM reference she's
having a growing friendship with a woman who has a tattoo parlor just opposite the British Museum
where she will give you a tattoo ink right sadly I think she doesn't exist otherwise we'd don't be
there but the what is really kind of in your face is the idea that water is something that actually
an awful lot of people so far in the west so far though I suspect it's changing have taken
for granted we don't notice it we don't think of the history of a raindrop it is a a thing
that just splashes down and goes away and we are only just becoming aware of water's capacity to
be misused actually water is lifegiving but it can be extremely dangerous and rather too many
people in a sense if you're if you're wanting a comfortable read rather too many people in El’s
book die because of water because the misuse of water is absolutely lethal and at one point you
say and I think absolutely rightly that you know we shouldn't perhaps talk about climate crisis
we should talk about water crisis and what your book is about in some ways from the dam which
dispossesses the Yazidis to cholera infected water in Victorian London you're you're saying notice
water more because it is what links us indeed I if I may share this with you the wonderful art
historian Katie she sent me a picture yesterday of a book seller who had a tattoo of the sign
of water which is in the book on the first page in cuneiform so I think it would be a
great great tattoo idea but I I so fully fully agree with everything you said notice water I
think is such such an important motto for our age because when we're talking about climate crisis
basically we're talking about freshwater crisis of course and even in our city I mean the temps
is such a remarkable extraordinary river but it's a zombie river isn't it because not that long ago
it was declared dead it was so filthy it was so dirty because of us as human beings the
way we mistreated the river it was biologically declared dead and now it is home to more than 200
bio-species so what the river has done in terms of renewing itself is really extraordinary but
yet yet we do not learn again as humans we do not learn much from history sometimes we draw circles
and again as we're speaking in the name of profit for making money for more greed water companies
are piping sewage back into the river so are we going forward what exactly is progress do we move
in a linear arc throughout history I think these are also questions that the book tries to address
and one final point if I may make with regards to what Mary said water is really the connecting
element we tend to think that it's a very different water the one that flows in the
Ganges River or the one in the Euphrates or the one in Mississippi but actually it's the same
water that's circulating it's the same water that we have we might have cried yesterday you know our
tears or the water that we drink or the water that we have inside so I think if we want to know how
connected we are not as human beings fellow human beings but also how connected we are with nature
we're not above nature we're just a small part of an ecosystem we have to look no further than
the story of water yeah and there's a wonderful bit in the appendix which where you give the life
history of a water drop going back to the reign of Ashurbanipal at and right up to now but I I think
also I mean you know water is a really crucial and I think very cleverly executed linking theme but I
was also struck as I read it again yesterday I was struck more on the second reading by other
themes that linked these different stories that we've got and one of those is theme of memory
and you've alluded to it already I mean the point about Arthur is he remembers everything he is an
individual who never forgets and that in all kinds of ways is his passport you know in the hierarchy
of Victoria London to being able to get out of the slumss and sewers but how memory operates
for different communities comes in throughout and the your Yazidi your young Yazidi victim
Narin she is slowly going death and one of the questions is what kind of memory do you have
when you can't any longer he and I was really struck by trying to weigh up the in a sense
extraordinary extreme author who will tell you what day of the week it was on the 5th of December
1856 right and what happened it's a kind of you know it's memory go with people whose memories
have been removed for them or even the hydrologist Zeleekhah’s uncle who has himself come from Iraq
has made it really big in the UK he's in the House of Lords he's done everything right and
yet one thing he doesn't do is remember anything he has no memory no meaningful memory
because I think it goes hand in hand I mean memory conscience and identity doesn't it and it's it's a
question that I think about a lot as a storyteller I come from Turkey a country that has of course a
very rich history a very complex history but that doesn't translate into strong memory I think quite
the opposite we are a society of collective amnesia in Turkey and so our relationship with
the past is full of ruptures and when you have so many ruptures usually those that void is filled
in by ultra nationalist more Islamist more you know grandeurs interpretations of the past but
if you start asking seemingly small questions for instance how was life like for an Armenian silver
smith or a Jewish miller or a Kurdish peasant or an Arab farmer or a Greek sailor how was life like
for women in the Ottoman Empire how was life like for a concubine for instance the moment you start
asking these questions there's silence and I think as writers we need to be not only drawn
to stories but also to silences where are the silences and who are the silenced you know in
those narratives and for that I want to come back to oral storytelling and oral history it is so
crucial because what written culture forgets oral culture often remembers and so for the minorities
if you want to dig I think writers need to be a bit like linguistic archaeologists we need to
dig deep into those layers of silences and we have to look at oral history in particular and
oral culture because there is a memory there that's transmitted usually by women women are
memory keep Keepers as well from grandmothers to grandchildren so in the case of Narin when
she starts losing her hearing ability her connection with her grandmother is broken her
grandmother is not a well-educated woman she's not capable of turning her stories into written texts
as she talks about those stories so it's a it's an oral transmission that is being lost so all
I'm trying to say it's an endlessly important for me the connection between memory conscience and
identity yeah and you know one of the questions I think that runs right through the book is do we
make some people's stories count more than others whose stories count in the world and you at one
point we'll come on to this in a minute you talk about the Museum as a place where it both helps
us remember and also helps us forget and the that the story whose stories are heard and how
is absolutely Central to any cultural enterprise and I think that comes over loud and clear but I
mean I think we ought to look at just briefly at the genocide of 2014 because your account of what
happens to this little girl and to her family is chilling and upsetting and horribly vivid and I
suppose I wanted to ask you two questions about that one is did you what do you gain or what do
you lose by telling those stories in fiction rather than in non-fictional reportage yeah
and what do you think that the archaeological background to this the culture of the Tigris and
the Euphrates Mesopotamia this kind of stuff does that add to the story thank you so much beautiful
questions you know I for me fiction is where my heart beats fiction is how how I connect with
the world of course there are there can be many more non-fiction books about all these subjects
but I think fiction does something in its own special way fiction you know when we when we
use the word fiction actually is quite misleading because we think it has nothing to do with truth
but actually fiction deals with truth in a very different and in my opinion honest way and also
in a very emotional way there is a connection between our emotions and memory when there are
studies that show when we go to a talk if the talk is conveyed mostly through numbers graphics
statistics 24-hours later we forgotten about 56% of the talk three days Later more than 75% is gone
in our memory but if the same talk is given to us through stories and emotions we remember what do
we remember how it made us feel then like like the great Maya Angelou said you she said people might
forget what you said people might even forget what you've done to them but they will never forget how
you made them feel so it's always those emotions that stay with us and I think inside fiction there
is room and space for multiplicity for me this is so important because in our daily lives we're
constantly being pushed into these dualities being pigeon holed, labelled but when we enter
a work of fiction I think my job as a writer is not to try to give any answers I don't know the
answers myself the only thing I know is I care about the questions including difficult questions
about difficult issues such as who tells the story of the past and who is not allowed to tell that
story that's an important question but you need to create a free space where multiplicity of opinions
can be heard and then you need to let the reader decide because every reader is going to come up
with their own answers right so I've met couples who have been married for 45 years they read the
same book they don't read it in the same way one loves it the other one not so much I've met good
friends who know share each other's every secret they read the same novel one of them loves one
character the other one hates that character why because the readers is not passive they bring
their own gaze so all I'm trying to say is inside the work of fiction I think there's this beauty of
celebrating multiplicity of thought nuance thought and a question about cultural artifacts and who
owns the past which is a very complex issue and an incredibly important issue we cannot avoid or
postpone this question can be discussed inside the work of literature and definitely not on social
media where we just reduced to snippets of slogans yeah I mean I think it's very interesting that we
not obviously in the case of the 2014 genocide but of various bouts horrible bouts of persecution of
the 100 years more than 100 years earlier I think we're helped in the novel to see that through the
art we see there is a history to this and we see it through the eyes of of author the archaeologist
the naïve nerdish archaeologist whose eyes are opened to it and in a sense his eyes being open to
it open doors indeed and I so appreciate that you say this because throughout the story Arthur goes
through a transformation and he tackles I mean he he he always he struggles with these questions
at first he's very sure that this is where the artifacts will be taken better care of and this
is where they belong but the more he gets to know the people of the region especially the minorities
of the region this for me is very important today when we talk about cultural artifacts
and questions about repatriation almost never the minorities are mentioned right it's always
governments for instance in the case of Iraq I don't hear many people talking about for instance
the minorities of the region also having a say on this issue so it's a very very complex issue and
Arthur realizes this one thing that disturbs him is upon coming to London seeing the artifacts of
from Nineveh in particular in the book in the in the hands of the wealthy just because they can
afford to buy them that's something that bothers him immensely so he starts questioning his own
role in this on the other hand the book also talks about the destruction of Isis and what happened
to these artifacts Isis not only destroyed them there was a big show in my opinion to
the world in these videos saying we're destroying everything you know left and right but underneath
that vineyard Isis also made profit from selling you know from illegally smuggling these items so
there's that complexity but my point is again coming back to the beauty of literature and art
we can be quite critical and in my opinion right so we might debate this if you'd like we can be
quite critical of colonial institutional history and the way many art facts have been brought from
other people's lands at the same time we can have respect for the passion and genuine dedication of
individual archaeologists and Scholars such as George Smith who as I said fell in love with a
poem and in his own naïve way you know came to the region to find the missing land so we can do both
things inside literature yeah and we've now come on to you know what if you're reading this from
a Museum perspective is one of the big questions in the book which is about who owns the past it's
about cultural property it's about the rights and wrongs of moving the past across the world and I
think that Allah does take us on a journey that we you know we start with him becoming entranced by
these things actually managing to see what these cuneiform tablets mean to he wants to go out and
find the missing bits and at the very beginning he's being told and he's he's taking on board this
idea that that western civilization has a duty it's a duty that in the end kills him actually
he dies as you said on the banks of a Tigris he has a duty to save it and as it goes further on
you know there is no way that Arthur Smyth becomes a restitution but he does start to
wonder repeatedly wonder about what the role of archaeology is in the world order and who's
you know not just who has a right to have their stories heard but who has a right to the objects
and he's very nice about the clash between towards the end between Gilgamesh and these things when he
says no nobody owns a poem we can all we can all own Gilgamesh but there is something different
about material objects and so we go on his journey which is just increasingly questioning about what
the stake of the archaeologist is what the stake of the Museum is though in part the Museum that
you conjure up is a Museum of sheer pleasure actually it's wonderful you know Zaleekhah
meets her to two artists from across the road here just where we are and then they have a coffee in
the great court and it's absolutely wonderful and that I you said a while ago go it's it's great to
be able to chew this over in fiction yeah rather than just sound off on social media as if these
questions were simple that's so true and I think it all most of this debate is also related to
identity isn't it we tend to think of identity in a very solid static and almost monolithic way
which immediately creates an in perception of US versus them you know here versus there but I think
if we could start to think of identity in a in a much more liquid way in a much more fluid way of
course it's very normal and beautiful actually for everyone to feel very attached to the land
of their ancestors or where they're coming from or their cultural identity in that regard so that's
maybe one circle many ancient philosophers Greek philosophers actually wrote about this identity
like water ripples in a in a in a lake so that's one circle but then you can also feel connected
to your country you can also feel connected to the continent where you come from and the
circles get bigger and bigger in my case I think of course you know Turkish I feel also attached
to the Balkans the Middle East there are elements in my soul I feel European the values that I share
also by birth I become British over the years and despite what politicians have been telling
us in this country I would like to think of myself as a citizen of humankind now the reason why I'm
mentioning this is because on the one hand it's of course wonderful that so many people from all
over the world can come and visit this Museum at the same time it is not enough in my opinion to
say well the people of those lands whenever ever they want they can come and visit these artifacts
so few people have the access to you know even a getting a visa so we we cannot continue with this
argument in my in my opinion but the important thing is to be open to discussing you know these
important and complex issues especially in a place like this I honestly believe that the
Museums should lead these conversations should engage in these conversations and we need new
Solutions we need a new narrative sometimes this could be a loan sometimes this could be definitely
repatriation in other cases it might be maybe digital replicas but we can come up with better
solutions rather than trying to suppress these questions which are important questions the final
thing that I want to add is there's a hurt you know in many parts of the world people have not
forgotten they might have lost their objects but the memory of what they have lost is still alive
and that memory is transmitted so we have to find a new conversation a new narrative in my
opinion not as citizens of here or as citizens of there but as citizens of humankind yeah and
you know the big question then is what does it mean to say that these things that we're sitting
between in a way they belong to everybody they both belong to everybody and they belong to the
British Museum and they sort of belong to the place where they were first displayed and those
are really complicated issues issues of ownership and belonging and what should happen to them and
suppose I thought it was almost best done at least as a kick-off infection because you were able to
see different people's good people's perspectives differ on this and it is you know in some ways
what what you say is makes the Museum seem or any museum yeah seem a a a wonderful place that modern
culture needs at one point you say brilliantly or rather one of your characters does I doubt
any therapists this is Zaleekhah’s friend I doubt any therapists would send their patients to the
British Museum but when you're next to something so in impossibly old it kind of puts things in
perspective and I think that's brilliant and she goes on to say referring to these the technical
term is Lamassu I think everyone should hang out with a Lamassu every now and then and so there's
a warmth of a feeling for the Museum but also a a recognition in other parts of the book about who's
excluded by that and it's it's hard to get your head around yes and I think again that's that's
the beauty of of literature but knowledge is so important isn't it because I think we live in an
age in which we're bombarded by information but there's very little knowledge and maybe
even less wisdom and it's a it's a question how do we change that ratio maybe let's spend
less time with information but more time with knowledge hopefully more time with wisdom I think
for knowledge we need nuanced conversations not Snippets of information the Snippets of
information is just an Illusion it's it it gives us the impression that we know the subject but we
don't we forgot to say I don't know you know I don't know was an amazing point it was the
beginning of philosophy to be able to say I don't know now we can Google anything everything in the
next five minutes I can say anything about you know any subject but that's not knowledge so I
think for knowledge we need to slow down and it's very important that museums open up these doors of
knowledge like how did these artifacts end up here it wasn't a smooth journey on the way somewhere
broken somewhere lost but when I say this I'm also saying this again as a Turkish writer who is aware
of the of the role of the Ottoman authorities for instance let's also discuss that and when
I say this I also want to talk about the role of for instance the fanatics who have destroyed the
cultural artifacts let's also talk about that but those are all layers and layers of knowledge but
eventually hopefully this is a conversation that can go towards wisdom and I think for wisdom we
need to bring together the mind and the heart so that requires an emotional attachment that
requires empathy and I think empathy has to lead this discussion yeah and I think we now ought to
open it up to a wider discussion I should just say that if had a favourite page in a in this
novel It's a wonderful novel by favourite page is Page-61 where you see young Arthur outside the
British Museum his he's employed you know in in a print maker outfit he has very little time of his
dad is a drunker his mom is really nonfunctional and he he's very attracted by the British Museum
and he comes he one day he leaves the print maker in Covent Garden and he comes here and he sees
a crowd of people outside the Museum and what's going on is that these figures are being brought
in they're being wheeled in and up the steps and loads of people have come to look and he's struck
by wonderment but it's not just the wonderment that was what kind of got me it's that he finds
himself next to some old guy and just and asks for a bit of explanation and it turns out that the old
guy he's standing next to is Samuel Birch who was The Keeper of the department I don't know what it
was called then Oriental Antiquities thank you thank you Sebastien and so he explains a bit and
he realizes that the Arthur is a strange but very interesting kid and he says to Arthur if you want
to come and see them you come in go up the steps and just ask for me because no one will then throw
you out and I will show you four years later that sort of happens but there is a kind of glimpse
there of the way that this working class lad life is overturned by the kindness of one fairly crusty
has to be said of an old curator who just spots that he's interested and that the real problem
and this is what you're saying I think the real problem is to put that that real experience that
wonderful experience next to what we know about rapacity exploitation imperialism etc etc because
both those stories both those stories are true in some way indeed yes both those stories need
to be told side by side yeah I think we should now open this up I don't know if we've got some
mics of we have I don't have my glasses on so so I don't have to look at the Venus like to ask
that question just hands up hands up and or make a comment hands up and a mic will come to you and we
time traveled a long way so there' better be Some yes not a very thrilling question but
at least kicks it off which is I when you were thinking about this book what where did it come
from for you what what brought you here and also as an aside how much when did when did you first
come to the British Museum do you do you have a clear memory I've spent a lot I work for the BBC
and I've spent quite a lot of time doing things about the British Museum recently and including
interviewing somebody who really remembers their first time that they came to the British Museum
and how much time they spent here because it's just full of the most incredible wonders but I
wonder for you when that was absolutely thank you so much I came to the British Museum for
the first time many years ago but back then I wasn't living in the UK and then ever since I
moved here I've been coming quite often but while I was writing the book that was a very different
visit because I was trying to visualize you know where would George Smyth be you know where would
what what would be his room like there's a lot of you know in the archives we can find
a lot of information about him but there also you know the blanks as well you know so so we
need to I think it's someone that the world should know more about we need to know more
about so those last two years was it was it was incredible it was a very different type of visit
and especially in this part of the Museum I I I spent much much more time I've been also reading
a lot the reading my reading was was was very eclectic actually how did the idea come to me
actually it came with a with a drop of water but it also came with the Epic of Gilgamesh I
have to say and perhaps you might think that you know coming from Turkey I might be very familiar
with the Epic of Gilgamesh that people in Turkey read about it that is not the case our knowledge
of the Epic of Gilgamesh is very superficial and when I started reading properly the Epic
I really was struck so we're basically talking about the oldest piece of literature known in
human history and I think in so many ways it is such a relevant story for our times Gilgamesh
and I I love Greek mythology but unlike many Greek myths in the Epic of Gilgamesh there
are no heroes there's no hero in a conventional sense just the opposite to begin with Gilgamesh
is a terrible creature terrible awful man or half man half Divine and you wouldn't like him at all
but it's only through journeys and friendship and loss and defeat he comes back as a changed person
and as a kinder person so it's a story about the possbility for change even from a very low and
terrible place there's hope it's a it's a story about tyranny about the danger of power it's also
a story about taking other people's things you know going into their lands there are layers it's
a story about climate crisis it's so unfortunate that today we associate the Middle East mostly
with violence conflict at least the media coverage is like that but we're talking about a land that
was once upon a time home to the wealthiest civilizations incredible complex irrigation
systems right so when you delve into the epic you realize the complexity of the region and I really
think in in many ways it's a story that should be told today that's how everything began for me from
the drop of water to the epic of Gilgamesh which straight brought me into the flood tablet if I may
add one or two words about the flood tablet it's so important what George Smith discovered because
that's what brought me into George Smith when he starts reading the flat tablet he realizes
the story told there you know about the deluge the floods water everywhere an arc or maybe I
should say a coracle like Professor Irving Finkle pointed out in which there are animals and human
beings how they fly a pigeon or a bird to see if there's a land nearby and so on so when he starts
reading this imagine his shock because the story is very familiar isn't it it's the biblical story
of the flood except this was written thousands of years back not only that before it was written
put on clay tablets by scribes written down it was transmitted orally so we're talking about
a very ancient epic which is much older than the Old Testament so it splits the Victorian society
into two those who are more inclined towards religion they say well you see it proves that
the sacred books were right it shows that these things really happened whereas those who are more
science-minded would say actually what the Old Testament or the or the biblical story saying
is the repetition of age old stories over and over so depending on where you stand you can
love the flood tablet for different reasons which is exactly the story of what's happening today so
it's incredibly important and groundbreaking what George Smith discovered but that's how everything
started from the drop of water to the epical to J Smith and in a way you get the feeling
that Arthur as the novel goes on Arthur becomes a bit more like Gilgamesh that he travels and he
becomes kinder yes and there's and that's his poem yes and he's seeing himself and there's
something kind of moving in the way that you know you know this isn't going to end well yeah
it's been a wonderful conversation so thank you and I can't wait to read the book but I
want to ask a question which is more from the Museum end I wonder if you could both in your
own words describe what you think the purpose of the international museum in the 21st century
is oh John that's a really that's an easy one who's going to do this to make us think about
ourselves better and harder and more critically I think that there is no point I think Elif has
been saying this a bit there's there's no point about in having a museum about which we all
agree museums have to cherish the idea that their focus is of debate that it's where we can disagree
it's where we can find you know putting in this in modern terms a safe space to have very difficult
discussions and I think in some ways that's what at least novel does it shows that come at this
from a slightly different angle and you can talk about all kinds of things that you thought were
you know restricted to not very sophisticated bits of social media yeah they should all go back no
they should stay you are ruining our culture you are a load of thieves nobody's getting anywhere
with that kind of that sort of talk it's a way of finding out how the Museum can Embrace its
responsibility to be difficult museum should be I mean alif talks about them being good therapy
but or her character talks about them me good therapy I also think you should go away from a
museum feeling discomforted a little bit made to made to reflect a bit differently I think there's
wonderment you know I shall never forget sitting here there is wonderment but it's about also
wondering about how you know what you do and I think to put that more strongly it's not just that
we ought to cherish our debates and disagreements about Museums we ought to reckon that if we didn't
have those debates then the Museum wouldn't be doing its job and I think that's absolutely
crucial what would it be like to have a Museum that we all agreed represented the past perfectly
it would be ghastly and I think that one of the ways that you can get inside those issues
which we find it very hard to get inside in kind of standup debates is fictionally definitely yeah
thank you so much for the question I think all empires have very difficult complex debates that
they need to face when I say empires debates about empires but the difference between a democracy and
the non-democracies in a democracy we can walk into a books store right a book shop and easily
find books that question the Imperial legacy from different points of view the good and the bad the
Beauties and the atrocities and the writers of those books are not arrested or prosecuted or
imprisoned it is incredibly important for a democracy the health of a democracy to
be open to these discussions it's not like one empire is better than another you know
anything like that but the biggest discuss biggest difference is are we open to having these debates
and these debates matter and I really think institutions such as these they're so important
and so complex and there's so much cultural heritage here they should lead lead the way
I also think language matters a lot as a writer for instance the fact that we use the word the
definition Elgin marbles disturbs me why do we say Elgin marbles they have not Elgin marbles
they're not Elgin marbles either they're Parthenon marbles or Parthenon structure
even even a detail like that I think matters so to be open to this linguistic change again
the Museums lead making this leading the way the way in that linguistic change is
also very important but the third thing is and I learned this from Dr Sebastien Reay because
I know he's working in the region with many archaeologists in Iraq also you know helping a
younger generation of Iraqi archaeologists women minorities perhaps people who would not have
access to that you know kind of public education so this is also very important and I really think
museums need to engage more in these massively important projects as well and in the meantime
we definitely cannot postpone the debate that we are having let's keep engaging we don't have to
solve it we cannot solve it in one go but just to be open to having these nuance conversations
especially through literature and art I think it's is it's going to be a good way forward a good step
for it I think that is a bit like your neck of the woods John you work to National Trust this
is I mean one thing you're very open about actually in the book and you know it's there
aren't any obvious heroes here and you we you know young Arthur is captivated by these things
you make it absolutely clear from page one that the Assyrian Empire was a very very nasty place
indeed and that you can be both captivated how not by this and everybody's captivated by their five
legs not four and you know it's it's wonderful but that's written on the back of slavery exploitation
cruelty and murder of course that's another chapter and it's an important one because in
the library of Ashurbanipal we're talking about thousands of tablets that were brought from all
over the Empire but sometimes by force by coercion sometimes by deceit sometimes you know acquired
perhaps more peacefully but that's a very complex story and especially the story of Ashurbanipal who
the most the most educated King that the Empire has ever seen before or after but it doesn't
mean he's less cruel than his predecessors so yes that's another complex story nasty man read books
sadly two yes thank you yeah that's nice men read books as well and women we got time for just one
more I think I'm just interested in the in the thread that that introduced the recent experience
of the of the Yazidi women because of course it's it's currently right now the 10th anniversary of
all of that happening and it happened at the hands of those who were also captivated by a
notional past because what they were seeking to do was to create a caliphate in a part of the
world which they thought was much more related to their history of of of their religion and
that they wanted to create something which was challenging Western democracy and the Yazidis got
in the way of that and signified something that even predated the coming of Islam or Christianity
or Judaism and they saw it it primitive and there for deserving of of annihilation and I just it's
another example of being caught up in a past that isn't necessarily truthful and isn't truthful but
but which somehow captured the imagination of an rather ill-informed group of people indeed very
very much so and of course there's there is an nostalgia for a for a past that never was true
there's also a lot of ignorance for instance even the word Yazidi Yazidi Yazidi I mean there there's
a linguistic distinction that is very important in the part of the world where I come from because in
a very ignorant way they they think that the aides are responsible for the for the killing
of the prophet's grandsons which is not true at all so there's a lot of ignorance and confusion
as well and as you said pointed out I think most importantly there's dehumanization you know just
say they're not people of the book so I can do whatever I want but one of the things I wanted to
show in the book was this is not only the story of 2014 what happened in 2014 was definitely a most
extreme form of genocide it happened in front of the eyes of the world and earlier we talked
about this single drop of water for me the most difficult chapter to write was the mount when midi
families had to run away towards we're talking about more than 50° temperature no Shades no tree
whatsoever and the people that I talked with the survivors or people who have been working with the
survivors those interviews were the hardest ones to listen they told me how drops of water families
had to ration drops of water among their children to keep them alive so that was something that
made me realize you cannot take for granted even a single drop of water the resilience of the Yazidi
communities is is is just remarkable but I think we have some very difficult discussions that we
urgently need to have especially now that there's this in August it was the 10th anniversary it's
not only Isis coming from outside and perpetrating these crimes but how is it it possible that
neighbour turns against neighbour is another story and that's how of course the worst atrocities
throughout history start so dehumanization how this has been systematic throughout the throughout
the centuries and how we as an International community have a responsibility in my opinion
to help especially women and children to heal there's a lot of individual and collective
healing that needs to happen and I I think we have a responsibility in that as well yeah it's very
striking that in lead's book which we usually only quote the main title and its remains the
subtitle says with an account of a visit to the Zion Christians of Kurdistan and the Yazidis or
devil worshippers so the that demonization of the you know is here in one of the founding texts of
Assyrian studies written into the subtitle and it so there is a a a history there a history yeah
and it's a history within scholarship as well as within modern geopolitics yes absolutely why are
like Syria Turkeys of course it's a so that's yeah your responsibility oh what that yeah and
that that's that comes out very clearly in what alif is saying I think that I am going to this not
really spoiler alert but the young deaf girl it's a terribly sad story but for her there is half
happy ending there is yeah it's not a spoiler yeah we can say that yeah happy ending but but just on
that note I mean because we've been talking about really difficult subjects right heavy subjects I
think again through literature you can also talk about this this the dance between maybe melancholy
and hope what keeps us more optimistic you know how we find more resilience when we learn about
each other's stories how that's why why global solidarity matters why global sisterhood matters
so I think at least personally that's something that I that I wanted to be able to hold in my
hands both The melancholy but whatever the opposite is the optimism the hope and the
resilience I think that's there as well especially in the story of Ides and also in the story of
water yeah I think at this point it's time that everybody should be able to get a drink and some
other refreshments there's plenty of time before the kind of last orders will go just before 9:00
but meanwhile I should say I think thank you very much to Sebastien who do come and look at these
wonderful books by Elif but I should also say now he's here and I can direct him convenient
you conveniently to him that the British Museum is still involved in archaeology in the region
but with a rather different politic and there is a collaborative excavation at guu which has just
got he tells me new funding and in the British Museum's International training program there
have been some outstanding students coming to learn and share their skills about archaeology
from Iraq so it's the tradition continues but it's perhaps less imperialist and more sharing than it
was but the most important thing is to say thank you to thank you so much for making this happen
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