May the Truth Be Revealed to Me

There’s something about Italian scholars and the ancient world: they seem to get it. Think the great Arnaldo Momigliano (link); think Fondazione Lorenzo Valla (link); indeed, think those walls of Greek and Latin classics you see in so many Italian bookstores. They have a history of their own; evidently they understand how others could have one, too.

In this light, I’ve spent some pleasant hours lately in the company of Sabatino Moscati, and his remarkable book, The Face of the Ancient Orient. Moscati died in 1997, at the age of 74. My copy of Face is a Doubleday Anchor paperback published in 1962; I got it for $1.95 at Palookaville’s finest used book store. Apparently Moscati finished the Italian original in 1958. As an exposition of archaeology, any book with those dates is almost as antique as the subject matter itself. No matter. You read this one not for current research, but for its almost unexampled rapport with its subject.

“Orient” here means “Near East” (or “Middle East,” depending on your discipline)—Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Persia, plus the Hittites, the Canaanites, the Aramaneans and a fairly large dose of ancient Israel. From the foreword, we learn that the book began as a set of radio lectures; in another time, perhaps he would have had a high-budget location show on PBS. He offers (as he says) “a comparative study of the essential and characteristic features of the ancient Oriental civilizations.”

Well enough, if dated. But what gives the book its enduring appeal, alaong with Moscati’s affinity for his subject, is its particular content. “Since we are describing literary works,” Moscati explains, “why not give actual quotations from them?”

And so he did. In the end, what we have here is an admirable little anthology of ancient literature, in context and in a framework that invites internal comparison. I can’t begin to do it all justice here. But who would have guessed that we would find a prayer/invocation, some 5,000 years old, of the quality of this from Babylon:

They are lying down, the great ones;
The bolts are fallen, the fastenings are placed;
The noisy crowds are quiet,
The open gates are closed.
The gods and the goddesses of the land,
Shamash, Sin, Adad and Ishtar,
Have betaken themselves to sleep in heaven.
They are not pronouncing judgment,
They are not deciding disputes.
Veiled is the night.
The palace and the fields are quiet and dark…
The great gods, the gods of the night …
Stand by …
In the divination which I am performing,
In the lamb which I am offering,
May the truth be revealed to me.

--Sabatino Moscati, The Face of the Ancient Orient 84
(Anchor ed. 1962)