Image Credit: NYT.
You can purchase Elif Shafak’s book here.
Note: All quotes are from There Are Rivers in the Sky unless stated otherwise.
The Flood
In her 2024 novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, Turkish-British author Elif Shafak recounts the discovery of a civilization hidden beneath piles of Mesopotamian silt until the 19th century. The Ancient Assyrian Empire, the world’s first superpower, controlled territory from Eastern Mesopotamia to the Nile Delta, exerting its will over a diverse, multiethnic population. Since the 1840s, archaeologists have unearthed remnants of Assyrian culture featured in biblical narratives.
The most significant discovery in Mesopotamia’s stratigraphic layers was not the imposing carved statues of Lamassu—human-headed protective deities, part bull, part bird—but broken clay tablets that allow scholars to learn about the ancient civilization from the perspective of the Assyrians themselves. Over the past 175 years, archaeologists have worked to uncover fragments of the world’s oldest surviving story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which recounts the life of Gilgamesh, a demigod and mythologized king of Uruk notorious for his cruelty. In cuneiform script deciphered by Assyriologists, the Babylonian epic that this imperial culture preserved grapples with immortality, the nature of civilization, friendship, and other questions still relevant to the modern reader.
Among the fragments that remain of the epic is the Flood Tablet, unearthed by Hormuzd Rassam in the 1850s and translated by George Smith in 1872; the tablet contains a story eerily similar to the biblical account of Noah’s Ark. Utnapishtim, a Noah-like figure, survives a divine deluge by constructing an ark that he fills with animals.
Shafak pairs the dramatized 19th-century events with the 21st-century lives of a young Yazidi girl—Narin—living in Southeastern Anatolia and a scientist—Zaleekhah—focused on water memory.
Arthur Smyth, a character based on the prodigious George Smith, the Flood Tablet’s translator, anchors the novel. Like his real-life counterpart, Arthur undertakes an expedition to Nineveh in search of the remaining fragments of Gilgamesh and falls in love with a Yazidi woman whose community is being targeted by the Ottoman administration. Narin’s story, woven around Arthur’s adventures, recounts the crimes that continue to be committed against the Yazidis, including the 2014 genocide perpetrated by ISIS in northern Iraq.
Across all three narratives, Shafak explores the preservation of history: an individual’s and a culture’s relationship with its ancestors, the ethics of archaeology, and water’s role as the custodian of the past.
Lost Limbs
Narin’s grandmother criticizes Western archaeologists who pillaged her homeland in search of “Oriental finds” to display in museums for mesmerized crowds. Museums claim to grant universal access to the artifacts, but most members of the communities to whom the artifacts belong “cannot travel.” “It’s like,” Narin’s grandmother articulates, “they’ve severed our body into pieces, and they say, ‘Whenever you want you can visit your limbs.’” Artifacts, essential to a culture’s understanding of itself, as integral as a leg to the functioning of the individual, were steadily sent abroad and put on display. Items offer connections to the past, to what ancestors constructed, believed, suffered, and fought for. The gypsum alabaster used in the Lamassu is of limited value compared to the stories the statue can tell. The reign of King Ashurbanipal in the 7th century BC, whose palace the Lamassu protected, and his insatiable search for knowledge; the daily processions of tributes from conquered lands; and the Babylonian and Median siege of Nineveh that saw the palace set ablaze in its entirety all remain part of the Lamassu that now languish in the dark showrooms of the British Museum. To steal a people’s ruins, to parade their priceless artifacts as curiosities, Shafak appears to imply, is a metaphorical dismembering of the individuals themselves.
The British Empire, to which Arthur belonged, partially justified its subjugation of millions of peoples in lands as diverse as South Africa and India, by appealing to the “civilizing mission.” Its proponents believed colonialism was a divine duty, meant to educate “barbarous” non-Western peoples in the precepts of civilized life. Colonial elites suppressed local cultures and emphasized or adopted “Western values.” Mesopotamia was not yet under British control, but with permission from Ottoman bureaucrats, British, German, and French archaeologists were granted almost total independence in how they conducted their operations and in deciding which finds they took back to Europe. These archaeologists maintained that the native inhabitants, whom they sought to “civilize,” were in no way suited to care for the past.
There is no better illustration of the ethos of the “civilizing mission” than Napoleon’s military expedition into Egypt in 1798. The invasion, which marked the beginning of modern Near Eastern archaeology, sought to “liberate the people of the region from their destiny and restore them to the grandeur of their ancestors.” Paradoxically, the relics that connected the modern inhabitants to those very ancestors would need to be taken under French stewardship to ensure their protection. The French general’s L’ Orient flagship contained a library specializing in the region he sought to dominate. 150 scholars, from across disciplines—“art historians, geographers, zoologists, geologists, engineers, botanists…”—accompanied cavalry and gunmen into the throes of battle, attempting to assert “the superiority of the West…not only via warfare but via science, art, and literature.” The infusion of Western culture and the practice of archaeology in the Ottoman and Egyptian lands during the 19th century was less an “exchange” than an imposition and theft at the cost of local tradition. For “just as a flame requires darkness to exist and expand,” European empires “needed [their] Orient imbued with deprivation and despair.” Shafak’s description of Napoleon’s warship, as Arthur travels toward Nineveh, invites the reader to consider the history and ethical questions tied to his profession.
As he journeys along the Tigris, ill and near the end of his life, Arthur considers the destruction that civilizations, or more accurately, empires, have wrought. Arthur “used to think of civilization as a solid edifice, elegantly expressed in marble, wood, glass, and metal…The Triumph of man over nature.” After having spent time in the “depraved Orient” thousands of miles away from London, “it seems to him that what they call civilization is, in truth, a storm in waiting. Powerful, protean, and perfectly destructive, sooner or later it will burst free of its barriers and engulf everything in its insatiable past.” Arthur sees civilization not as a noble mission that ought to be praised but as an indiscriminate force that, once loosed, destroys everything before it. The rapaciousness at the core of Western imperialism, of which historical looting is only a small part, becomes apparent to the dying archaeologist.
Westerners alone are not responsible for the removal and destruction of regional cultural heritage. Hormuzd Rassam, who led excavations for the British Museum and removed items from Nineveh and Nimrud, was himself an ethnic Assyrian. ISIS, a terrorist group led by native Iraqis, destroyed the Lamassu that remained in Nineveh in 2015 and spread videos of their defacement. Shafak highlights this complexity: ISIS leaders are depicted examining clay tablets, choosing which would fetch a higher price from wealthy Western collectors. Locals willingly take part in dismembering Mesopotamian culture through the shipment of antiquities abroad or by destroying the sites themselves. One could object that shipping artifacts abroad is an act of preservation wholly distinct from intentional defacement; the Lamassu in London remain intact, while those that were left in Iraq are not. But “limbs” kept safe in England and France are still severed from the descendants of their creators, no more accessible to most locals than what has been turned to dust.
Fluid Bridges
Shafak’s portrayal of water as a medium for interconnection, for “communication between separate worlds,” ties the novel’s three narratives separated by centuries into a cohesive whole. Rivers, “fluid bridges,” winding bodies of water that flow over and through, are part of Shafak’s examination of history: “They carry the spirits of the departed into the netherworld, and occasionally bring them back. In the sweeping currents and tidal pools shelter the secrets of forgone ages.” Towering Lamassu and hundreds of crates of bas-reliefs were lost to the Tigris as French excavators tried to ship them back to the Louvre; the wreckage of Napoleon’s rotting fleet lies hidden beneath “the ripples on the surface” in Aboukir Bay, near the Nile’s mouth. But in Zaleekhah’s telling, the water molecules themselves may also carry memory, a recollection of the kings they have alighted upon and the irrigation canals that transformed the arid Mesopotamian landscape into a prosperous paradise.
The culture of the ancient and modern Near East, from the Sumerians to Northern Iraqi Yazidis, is constructed on water, “the defining force of life,” along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates. But the same water in these two Mesopotamian rivers circulates through atmospheric passages and ends up in our glasses. The novel’s title, There Are Rivers in the Sky, draws attention to these invisible systems that shuttle water from one part of the world to another. A single raindrop begins by falling on Ashurbanipal’s hair and recurs in all three narratives, traveling as part of a cloud and falling as a teardrop. Shafak’s novel suggests rivers are better custodians than museums of a people’s past: Even if the heritage they contain remains physically inaccessible, each antiquity becomes part of the river, of the shared global water supply. Floods like the divine deluge from the Flood Tablet, or the Dam that drowned Kastrum Kefa, submerge but also preserve. As droplets from floods and rivers circulate, we share in the “memory” Zaleekah hopes they contain simply by existing.