Personal notes of Dr Sana Barzani regarding the Barnun Tablets.
(17/04/1999-27/04/1999)
I received these quite quickly after I uploaded the last. Still no idea who’s sending these but there’s much more information in this package than the last.
It’s also solidified my certainty in this source. It lines up with the evidence I have, my experiences mirrored on the page. I don’t feel like I’m crazy for chasing this anymore and my mission feels clearer than ever.
I’ve been delayed by health issues but I won’t let it stop me. The sender asked me to spread this information and I will.
The Kish project ended last night, with drinks in Cavendish’s office. I headed home as soon as I could get away from the cloying congratulating of my colleagues. I got home and immediately collapsed into my bed and tried to sleep. I was ultimately unsuccessful. The images of the reassembled texts have been sitting on my desk for weeks now and I have never felt called to a find like this before. Finally giving up on sleep at 3am, I got to work with the aid of a thermos of coffee and a pack of cigarettes waiting by my balcony door. It is now 9pm and through countless cups and at least a couple packs, I honestly can’t decide whether what I’ve translated is some deluded hallucination or just wrong: career suicide no matter where it falls.
Usually from the first few sentences I’m able to discern a theme: royal declarations starting with the name of some King and followed by so-called heroic deeds in battle: inventory lists by merchants like the Kish project, often just big lists you can spot a mile away: religious texts will have the usual string of God names and their endless epithets, used as metaphor for their physical reality and by far the most engaging to parse out. I thought the find to be the latter, having already noted the repeated use of ‘Udug’, added with the words for ‘omen’ and the names of Gods and mythological figures jumping out at me. So as I started my transliteration believing I had an account of the fall of Babylon from the perspective of some religious zealot, I was annoyed to find my theory crumbling as I read.
The concept of a ‘demon’ being an evil spirit that can walk amongst and spread sin is a modern one, the Mesopotamians more so seeing ‘demons’ as personified forces of nature that cause events that can’t be blamed on your fellow man. So, it was strange to see that the ‘demons’ in this text didn’t stay in myth or metaphor but drifted into the material life of the author: they stayed in the author’s home, they travelled away and sent word back, they were ‘foreigners’ whose names I’m pretty sure were the first to be chiselled from the clay. I started to think that this was one of many times humans settled a grudge by painting their enemy as some great, mystical evil. Annoyingly, that theory didn’t quite stick either.
I will have my full translation completed in time but I have a basic layout of the story being told here: two ‘foreigners’ arrive in Babylon and stay with the author for a time. They leave for a place where a deposit of ‘red gems’ had been uncovered that the alchemists at the time are very interested in, and these two start openly talking about finding the secret to immortality.
NOTE: This cannot be a reference to the Philosopher’s Stone. These tablets were made at some point after 539 BC, thousands of years before the fever dream that led to the greatest dead-end for overzealous chemistry students everywhere. (If I fall into bed with the folklorists at this point in my career, I will never be allowed to set foot in a serious academic space again.)
Anyway, the next sections were no better. My usual method of looking for words like nouns and verbs first, then puzzling them together with the connective sections, led me straight into a scene of horror. The words on the fourth tablet that found my eyes first were ‘corpses’ (specifically plural), ‘blood’, and ‘cursed’. As I worked through the text, I believe what it says is that one of these two travelling alchemists was found dead in a temple with a wound to his eye and with his heart missing. I’m embarrassed to say that I had to shake the sense of dread from my aching shoulders as I put it all together. In trying to discern the text’s purpose I didn’t find any religious doctrine, a story pulled from the mind of a zealot, or anything belonging only to myth or fact alone: it felt like I’d found a warning?
I’m taking a break. I have other things to work on and I’m not going to waste more ink on this until I’m sure this isn’t an elaborate ruse. The mentions of demons? Ritualistic murder? Strangers whose names are erased from the blood stained clay? Tablets broken and buried deep within the ground far from any other known site? That could all be chalked up to a brain addled with religious delusions witnessing what they could see as the end of their civilisation. The red gems, however, give me pause, with the only conclusion I come to being a stupid bloody prank by my idiot cousin they decided to make head of department at UoB. I will have to call my contact on his forensic team, Mrs Dariush would have no time for this and wouldn’t allow me to waste precious time on a lie.
UPDATE: I called Mrs Dariush. As always, a diligent forensic archeologist who was willing to take extra pictures of little details to send over, something I knew she wouldn’t be able to do if the tablets were fake. I am displeased to find the thing is real.
In fact, she was also able to find some consistencies between a number of the 14 chiselled out sections. I had told her that I believed 9 of these sections to be the names of the foreigners, the ones the author had labelled as ‘demons’, and Mrs Dariush said she’d examine them closer to find any consistencies across them. She just got back to me with what she found after cross-referencing all 9 erasures, the initial syllables of those names. The symbols for “Em” and “Mu”.
Whatever their names are, they weren’t Babylonian as the text says: so the spelling erased here was probably a Babylonian approximation and spelling of those names. If there is any more hints pointing towards the origins of these ‘demons’, it may allow me to assign a name from that culture- But for now, all I know it that their initials were E and M.
Time to sleep.
I think I'm being followed.
Or at least something… happened today.
There was a visitor in my lecture today, a strange man. He was there when I arrived, sitting at the very back. I didn't recognise him from class or from the faculty but he was sitting in a huge coat and large sunglasses that obscured his eyes, so I was initially annoyed that a student had slept between lectures. But he quietly interrupted my tirade to inform me that he had authorisation to sit in on one of my lectures. Unfortunately, students had started filing in before I had the chance to check and thus began my strangest lecture yet.
I don't like to make judgements based on physical appearances. After all, growing up in Cambridge during the 70s and 80s — as the only student with skin darker than the paper we wrote on, no less — was traumatising enough without pushing that same judgement onto others.
But…
He was pale, not the pinkish white of the majority of my peers, but more like a… corpse? His eyes, once he took off the obscenely large sunglasses, looked to have no irises; or if there were they blended into the surrounding sclera seamlessly from across the hall, where they followed my every move like I was a pacing animal caged by his attention. His hair was jet black and well coiffed, old-fashioned in a way I couldn't put my finger on. Everything was off and I was getting the distinct feeling that I was being threatened. A feeling I do not appreciate.
He left before I could stop him, gone in the rush of students looking forward to post-lecture drinks, it being already 7:00pm and the last session of the day. I told Cavendish, as the head of department, that there was a strange lurker in the back of my lecture hall. That conversation went quite frustratingly along these lines.
“Oh yes! Apologies for not informing you sooner, Sana,” he said, even though I’ve asked him to call me Dr Barzani regularly and rarely politely. “He’s an old friend and private collector. He asked about recent projects that had come in and I mentioned the Barnun find. He was very interested by my brief description, seems to be as avid a fan of an obscure find as you.”
“Well, does this creep have a name?” Yes. I did say that. The guy looked like a washed up goth in his late twenties, not some private collector. Cavendish didn’t look too pleased, which he rarely does where I’m concerned so nothing strange there.
“He is a respected academic in his own right and a personal friend, Sana. I hope you treat him with a little more respect in the future. After all, you should be honoured that someone is taking an interest in your personal projects.” Prick.
That delightful conversation done with, I couldn't get rid of the sense of unease as I walked to my car. I pulled out of my spot and drove towards the exit where I'm pretty sure I saw a figure hidden amongst the trees. In only a few seconds, I was too far past to get another look, but it had already been dismissed by the logical part of my mind that said I was already on edge; a perfect state of mind for the eyes to play tricks in the dark.
It was the second time that has me truly questioning that assessment. Nothing happened throughout the journey as I contemplated in silence the day I'd had. As I approached my driveway, I saw another shadowed figure leaning up against a tree across the path from my complex. I left my car, walked towards my apartment building and with one final look back, illuminated by the porch light, another stranger previously shadowed by the night. Dark clothes, smoking a rolled up cigarette, and looking directly at me. I hurried inside, not willing to deal with whatever that was just yet.
He wasn't the same man from my lecture but the encounters feel connected. How could they not be? Maybe it means nothing, maybe I'm overthinking, maybe I need to sleep.
There's not much development on the Barnun translation. The warning I found there hasn’t changed since I last read them. But there’s one thing that strikes me as strange now that I’m going over everything that happened today: I hadn’t told Cavendish about the Barnun project.
“Ignore the omens that demons present, and thus perished are the lives we lived! Before the fall, wrought by Cyrus, these demons descended onto Babylon as mortal humans: in the guise of foreigners, they sought the secrets of the alchemists here so as to return to their immortal forms amongst their demon kin. I know not the lands they hail from, but their names were strange: they were (-E-) [of light] and (-M-) [of dark]. I hope to press the knowledge of them into this clay; in remembrance of one, and for the other to be heeded as a warning.”
Immortality is referenced throughout. It’s often implied that ‘demons’ in Babylonian myth are immortal but it rarely needs to be explicitly stated and they rarely talk about them trying to obtain or regain it. My theory is that these were just people the author believed to be ‘demons’, but even by this logic they were definitely alchemists who wanted to find a way to live forever, like people from time immemorial are wont to do! Thanks to Mrs Dariush’s work, I’m able to put their initials in for ease of understanding but the surnames seem to be Babylonian descriptors in the place of a full Babylonian name, something which would happen when they interacted with foreigners of different naming conventions. My theory based on context and word usage is that these are based on hair colour, one having blonde hair and the other being darker.
“Know this: I am able to recount this tale to you for I once considered them friends. They claimed to be students of one of my own, the alchemist Lustamar-Adad, and cursed my home with their warmth. Their pale skin grew darker through the two years with my family, they told us lies of their distant home, drank our beer and ate our food. I wish I had known, if I could have stopped this! If I hadn’t told them of the red stone, if I had stopped them from leaving, if I had killed him before he could (-)”
The text abruptly stops here, no chiselling or removal. The sentence simply stops.
This ‘Lustamar-Adad’ is described as an alchemist, E and M were his students, which means it’s not a bold assumption to make that the author’s profession is alchemy as well. As I’ve said, alchemy at this point in history is often thought of as basic and early chemistry… but this could imply… I’m getting ahead of myself.
Their skin is described as pale. Skin colour is only mentioned in cuneiform tablets if they are considerably paler or darker to the rest of the Mesopotamian population at the time, probably meaning that they were quite pale. It’s hard to say where these ‘strange lands’ were, trade in this period was increasingly common and they would have been aware of the paler europeans. But travel was still treacherous across such long distances so the ‘strange lands’ they come from are narrowed down to the furthest points in Europe from Mesopotamia, and that could be anything from the far reaches of modern day Scandinavia to even potentially the British Isles. They had apparently studied with the distinctly Babylonian sounding Lustamar-Adad. Where did they meet? How? Both questions I’m afraid I won’t ever know the answer for. Such is the work of the ancient historian.
Alright, fine. The ‘Red Stone’. After a few days of avoiding this section, and with the more fantastical part of my brain screaming about ‘what ifs’, I contacted a folklorist ‘friend’ of mine. She confirmed that the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ was imagined into the collective conscious by some 12th century alchemist called Nicholas Flammel. It was described as a red gem that could be used as an alchemical catalyst of sorts to achieve miraculous feats outside of what was normally possible with alchemy: this included turning lead into gold, cure the incurable and… f*ck me… achieve immortality. As the search for it goes cold over the centuries, it’s more often seen as a spiritual concept to spur believers to reach beyond what they believe to be possible… but it has never turned up in Babylonian mythos or even historical writing about Mesopotamia before! Before now, I guess.
“The demons left us for (-Lost City Name-), following the alchemists' trail east to the caves from which the scarlet gems are cut. In the span of 3 years, we only received news of their lives through messages sent by the ‘house of alchemists’; in the first year, we were told that they had been discussing immortality with their peers; in the second, we were told the two had fought bitterly in public; in the third year we were told (-E-) left the city while (-M-) remained and had come into the service of the King of (-Lost City Name-), (-Lost King Name-). The city then turned silent and all were anxious for word, so a small band of messengers and soldiers were sent.”
There are fourteen chiseled out sections but my theory is that between these erased sections it is 4 separate words: 4 names, 3 the names of people and 1 the name of a City state. E and M are the names of the two foreigners, the third name is the name of the King of this city. I may be wrong, there may be 2 cities and 3 Kings, 4 demons with 5 heads, but I doubt it given the context around those erased sections. But the question of ‘why’ still haunts me. Why were these names erased and by who? Does it have something to do with the blood in the fracture lines? I digress.
Again, a reference to these red gems with a different descriptor no less, to really drive home how insane this is! The author is undoubtedly referring to some red stone that was being used by alchemists at the time, so much so that alchemists are leaving Babylon to find them in this other city? The ‘house of alchemists’ was essentially a ‘guild’, but guilds weren’t the same sort of established organisations then as they would be later in other areas of the world; which meant that there were enough alchemists in this lost City that they sort of clumped together. Whatever this stupid bloody red gem was, the alchemists were going crazy for it! E and M spent three years there and their relationship started to publicly fall apart, so much so that their peers sent word back to the author about it (who seems to be an an important alchemist in his own right from context).
Immortality is mentioned repeatedly. I feel like I see the word even when I close my eyes. E and M are talking about it, they fight and then separate before tragedy unfolds. Is their fight related to their research into finding a way to conquer death? What happened? What if they- no, I cannot BELIEVE I’m considering this. I can’t be! They died and they stayed dead, enough!
“The horrors they recounted: the silence in the streets, the corpses in the palace, the blood in the water. The King lay before his throne, throat slit, long dead. But they never found (-M-), the sole survivor of (-Lost City Name-). (-E-) had returned to us soon after we heard of the mountain city’s fate, panicked and seeking to prepare a ritual. The last I saw him, we embraced like family as he left for the temple. No one but Marduk, King of the Gods, knows what transpired within those sacred walls and all we found in the aftermath was his corpse. A blade had been stabbed into his left eye and his chest was hollow with his heart torn from it.”
So, this lost city falls. It sounds like a total cull. The King is dead, citizens slaughtered in the palace, blood contaminating the water supply. It says on the last side that M had been employed by the King, and the King is found with his throat slit and the population wiped out : they say they don’t find his body but how could they tell? Did they look for him specifically? M is talked about by the author like they suspect him to be behind this tragedy multiple times:
The author maybe had them search for this M, who was not found. The author either fears him, hates him, or feels a combination of both. Other than M’s corpse not being found amongst the ruin, what reason does the author have to feel this way? Didn’t he stay in their home for two years? Maybe he was always an a**hole? Again, the only people who knew are long dead… I think.
E however is described with a different tone, one much more loving or at least pitying. It says on the first tablet that one of the two is to be mourned and the other to be feared, and the death of the former is done within a temple in a manner that is as brutal as it is ominous. E couldn’t have possibly stabbed himself in the eye and ripped out his own heart, someone else must have done that. But the author doesn’t mention anyone else known to be present at the murder but Marduk (could imply the murder took place in a temple to Marduk). The author said they ‘embraced like family’ before he left. I can only imagine the confusion and despair this author went through. I’m not surprised a person of this culture and time would only attribute these events to the work of demons: I would certainly be tempted to turn back to religion if such things happened around me.
“The demon (-E-) curses a sacred temple with the obscene corpse it left behind, and the demon (-M-) has disappeared leaving carnage in its wake! Or (-M-) is the root of this evil, flooding the streets of (-Lost City Name-) with blood, killing the King he served, and then turning the blade on his oldest friend! The stench of evil is heavy in the air, making way for the destruction of our homes and the lives we leave behind. I beseech you who read this, beware of these demons, for I fear their goals may have been achieved. May Uta-Napishtim curse their arrogance and pluck the fruit of immortality from their lips!”
Finally, the last tablet. Again, ‘demons’ of this time are considered more forces of nature and weren’t seen as ‘evil’ per say, more inevitable tragedies too big to counter by humans. After working on this for weeks now, I have come to a conclusion. The events around E and M are strange, with their talking of such a taboo subjects as immortality, the utter destruction of a city whose name is erased and existence lost, E being found dead in a way the author describes as ‘obscene’ (especially to someone who obviously held a lot of love for him), and finally Cyrus’ invasion of Babylon: the painting of these two as demons obviously helps this author make sense of the events they’ve witnessed. Now it seems I am burdened with the meaning behind this demonic metaphor.
M is blamed for the ruin left in the Lost City, the murder of its King, and even suggesting that he killed E in the temple. Despite the love this author had for E, and the trust they at least had to host them both in their home, and the fear and hatred aimed at M after it all: the warnings that immortality has been achieved is placed on them both. E’s body is described as being ‘left behind’ and M’s body is never found. The idea around M becoming immortal I can understand seeing as he’s never found dead, but the other whose corpse is left lying in a temple to be found by horrified witnesses? The author does mention that E was going to the temple to conduct a ritual, but to what end? Did E know he was going to die?
I haven’t slept yet and it’s three hours till sunrise. I’m dreading seeing Cavendish at work tomorrow. He’s acting normal. I can act normal. I can be normal. I can-
This project will be the end of everything I have worked towards. Talking of an ancient mention of a philosopher’s stone, demons and immortality, no one will think of this as anything but religious fanaticism or some deranged historical fiction. I don’t think I can hide how seriously I’ve taken all this?! I have been asked by Wright, Davis, and even Cavendish if I’ve been feeling alright recently. Am I really acting that strange? I can’t let them know but I feel like I’m going insane because I…
He was there again, that strange man. He was talking with Cavendish and I finally asked him his name, feeling like my tongue would burn if I didn’t then and there! I ignored Cavendish and his scoffing, still keeping up the image I was done maintaining. The pale man looked like he could see right through me, as if he knew his answer would be seared into the inside of my skull.
“My name is Mordecai, but you can call me M.”
That is the last of what I’ve been sent so far. I’m grateful for it but I’m glad it’s done. It’s been getting in my head.
I said in my foreword that these new pages have solidified the validity of this source for me. I’ll explain: the man Dr Barzani describes, Mordecai as he calls himself, is a man I have met myself. I would see him everywhere for a while, he would follow and watch me from afar, until one day I came home and he was there in my tiny flat. I don’t remember many specifics from that conversation but he wanted to talk about my research. Clearly I had struck on some truth. I’ve been in hiding since.
Dr Barzani and I are similar in one way at least: fate has led us to truth that brings this threat into our lives, and it seems stubbornness is making us stay on this dangerous path.
I need to go take something, this headache will not go away.
Uploaded: 22/03/2025
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