Her chalk screeched an extra letter on the slate. She used the moist sponge to erase it and smelled the familiar scent of errors being corrected.
She loved that smell because it evoked a distant and warm land, the perfume of flat bread baking, the feel of wet clay and many memories of the place where it all began. She let the ancient pride of the scribe come freely into her brain to savor these feelings once again.
Her first hazy recollections of a place near Babylon happened near school vacation time, the summer of the year 1945. She would continue her Scribe dreams for the next few decades…
When was she pressing signs on clay tablets, with a stylus, under the brutal sun near a very large city?
She told herself that she could have been one of a long line of scribe-apprentices learning to make short straight wedge-shaped strokes in the moist clay.
Apprentices were taught horizontal symbols at first and they all tried to work faster than the clay could harden. Every few days, all the clay tablets were collected and delivered to the gods who lived in the Great Temple. She had gone a few times to help her Scribe-Master carry the tablets there, and what she saw was so incredible that she approached the Hall of the Tablets with great fear.
She saw the tablets of the gods standing up by themselves and glowing softly in the dark room. She watched the younger gods place a metal beard under their chins and speak the sacred language into the tablets. She was awed by the older gods putting their horned helmets on and showing the younger ones how to think the sacred language into the tablets.
Were the magic tablets of the gods written from the inside? All was possible to the gods, and no mortal would ever be able to understand, she thought. So she continued her daily task, counting the animals passing in front of her on their way to Nippur, and pressing more symbols into the wet clay with her stylus…
Centuries have now passed, and one of the ancient clay tablets has flown above the earth. Astronaut Sonny Carter took it into the space shuttle Discovery in November 1989.
She smiled as she wondered if the ancient gods had predicted, or known, that the space-bound descendants of the original "Black-Heads" would carry a souvenir of the innocent past of their ancestors, so far above the planet.
In the latest news from the Emerging Technologies Department of the Microsoft Company, "The Microsoft Tablet Team" announced that the time was right for a portable tablet computer. A portable tablet computer might finally be able to replace the keyboards of today's portable machines with either handwriting or speech input.
She now wonders how soon that portable, wireless, keyboardless device that looks like a writing tablet will appear. Will this future tablet be spoken to from a metal beard under one’s chin, or will it be thought into from the depth of a horned helmet?
Across many millennia she greeted her ancient team of apprentices and her patient Scribe-Master. She saluted all clay tablets still under mounds of earth waiting to be discovered one day. What other wonders would be emerging when the future of human technology fits like a transparency on the older tracings of the Babylonian gods? She doesn’t know!
malou