IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 283

In the seventh century BC the Assyrian empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the borders of Egypt, and its capital was Nineveh, a great city on the river Tigris beside the site of modern Mosul in northern Iraq. For much of that century it was ruled by Ashurbanipal, who came to the throne in about 668 BC and died, probably, in 627 BC. Among the buildings of his palace complex was a collection of clay tablets that has become known as the library of Ashurbanipal. It is the largest surviving collection of writing from ancient Mesopotamia.

Ashurbanipal was unusual among Assyrian kings in being able to read and write. The scribal art belonged to a small professional class, and royal inscriptions boast that the king had mastered it, studying both the signs of cuneiform and the difficult scholarly texts of his day. Having learned to value such knowledge, he set out to gather it. Letters survive in which he instructs officials and military commanders to seize or buy tablets wherever they can find them, and scribes were employed to make fresh copies of works held in older collections elsewhere in Mesopotamia. The result was not a single room but a collection dispersed across several chambers of the palace.

The texts were written on tablets of damp clay, into which a cut reed was pressed to form the wedge-shaped marks known as cuneiform. A tablet could be left to dry in the sun, but a harder and more durable result was obtained by baking it, either in a kiln or in the course of a fire. Many of the tablets from Nineveh are broken, and some survive only as fragments smaller than a coin. Others, however, are complete enough to be read, and a few carry the name of the scribe who copied them.

The range of subjects is remarkable. Divination texts, which explained how to read the future in the entrails of a sacrificed sheep or in the movements of the stars, form the largest category, reflecting the importance of omens to the Assyrian state. There are medical recipes, lists of plants and stones, mathematical problems and records of astronomical observation, together with administrative accounts, royal decrees, private letters and literature. Among the literary works is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the long poem about a legendary king of Uruk and his search for immortality. Without the Nineveh copies, large parts of it would be unknown.

Scholars use the word 'library' for convenience, but the collection was not a public institution. There is no evidence that tablets were lent, and access was presumably limited to the king, his scholars and the diviners who advised him. Its purpose was practical as much as cultural: a ruler who controlled the texts of divination controlled a powerful means of interpreting, and justifying, events.

Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BC, when an alliance of Babylonians and Medes captured the city after a siege. The palace was set on fire, and as its floors collapsed the tablets fell into the ruins below. The burning that ended the library is often credited with saving it. Clay that has only been dried in the sun crumbles away in the ground. Tablets baked hard by the flames, by contrast, survived for more than two thousand years beneath the mound that covered the city.

Nothing was known of the library until the middle of the nineteenth century, when British excavators began to dig at the site. Austen Henry Layard worked at Nineveh from the late 1840s, uncovering palace rooms and carved reliefs, and his assistant Hormuzd Rassam found two rooms filled with tablets in the early 1850s. Thousands of tablets and fragments were packed into cases and shipped to the British Museum in London, where they remain one of its most important collections. Smaller numbers reached other museums, and Iraqi institutions now hold material from the site as well.

Little could be done with the tablets at first, because cuneiform had not been deciphered. Scholars in several countries worked on the problem during the 1840s and 1850s, and by the end of that decade Assyrian cuneiform could be read with reasonable confidence. Translation then began, and a small group of museum assistants, working in cramped rooms with fragments spread across every table, started the slow task of sorting the pieces and joining those that belonged together.

In 1872 a young assistant named George Smith made the discovery that brought the library to public attention. Examining a tablet from Nineveh, he recognised an account of a great flood, of a vessel built to survive it and of birds sent out to look for land. The story was strikingly similar to that of Noah in the Book of Genesis. The news was reported widely, and the museum found itself at the centre of an argument about the age and origin of the biblical text.

Work on the collection has continued ever since. The British Museum holds roughly thirty thousand tablets and fragments from Nineveh, and pieces are still being identified and rejoined, sometimes a century or more after they were separated. The library remains the principal source for Assyrian scholarship, religion and literature. It is also a reminder that the survival of the past depends on accident as much as on design: a fire that destroyed a city preserved its books.

Until photography became cheap and reliable, anyone who wanted to describe a plant to someone far away had three options: send a dried specimen, send seeds, or send a picture. The first two often failed. Specimens packed in a press arrived crushed, discoloured or rotten after months at sea, and seeds grew into plants that might differ from the parent in ways no one had recorded. Written descriptions were better than nothing, but words such as 'pale blue' or 'deeply lobed' mean different things to different readers. Botanical illustration developed, therefore, not as decoration but as a form of evidence.

The earliest printed plant books, the herbals of the sixteenth century, were medical works, and their pictures existed to help a reader identify a remedy. Leonhart Fuchs's De historia stirpium, published in 1542, was among the most ambitious. Its woodcuts were cut by craftsmen following drawings made from living plants, and Fuchs took the unusual step of printing portraits of the draughtsmen and the block-cutter at the end of the book. It was a sign of how highly he valued their work. Woodcut was a robust method, but it could not render the fine gradations of tone and texture that a plant's surface presents.

Copper engraving, which became common in the following century, allowed a much finer line, and the new instrument of the microscope pushed illustration further. Robert Hooke's Micrographia, published in 1665, included a celebrated fold-out picture of a flea and detailed studies of the structure of plants, drawn at a scale no reader had seen before. Some illustrators went further still, working abroad rather than from specimens brought home. Maria Sibylla Merian travelled to the Dutch colony of Suriname in 1699 and spent two years there recording insects together with the plants on which they fed, publishing her drawings in 1705.

The eighteenth century brought a new motive for accuracy. Carl Linnaeus and his followers needed descriptions that could be compared across the world, and illustrations began to accompany the formal descriptions on which scientific names depend. The best-known professional of the period was Georg Dionysius Ehret, who worked in Germany, the Netherlands and England and whose plant drawings were admired for their precision. Patronage supported most of this work: illustrators were paid by wealthy collectors, by botanical gardens or by publishers, and very few could have earned a living from science alone.

Long voyages produced the greatest, and the most frustrating, bodies of work. Sydney Parkinson, the botanical draughtsman on James Cook's first Pacific voyage, drew and painted hundreds of plants in three years before dying at sea in 1771. Most of his drawings were not published until the twentieth century. Ferdinand Bauer, who sailed with Matthew Flinders to Australia in 1801, went further, devising a private code in which numbers stood for particular shades. A finished watercolour could then be made years later from a small sketch and a line of figures. Bauer's finished paintings were indeed produced long after his return, and some were never completed.

Technique was laborious. A draughtsman usually began with a pencil outline and then built up colour in watercolour washes, sometimes dissecting a flower to show the arrangement of stamens or the structure of the seed. Colour was the hardest problem: pigments fade and light changes. A plate printed in black and white had to be coloured by hand, a task often given to women and children who were paid by the sheet. Pierre-Joseph Redouté, who worked in Paris for Marie Antoinette and later for the Empress Josephine, used a stipple engraving method that reproduced the softness of petals with great delicacy.

Drawings were not the only record. Herbaria, collections of pressed and dried plants, became the standard reference, and they still are: a pressed specimen can be measured, dated and, today, sampled for DNA. What a specimen loses is almost everything a painter was employed to capture. Pressing flattens a flower, hides the arrangement of leaves around a stem and destroys the colour that may be the most useful clue to identification. Labels, too, are only as good as the person who wrote them, and early collections are often mislabelled or undated.

Photography, from the middle of the nineteenth century, offered a new kind of record. Anna Atkins used the cyanotype process in the 1840s to make images of algae, producing what is often described as the first photographically illustrated book. Yet photography did not displace the illustrator. Colour plates remained costly and early colour images were unstable. A drawing could also show what a photograph of a single specimen could not: the features that distinguish a species, emphasised and arranged for the reader's convenience.

Some illustrators worked on a scale that has outlasted the books in which their pictures appeared. Marianne North, a wealthy English traveller, painted plants in North America, South Africa, India, Japan and Australia and gave her collection to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. A gallery built to hold the paintings opened there in 1882. The gallery still displays them as she hung them, arranged by continent rather than by species, an arrangement that makes an argument of its own about where plants come from. The paintings are valued today as much for what they record as for their beauty.

Company archives are peculiar things. They are created for the firm's own purposes, kept because someone judged them worth the shelf space and, in most countries, protected by no law that requires them to be shown to outsiders. A public body's records are usually open after a set number of years; a private company's are open only if the company chooses. Historians who study business, labour, technology or consumption therefore depend on the goodwill of the organisations they write about. The question is whether that situation is acceptable.

What such archives contain is extraordinarily varied. There are ledgers and wage books, minutes of board meetings, correspondence with suppliers, staff magazines, photographs and reports on products that were never launched. For the historian of work, a wage book can reveal how earnings changed and who was employed. For the historian of medicine, the files of a chemical company may be the only surviving record of what was tested and when. The records of the East India Company, held at the British Library, are the classic example of a corporate archive that has become indispensable to scholarship far beyond the history of trade.

The case for keeping archives closed rests on three arguments, of which the first is commercial. A company's files contain details of processes, prices and products that competitors would find useful. A firm that knows its internal correspondence may one day be read by a rival will write less freely, or write nothing at all. The second argument is legal: records about identifiable employees and customers are subject to data protection law. The third is cost. Opening an archive means providing a supervised reading room and cataloguing material that has lain in boxes for decades.

These are real difficulties, but they are used far too often to justify blanket secrecy. The strongest argument for openness is that closed archives do not prevent history from being written. They merely ensure that it is written from the outside, in ignorance of the records that would settle the question. The most valuable documents are often those a firm would rather forget. When litigation against American tobacco companies forced millions of internal pages into the public domain in the late 1990s, historians could read what the industry had known about the health effects of smoking. Those documents, now held at a university in California, would still be locked away without the lawsuits.

Secrecy also distorts the record in a subtler way. Archives that are open tend to belong to large, old and self-confident institutions: banks, department stores, brewers, publishers. Firms that failed, or that never grew beyond a workshop, leave little behind, and their records are often lost entirely. A history based only on accessible archives therefore flatters success. It also tends to be written in the language the company itself preferred, since the categories in which records were filed, divisions, departments and grades of staff, are the company's own categories.

Records should be closed for a fixed period, commonly twenty-five or thirty years for ordinary business papers, and then opened as a matter of right. Closure should be supervised by an independent archivist rather than by the company's own staff, and catalogues should be published online. Personal details should be removed from individual files rather than whole series being withheld. Where a genuine secret survives, such as a current formula, a single file can be closed while the rest is opened, and the closure can be reviewed.

Openness need not harm a business. The Hudson's Bay Company, founded in 1670, kept records of its fur trade for more than three centuries, and in 1994 it gave them to the provincial archives of Manitoba, where they are available to any researcher with a reader's ticket. The arrangement has not damaged the firm's commercial interests, and it has allowed historians to reconstruct the lives of the people who worked in the trade, including those who left no other trace. It is a model that others could follow.

Who pays for all this? Cataloguing and digitisation are expensive, and few companies will volunteer for costs that bring no obvious return. In Britain, voluntary bodies such as the Business Archives Council have long advised firms on the care of their records. Tax relief for cataloguing would cost the state very little. Where a collection is of national importance, public money may reasonably be used, as it is for museums and historic buildings. Digitisation widens access considerably, but it is selective and costly, and it cannot replace a proper catalogue and a reading room.

The reasonable conclusion is that access should be the default and secrecy the exception, granted only for a defined period and a stated reason. A company that hides its past invites the suspicion that the past contains something worth hiding, and the suspicion is usually more damaging than the disclosure. Firms also have something to gain: their own employees, successors and customers are curious about how an organisation came to be what it is, and an ordered archive is a form of institutional memory. Opening it to historians is not an act of charity. It is part of what it means for a powerful institution to accept that its record belongs, in some measure, to the society that made it possible.