Ashurnasirpal was a barbarian, but a sophisticated one. He slaughtered foes for Art, not for superficial power or for sport.

The curious thing about Assyrians in general and Ashurnasirpal, their most powerful ruler-general, in particular, is that other than cuneiforms chiseled into stone pillars, they left behind no literature whatsoever. Not a thing: no legends, no myths, no religious admonitions, no canceled checks. Nothing except stelae commemorating military conquests. They knew how to write, in at least six different languages, but had nothing much to say. This nothing they recorded in Akkadian (now dead but then the forefather of several Crescent tongues, including Babylonian), formed from cuneiforms shaped like broken shark's teeth or golf tees turned to every unlikely angle.

Several other ancient cultures left behind no literature and are no more remarkable for it. What makes the Assyrian alexia an interesting enigma is what they did leave behind: exquisite alabaster friezes of curly-beards on horseback, kings leading awesome armies and savagely slaughtering those foes later memorialized on pillars. Their art displays the age's greatest sensitivity to perspective and detail, remaining an inspiring sight today, at such prominent sites as the British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, or even the Kimball in Fort Worth. Their mighty armies, sadly, never made it to the friezework proper, because Art, especially in the ancient world, was something only the very wealthy could commission. The king viewed soldiers as simple material extensions of the royal will; where they struck, the king struck too, so an alabaster figure of the king's terrible beauty contained both the conscript's blunt edge and God's divine light. "Man is the shadow of a god, a slave is the shadow of a man," their proverb went, "but the king is like the very image of God." Like the very image: hence "the city I destroyed, I devastated." Commands, soldiers, soldiers' deeds--these were the king, as the king was God. "The very substance of ambition," as Hamlet has it.

The friezework required gathering the known-world's most talented artisans, an enormous burden on the nation's treasury but a necessary one, given the king's other-worldly status. If this expense was enormous, so too was the cost of maintaining a standing army to protect Nineveh, Assyria's capital city, which is said to have reached a million souls; the inner city walls--100 feet high in a circuit eight miles long--were wide enough to drive four chariots abreast. Of course, for Assyrian kings to place their simulacra on public buildings, there first had to be public buildings, funds for materials and construction crews (slaves eat more than a shadow's worth), funds for craftsmen (though fickle lords made artists frugal even then), and funds for the army (which, despite its ubiquitous paunch, still managed to stand). Accountants, clerks, types like Eliot's teatime typist. Thus more territories to subjugate, more tributes to collect, more rebellious libertarians to butcher, more alabaster to consecrate, more young men carbuncular a la abacus. Luckily, most foreign kings and foolish chieftains took their treasuries to battle, thereby saving the Assyrians the need to sack capitals carefully. (Even impressed soldiers would not fight unless they saw some promise they'd be paid; besides, most kings felt safer stashing family jewels in mobile War Chests than leaving them with apostates behind.) The wealth amassed was then recycled into large and larger public buildings, more art, accompanying more and greater jealousy of neighboring kings. A cycle which not only led to drawn out military campaigns but also to imaginative experiments in Keynesian economics long before Keynes demonstrated the practicality of deficit spending.

Still, Ashurnasirpal evidently could not understand why in the world once subjugated peoples continually revolted, especially when they knew what terrors awaited as a direct response to the slightest defiance. To an extent greater than most folks will admit, maintaining political power is simply a matter of chutzpah, huzzah!, and hearty grog. Jonah's foggy warnings were heard in Nineveh, probably less because the Assyrians grew weary of genocide and fearful of YHVH than that they grew prosperous and melancholy and maudlin. Jaded and fat, they became content to stay home while skalds sung stories of glories past, tales evaporating just past the liquored tongue.

New conquerors swept the fertile crescent. First: Scythians, nomads from the Russian steppes, leaving Nineveh open to anyone with a lance to call his own. Later: various others, including Babylonians. Since invading barbarians usually destroy first what they understand least, Babylonian kings gave instructions for their own rampaging armies, mostly illiterate peasants impressed as mercenaries, to liberate art before wheat, and the obedient soldiers obliged. Later, these loyal Medes got a quick sack as reward--some gold, some grain, then the old pensionless heave-ho back home, where a well-placed pike could double as sun-dial--recognizing nothing but hours the scratch plow could pass, boustrophedon, tilling fields with barley until, perhaps, the surplus served to entice a farmer to become a malter, or a reformer to preach temperance, or a thirsty foreigner to invade.

Assyrian power revived only briefly, but long enough for an ambitious general to usurp the supine throne and sweep himself into the Bible by forever splitting the two Hebrew kingdoms in 721 BCE. Tiglath-pileser (and his henchman Sargon) carried thousands of Jews into captivity and left the northern kingdom of Israel a smoldering, empty wasteland. Affecting nationalistic nostalgia, always an effective ploy for power-hungry patriots, the general ironically encouraged the artless destruction of the Hebrew nation in the name pro patria, an almost forgotten glory remembered then only in the remaining affects of Assyrian imperialism--the friezework and stelae scattered throughout surrounding lands.

To make a long megillah short, all this destruction came about despite Amos' and Hosea's loud warnings of impending disaster. Perhaps the reason no one heard them, then as now, was that both Amos and Hosea spoke, preached, implored, persisted, exhorted, blistered . . . but never bothered to write anything down. Real prophets never do, you know. Look at Socrates (arguably a prophet), who never wrote a word (Derrida's revisionist post cards not withstanding), and who consistently condemned those who did. Christ left it to apostles to record his Sermon on the Mount. Siddhartha merely smiled (a little lie). Michel de Nostredame was a quack not because he sold his magic to Catherine de Medicis' court, but because he wrote Centuries. For the authentic prophet, merely speaking from prepared text erases the spontaneity and vital urgency: the sky will fall, the crops will fail, the Cubs will choke. On the other hand, since soapbox lecturers never make it to Parliament, you need someone to spread good news about you, as Plato idealized Socrates, as Augustine apotheosized Ambrose. So if you must write something, remain elusively cryptic, fastidiously economic. Write pithy slogans like an ad man, on the occasional placard, the occasional sandwichboard: "Prepare to meet thy doom!" Never say when, never say die. This is the most effective sort of prophecy.

For all the pure power of prophecy dissolves on the paltry page; its magic transformed by newsprint to ugly black and white squiggles, mere curves and serifs fit to line a bird cage. Think of Jeane Dixon and all the accounting she must do twelve months after her predictions appear in one of those year-end tabloids: still, the psychic stuff of 10pm eyewitness newscasts, fit to send us off to bed with wry smiles, not the stuff to put us on our knees. Besides, had Hebrews heard Amos and Hosea as Assyrians eventually attended Jonah, it would have ruined a perfectly wonderful book.

Something else is going on here as well, something more than the mere underscoring of preposterous ironies. Yes, books do draw strength from narrative impossibilities. And true, prophets want to be "a cake not turned," as Hosea said; hence Jonah's chagrin when Nineveh acceded: he came to prophesy their doom, not accept repentance (Nahum later drove prophetic nails into their tomb). So something else, too. Although Assyrians were wordless butchers inexplicably fond of elegant figures, their will to silence kept them from turning elegant figures in words. To be honest, the eclectic Assyrians had their scholarly scribes, willing Bartelby's all, preserve every variety of record for the state library. (I lied before.) (That damned apophrasis.) But only civil servants, influential lords, and the royal family could access the archives, which by c.600 BCE held 100,000 volumes. Their final tyrant, Assurbanipal, had scribes search out and copy everything they could, and his library is the source of almost all we know about fertile crescent culture--as far back as 2,000 BCE.

So let's face facts: Ashurnasirpal must have understood far more about language than we condescending moderns give him credit for. "Words are deeds," wrote Wittgenstein, thinking he'd said something novel. Clearly, the king understood the threat within words. The pillar, the marker on the pillar, the words that formed the marker, these are deeds themselves. Not the shadowy image of the God-King's wroth, but the very frying, roasting, carving, slicing, devastating. No one back then confused figure and ground as we do now, since such things didn't differ in the first place; this is what logos meant. Who would dare revolt when words were prophesy and performance? And who wants literature when words contain such violence? What society, what army could withstand the sheer barbarian recklessness of words, which can be tossed about by gravediggers as easily as princes? With the king watching like Big Brother, Akkadian icons became ontological telegrams.

Less civilized nations, it must be noted here, did not appreciate the ferocity of the prolix. They feared swords more, and found well-worn hearth-songs reassuring in the empty night, invigorating before battle or dawn. Anyway, all fighting stopped during the rainy season. Mud will do that to you. Soldiers were farmers first; they needed to return home each autumn to sow and till their fields, if there were to be enough wheat to fight over. Paranoiac Assyrian kings might retreat within their walled homes to worry about eradicating rhymes, but sedulous soldiers-turned-farmers found their fields fine places to recite measured lines over and again, learning to treasure iambs more with each regular turn of the ox.

Although a great many battles were fought over gold--who had it and who didn't--land remained trump in the Age Before Oil. Fertile soil and precious metals were the primary forms of exchange, above only wheat, meat, beer, and (slave) labor. Art didn't cut it. But real estate was treasured, especially by gluttonous kings, just ask The Donald, treasured as the very foundation of lasting wealth, even if in and of itself the land had no real worth:

So an unnamed soldier answers Hamlet's query on where mighty Fortinbras' army heads. Land and people, Malthus said, observing the obvious. Economics is just land and people, even when both land and people are rotten. In Hamlet Shakespeare economically shows that neither land nor people need be real, and he makes the elasticity of both supply and demand nothing but a name, a word. (But note this worthless land retains its name--more distinction than the anonymous, exchangeable soldier.) Why Fortinbras' army should attack for "no profit but the name" remains obscure, except to say that mighty Fortinbras ("Enter Fortinbras and English Ambassadors, with Drum, Colors, and Attendants.") has nothing much better to do than fight for his own rank, his name, his honor--which another still grosser Shakespearean knight would, fleeing battle, later damn as just a word. Nevertheless, Fortinbras and peers will be fighting in the rear; the infantry is on commission and in the front, the best place to maximize your variable costs.

Hamlet too faces this ancient problem of words. His abstruse, portentous inheritance passes through probate in a diffuse speech given by a ghost--a doubly difficult charge since it leaves Hamlet with his princely but fallible human memory of now absent words, words as worthless as the peascod chaff. Perhaps less so.

"Thou art a scholar; speak to it Horatio!" Marcellus implores of Hamlet's protective friend. As Zulfikar Ghose has noted, the play goes on to revolve around just two words: speak, silence. Just a matter of proper balance, like land and people. During the Renaissance, commoners believed that the scholar had sole access to that proper balance; that the scholar could somehow combine words and acts in the alchemy of wisdom; that the scholar's alembic connected him to the cosmos' mysterious secrets--divination and erudition then remaining approximations of the same. If God has structured the world like a book, then knowledge must be predicated on (correct) reading: interpretation. And in this single, infinite text that is the world--only the sage can decipher discrete scraps, replace the endless zigzag with solid models, puzzle out ingenious jigsaws just as paleontologists construct entire dinosaurs from but a single tooth. Marcellus calls on Horatio as we would call in an exterminator, reasoning a more rational man will recognize the runes, will know the right rhymes to ground this ghostly presence. An incomplete scholar, Horatio reasons a still greater man may know, and calls for a second opinion: "This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him."

Remember that Hamlet is first and foremost a professional academic at home only because recalled for his father's funeral. Skilled with a foil, a felonious spar for pretentious fools, fascinating to fashionable women, but a scholar first. Recently returned from Wittenberg--the seat of Protestant theology--Hamlet first thinks Horatio mad, then hastens off to "have words" with this thing, to see for himself, as any good Protestant should. The sailors say they have letters for you. Words comprise the writ Claudius signs for Hamlet's death. Words are what remain of sweet Ophelia's daffodils ("A document in madness: thoughts and remembrance fixed"). Proof, nourishment, choices, deeds. "Words, words, words," the prince exclaims at one point, equating every written thing with every other, rejecting the notion that words are deeds. Yet later Hamlet sees words as more than mere transparent devices and devises a plan to gauge his uncle's guilt by slipping a newly contrived speech into the traveling company's play, thinking, you may recall, that the truth would be revealed, made plain, spoken in a dumb show. Thinking the ineffable could be turned by the shadow of words.

Hamlet is a cunning parody of rhetoric, an existential soap opera: "some gentle entertainment . . . before you fall to play." The play turns as words turn, we figure against the figures of words. We are, perhaps, the play between the two. With these words in our hands, we stand charged at the proscenium arch, our normal lives suspended, our resemblance to Hamlet complete.