The Clockwork Toymaker and Other Fables

The Quest

One of the few surviving texts rescued from the Imperial Library of Constantinople, before it was burned to the ground by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, makes mention of a great and ancient quest, set to his people by Sumerian King Jushur of the First Dynasty of Kish.  The mention is brief, stating only that it was believed to be a quest that would lead to great knowledge and riches, both mortal and divine.  

There is a second mention, rather oblique, etched into a fragment of Babylonian clay, a marginal note encoded in a mathematical formula, which indicates that the quest is somehow tied to the ascendance of Jupiter.  It has been speculated, by more modern scholars, that this link implies a lost discovery, a quest of the mind, rather than something of a more physical nature,  but the idea is disputed.  There is evidence to the contrary, some say, in the writings of the halakhic historian Yehudai Kayyara, who dismisses the quest as a dalliance and distraction from more learned pursuits.  

This critique is itself disputed, however, and it is far from clear if the quest to which Yehudai Kayyara is referring is, in fact, the one attributed to King Jushur and mentioned in the recovered Constantinople text, or some other quest entirely.  

King Jushur's priority as the originator of the quest has also been brought into question in recent years.  Bertrand Labot's prescient treatise of 1784, "On the conservation of antiquity and truthful portrayal of historical reality", makes a laboured point that while the verisimilitude of the Constantinople document is by no means in question, it is itself at best a third- or fourth-hand manuscript, an account of an orally transmitted legend, and most definitively short on detail or specifics.  

This harsh commentary has by no means deterred the modern investigator.  Indeed, in 1937, when the original Constantinople text was stolen from the archival room at the British Museum, an article in The Times of London, listed no less than fifteen (15) independent groups engaged in uncovering facts.  

It was during this period that the connection to the Babylonian clay tablet was made, and it has only been with the advent of x-ray scanning and contemporary digital reconstruction, that real progress has been made on this mystery.  

The last few years have seen a renewed enthusiasm for decoding the riddle and there is considerable hope that we may at last be close to determining both who set the quest and what it was set to find.