New technology allows specialists in ancient Mesopotamia to have access to texts written four centuries before Christ: cuneiform tablets still sealed in their clay envelopes could be scanned at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara.
It took the research team of Assyriologists three weeks of scanning to discover these texts that no one had read for millennia. These cuneiform characters were traced in lower Mesopotamia, this ancient region which covered modern-day Iraq and Syria, spilling over into Turkey and Iran.
This nail-shaped writing system was developed around 5,000 years ago: it was used to transcribe very different languages such as Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian or Hittite. Cuneiform writing, which archaeologists know how to decipher, spread throughout the ancient Near East, before disappearing in the first centuries of the Christian era.
The main medium on which cuneiform was engraved using a reed stylus were clay tablets, usually the size of the palm of a hand.
Nearly two centuries of archaeological excavations have yielded hundreds of thousands of texts, a gold mine for specialists, except for one detail… their clay envelopes! These were used to protect the tablet and its confidential nature: there is no question of breaking them, because they also have inestimable value (read box).
A portable scanner
A team from the University of Hamburg has developed a portable scanner called ENCI, an acronym which, in English, means “non-destructive extraction of cuneiform inscriptions”. This innovation weighing “only” 400 kilos means that you do not take the risk of damaging the precious tablets by moving them.
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Cécile Michel, research director at the CNRS, used this device to scan around sixty documents in Ankara: “Today, we have the possibility of analyzing the cuneiform tablets sealed on site for the first time,” says her in a interview given at the University of Hamburg. “Before ENCI, no wearable device existed.” Scanners performing this type of task usually weigh between two and seven tonnes.
Among the discoveries, a letter which excited Cécile Michel, research director at the CNRS: “I was finally able to read a very long tablet, of 60 lines, which was enclosed in its envelope. A fascinating text which traces the fact that there was a trial between several people and they are trying to unravel the matter to see if we can find a solution.”
The Assyriologist has not yet finished translating the missive, but she is delighted to have access to it: “In 1997, when I published the envelope, I had the three lines from the letter’s correspondents! There was only the name of the sender, the name of the recipient, and the seal of the sender and that’s it”, she recalls on the microphone of Tout un monde.
These writings, mainly contracts and personal letters, offer a unique insight into the daily life of Assyrians settled in Anatolia in the 19th century BCE. New perspectives for the study of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia are opening up to research.
In his excavations, Cécile Michel brought to light many letters from women. In a documentary that she made with a colleague from the CNRS, the voice is given back to one of them who writes to her brother and her husband, installed in a trading post in central Anatolia: Thus speaks Tarām-Kūbi, Assyrian correspondences.
Subject radio: Anne Andlauer
Web article: Stéphanie Jaquet
