Baking in the details: Semitic Museum project conserves thousands of ancient clay tablets(Again, via Explorator.)
January 6, 2012 By Alvin Powell (physorg.com)
In the basement of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, Alex Douglas looked at the pieces of baked clay in front of him, teasing out how they fit together into a small tablet, thousands of years old and marked with ancient cuneiform writing.
Finding a void in the reassembled tablet without a piece to fit into it, Douglas referred to a computer screen, where a photograph of the intact tablet was displayed.
“I want to make sure that wasn’t me getting the mend wrong,” Douglas said. “When I first took it out, there were a lot of pieces. I wasn’t sure where they all went.”
Douglas, a graduate student in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is part of a long-running project at the Semitic Museum to conserve its unusual collection of thousands of clay tablet.
The project seems humble enough. A furnace on a table behind Douglas bakes a handful of the small tablets, just inches on a side. That is followed by two baths in de-ionized water, drying, and, for tablets whose internal moisture causes them to break in the process, reassembly.
“They’re our responsibility, essentially forever,” said Adam Aja, the assistant curator at the museum and overseer of the project. “This is the best treatment you can do. They’ll be as stable as any ceramic pot and can be handled.”
Preparing tablets that are already thousands of years old to survive “forever” may warrant such a long-running project. The Semitic Museum has been baking tablets for 10 years and has another five or so to go, Aja said. The tablets themselves are part of an enormous collection of 5,000 clay tablets, some of them purchased, but most excavated in the 1920s and 1930s by a Harvard-led dig in the ancient city of Nuzi, near Kirkuk in present-day Iraq.
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The tablets represent a unique record of the area 3,500 years ago, according to Anne Lohnert, a postdoctoral fellow in the Mahindra Humanities Center who works two days a week translating tablets. Rather than a grand telling of history, most of the tablets are records of everyday life, sales receipts, real estate transactions, and adoption records.
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The Nuzi tablet are best known for their over-use in the mid-twentieth century for exciting-sounding parallels to the biblical patriarchal narratives, which parallels consistently evaporated when examined critically. But now that is out of the way and the truly exciting task remains of studying them to learn about the culture and life of people, especially regular people, in this ancient Hurrian city.
When I was a doctoral student in the Harvard NELC program in the 1980s, some of us tried to persuade William Moran to work with us on some of the unpublished Nuzi tablets. But the timing wasn't right and the proper technology was not yet in place. I'm glad to hear that the tablets are now getting the attention they deserve.