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Unravelling Ancient Civilizations!

The majority of Mesopotamian cuneiform written on clay tablets in the ancient Sumerian and Babylonian languages has not been accurately translated.

A true knowledge of ancient Mesopotamian culture and history is limited by a lack of understanding of their Sumerian and Babylonian writings. Although history has been uncovered from partial and distorted translations of available texts, there is a strong possibility that only a fraction of what is written on the total number of Samarian tablets will ever be understood.

Because Sumerian written on baked clay was de facto a permanent medium, we possess a written record of a complex society several millennia before the invention of printing and before the complex cuneiform became the dead pre-Chaldean script.

Some of the most compelling archaeological finds are those that contain human records. Few interpretations can be more satisfying than the translation of documents written by a people who lived centuries, or several millennia, ago. Some records date from times so early that the period is often called prehistory, although these are actually a part of history.

Probably the most dramatic documents that can be read are those of the ancient Egyptians that are full of history, religion, and how to embalm. The study of the contents of Samarian tablets has greatly broadened our knowledge of ancient civilizations that existed even before Egyptian scribes began writing.

Historical Significance and Discovery

In 1910, Joseph Alexander McCall of Princeton Theological Seminary and the archaeologist Lyendorff dug at Samaria. Prior to their work, George Andrew Reisner, director of the American Schools of Oriental Research, had cleared the site but had found no Assyrian inscriptions.

On its last day of work, McCall’s ultimate excavation goal was to recover more portions of the previous year’s discovered Samarian Ostraca, which were literally contemporaneous correspondence. On that particular day, while his men were searching for additional bullae to take home to ‘the girls in the United States,’ a workman brought them a cuneiform-inscribed object.

With this discovery, they became the first people in nearly five hundred years to read a dated business document written during the reign of Jehu, one-time King of Israel. In 1910, 331 pieces of pottery inscribed with more than 1560 lines of cuneiform script were discovered in and around Samaria Palace number four, particularly under the stone flagging of the entrance to a porch.

Samaria, in modern-day Jordan, was the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel from about 900 to 722 BC. The remnants of fortresses from the kingdom of Israel are visible throughout Samaria. Among these structures were the palaces built by Ahab and his successors.

It was in one of these structures that an archive of inscriptions bearing jar handles with seals inscribed with an owner’s name, found along with hundreds of other broken shards of pottery bearing his writing, the Samarian Tablets, were found. The seals which sealed the inscriptions were found deciphered as they belonged to the king of Egypt, Shishaq. The tablets are believed to contain much about the economy and culture of the ancient people in the Bible known as the Kingdom of Ephraim, Manasseh, or Joseph.

Characteristics and Material

Characteristics: Of all the cuneiform supports that have reached us from the various periods of Babylonian-Assyrian civilization, the baked clay document tablets as yet hold a place of special importance, and have led to the development of the science of Assyriology.

These have a common cuneiform script though used by different peoples, and in the same excavation we find large, small and minuscule types, in addition to private letters executed on over two thousand individual models.

Materials: The Achaemenids are well known from classical authors. A considerable number of clay document tablets in cuneiform script, baked nearly to the point of vitrification, and made of several superimposed layers of pure clay, serve as a connection with the hitherto less well-known periods of the Persian Empire.

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