Clay cuneiform tablet; instructions for dyeing wool; recipes are given to produce blue and purple wools. Credit FAE, Wikimedia Commons
Posted on 05/22/2012 1:44:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
They were stored in the basement of the Customs House at 6 World Trade Center... when the building was destroyed by the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The ancient, 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets, 302 in all, were looted from a site in southern Iraq sometime before the attacks. They had been confiscated by U.S. customs while they were in the process of being smuggled into Newark, N.J. and then placed temporarily in the basement of the Trade Center...
Scholars now know that the tablets resided in an archive near the city of Nippur, the religious capital of Sumeria, and 145 of them constitute records of a relatively high-ranking agricultural official named 'Aradmu', a fact that came to light when Benjamin Studevent-Hickman, a lecturer on Assyriology in Harvard's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, dedicated months translating the cuneiform characters on the tablets.
What he discovered was a detailed account of routine operations of an agrarian society, including receipts for agricultural items such as donkeys and oxen and grain loans. At least some of the loans had an interest rate of a whopping 33 percent, apparently a typical standard rate for the time in Mesopotamia.
Working against the clock, Studevent-Hickman was faced with translating the 145 Aradmu tablets before they, by agreement, had to be repatriated to Iraq in 2010. Although the job was not completed before they left, he continues to work with photographs of the tablets, and hopes to develop a monogram of the collection...
Studevent-Hickman is also researching the details about the investigation that led to the confiscation of the collection, and is studying satellite images up through the year 2001 of the Nippur area to identify signs of looting, indicating where the tablets may have initially been unearthed.
(Excerpt) Read more at popular-archaeology.com ...
Clay cuneiform tablet; instructions for dyeing wool; recipes are given to produce blue and purple wools. Credit FAE, Wikimedia Commons
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Tie dye Grateful Dead heads manual.
One of the tablets was translated and read: OBAMAUMAU - YOU ARE TOAST.
I think I can just make out “Akkadians suck.”
Thanks for an interesting post. It would be great to have the knowledge this scholar Studevent-Hickman has and be able to actually hold read and translate tablets like these.
Another tablet from Nippur documents the Sumerian flood story. Dating from the 17th century BC. Noah. Something like 40,000 tablets have been found there.
Fascinating.
“EAT AT MOE’S” Saturday nite special Roast Camel Hump
“EAT AT MOE’S” Saturday nite special Roasted Camel Hump
Now THAT would be cool to learn!!
Those colors were produced for royalty. Lydia (from the Bible): was from a city called Thyatira; she was a seller of purple goods. She was a worshipper of God. A good friend of Paul. She also helped finance the early church because she was a widow and a good businesswoman.
I meant to say that that tablet is just beautiful! It looks like carved ivory.
'Rich people are evil.'
'Global warming caused by the invention of fire'
'He cheated tens out of their money in Dinosaur Egg Research'
'For a good time send smoke signal to...'
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