Reading Enclosed Cuneiform Tablets

Cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia in the Middle East are the oldest written artefacts in the world. To protect the information written on them, in 3,000 BCE people began enclosing them in envelopes made of clay. Some of these were never opened, for example, if they never arrived at their intended destination, with the result that today, many museums around the world have sealed cuneiform tablets in their archives.

Researchers in the Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts (UWA) and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) have developed the world’s first mobile computer tomography device that can read these sealed tablets. ENCI (Extracting Non-destructively Cuneiform Inscriptions) opens up a wealth of previously inaccessible sources for the study of antiquity.     

In February 2024, a team of UWA and DESY researchers used ENCI to examine cuneiform tables from the Louvre in Paris. The museum has around 12,000 tablets, making it one of the most important collections in the world. For this field trip, a dozen tablets were selected for examination. Most of these come from southern Iraq. 

In September 2024, ENCI was employed to analyse cuneiform tablets at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara. In addition to contracts, legal documents, and religious texts, the collection also includes numerous private letters, making it an invaluable source of knowledge about the economic, political, and social conditions in ancient Mesopotamia.