X-Rays for Ancient Clay

A Mesopotamian Cuneiform Tablet at the Beamline

Szilvia Jáka-Sövegjártó

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This small administrative tablet from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Umma dates to the reign of the Ur III dynasty (2112–2004 BCE), and records a disbursement of flour. The tablet measures 4.1 × 4.0 × 1.5 cm and is made of clay. Having been produced, the written artefact was probably dried in the sun.

Written in a concise manner, the contents of the tablet are of a practical nature, the obverse containing the information on the transaction and the reverse containing the dating formula. In Mesopotamia, dating occurred with the year names of the rulers determined in each year on the basis of an important event. However, very prominent events could be used for several years, as is the case here. The year name reads “the year after the Amurru wall was built”, which is a short version of the year name related to the 5th regnal year of King Šu-Suen (c. 2033 BCE).

The objects are being examined at DESY at Beamline P02.1. Above, the position of a tablet is being checked before irradiation.

What is also interesting is that the tablet has traces of the process of authentication by way of a cylinder seal. The sealing belongs to Ayakalla, the governor of Umma who functioned as the guarantor of the transaction. Cylinder seals functioned like a signature in ancient Mesopotamia. The impression of both the image and the text that was once engraved in the seal is well preserved, and can still be seen on the tablet.

The city of Umma was in southern Mesopotamia, and it became an important provincial centre during the Ur III period. Approximately 30,000 administrative documents have been unearthed on the archaeological site, and these have shed light on the history of the region. Umma tablets come not only from excavations, however, but also from the antiquarian trade from the 1900s onwards. Extensive looting in the early 2000s also compromised further excavations on the archaeological site.

By assigning the material profiles of cuneiform tablets to specific places of origin, the study will lay the foundation for a database that will be used in the future to determine the provenance of tablets of unknown origin.

Among other cuneiform originals housed in the collection of the Hamburg State and University Library, this manuscript is part of a pilot study that the Clusters is carrying out in cooperation with DESY (German Electron Synchrotron). We intend to analyse as part of a non-invasive powder diffraction study the material composition of the clay cuneiform tablets. We hope by doing so to establish patterns according to various provenances, and thus to build a useful database for provenance studies. This study is also helpful on a smaller scale when it comes to answering questions about the materiality of cuneiform tablets, and how they were produced.