Revealing Enveloped Cuneiform Tablets at the Louvre with High-Resolution Portable CT (ENCI)

By the mid-third millennium BCE, people wrote legal documents and sent each other many letters, telling of kings and their reigns, and the everyday and private lives of families. To protect the clay tablets from damage and ensure confidentiality, tablets were encased in clay envelopes. These envelopes featured the names of the sender, the seal imprint using Mesopotamian cylinder seals, and the name(s) of the addressee(s).

To reveal the cuneiform text inside these envelopes and visualize the internal structure of the clay tablets, a High-Resolution Portable Computed Tomography (ENCI) scanner and visualization software (Olbrich et al. 2024) was developed and built as part of the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artifacts” (UWA) at the University of Hamburg in collaboration with DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron). This scanner recently had its first mission at the Louvre Museum in Paris. As a result, high-resolution tomographic data of twelve contracts and administrative texts from the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE were recorded.

One of these objects is the enveloped cuneiform tablet, designated AO 8295 (Michel et al. 2024), a fascinating artefact from the Old Assyrian period (circa 1950-1850 BCE), originating from Kanesh (modern-day Kültepe) in Cappadocia. The tablet measures 6.1 cm in height, 5.9 cm in width, and 2.1 cm in thickness, and features cuneiform writing in the Cappadocian language. The text is a debt contract, providing valuable insights into the economic practices of the time. Discovered in Cappadocia, this ancient artefact is currently housed in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France.

Figure 1: Enveloped clay tablets, Old Assyrian, Height: 6.1cm; Width: 5.9cm, Thickness: 2.1 cm, Louvre Museum. Collection number AO 8295

Figure 2: (Left) Tomographic slice through the 3D reconstruction and detail of the cuneiform and manufacturing and (Right) Visualization of the enveloped cuneiform table and the extracted tablet inside

References

Michel, C., Schroer, C., Olbrich, S., Ehteram, S. and Beckert, A. (2024) ‘AO 8295 (X-Ray Tomography 3D data of an Enveloped Clay Tablet, Louvre Museum, Paris)’, <https://doi.org/10.25592/uhhfdm.14776>.
Olbrich, S. and Beckert, A. (2024), ‘EXAVIS42 – Efficient methods for creation, feature extraction, and interactive visualization of isosurfaces of 3D volume data’, <https://doi.org/10.25592/uhhfdm.14778>.