A Danish Museum’s Cuneiform Tablets Hint at Gilgamesh and Record a Beer Receipt
Cuneiform tablets sat in Danish museum storage for decades. Now researchers have read them all, and the collection holds a copy of a famous king list, an anti-witchcraft ritual and a very old receipt for beer.
A king list in Denmark
Researchers from the National Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen analyzed, identified and digitized all the ancient texts in the museum’s collection for the first time. One tablet carries a copy of a well-known list of kings, apparently a school text. It names kings from before the Flood and from the end of the third millennium BC. Other copies of the list mention the legendary king Gilgamesh. Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll says that makes it one of the few relics hinting Gilgamesh may have existed. “We had no idea we had a copy of that list here in Denmark,” he said.
Magic, beer and bureaucracy
A night-long ritual from the Syrian city of Hama has an exorcist burning small wax and clay figures while reciting fixed incantations. It aimed to protect the Assyrian king from misfortune, such as political instability. The beer receipt shows the everyday paperwork behind early writing. The collection also holds accounts, letters, medical treatments and religious and literary works. Some tablets are more than 4,500 years old, and cuneiform itself began about 5,200 years ago in Iraq and Syria.
Where the tablets came from
A Danish expedition studied Hama in the 1930s. Assyrian warriors destroyed the city in 720 BC and took the spoils to Assur, but they left some tablets behind, likely remains of a large temple library. Danish researchers excavated Tell Shemshara in northern Iraq in 1957, and Thorkild Jacobsen donated a significant part of the collection in 1939. The project, called Hidden Treasures, is led by Nicole Brisch of the University of Hamburg and Anne Haslund Hansen of the National Museum, with funding from the Carlsberg Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation and the Edubba Foundation.
Sources
Related Articles
