For more than a century, the National Museum has preserved a remarkable collection of clay tablets from some of the earliest civilizations of the Middle East. Many of these artifacts are more than 4,000 years old and are written in long-lost languages. For decades, they remained largely intact, but researchers have now deciphered them, uncovering texts ranging from magical rituals to royal records and everyday administrative notes.
Over the last century, the National Museum has assembled an important collection of these tablets. However, until recently they had not been studied in depth. Researchers from the museum and the University of Copenhagen have completed the first comprehensive effort to analyse, identify and digitize the entire collection as part of the ‘Hidden Treasures: The Cuneiform Collection of the National Museum’ project.
Rare texts from ancient Hama
As the team examined the tablets in detail, they found a wide range of contents, including letters, accounting records, medical instructions, and magical texts.
A particularly important group comes from the Syrian city of Hama, first explored by a Danish expedition in the 1930s. In 720 BC. C., Assyrian forces destroyed the city and took many of its valuables to its capital, Assur, located in modern-day Iraq. Some tablets remained among the ruins and eventually became part of the National Museum’s collection.
“The texts in the collection that come from Hama are almost 3,000 years old and deal with medical treatments and magical incantations. They were left in the remains of what we believe must have been a large temple library. All the other texts disappeared,” explains Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll, who has been part of the Hidden Treasures project.
According to Arbøll, these Hama texts are especially rare because very few similar examples have been found in that region and time period. One tablet stood out in particular.
“It turned out that one of the clay tablets contained an anti-witchcraft ritual, which was of enormous importance to royal authority in Assyria because it had the remarkable ability to ward off misfortunes, such as political instability, that could befall a king,” says Troels Pank Arbøll.
This ritual lasted an entire night and involved burning small figures made of wax and clay while an exorcist recited specific incantations. Because such rituals were closely tied to the Assyrian center of power, researchers were surprised to find this text so far from the central regions of the empire. Hama was located on the outskirts of these cultural centers.
Kings, legends and historical records
Among the discoveries is a copy of a well-known list of reigns that records both mythical and historical rulers. This document is important because it traces the kings back to a time before Noah and the Flood.
The version found in the National Museum appears to have been used for teaching and includes rulers from the late third millennium BC. Other versions of this list also mention the legendary King Gilgamesh, known from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
“That makes this regnal list one of the few relics we have that suggest that Gilgamesh actually existed. We had no idea we had a copy of that list here in Denmark. It’s pretty spectacular,” says Troels Pank Arbøll.
Letters, administration and daily life
Another set of tablets comes from excavations at Tell Shemshara in 1957, located in what is now northern Iraq. These texts include correspondence between a local leader and an Assyrian king from around 1800 BC. C., along with administrative records.
These documents highlight how essential writing was for the management of primitive societies. Many tablets contain practical information, including inventories, personnel lists and financial accounts.
“Many of the cuneiform tablets we have today testify to a highly developed bureaucracy. It was necessary to keep track of the advanced societies that were being built and we have found a large number of cuneiform tablets containing practical information, such as accounts and lists of assets and personnel. It is therefore not surprising that one of the tablets in the National Museum’s collection contains something as common as a very old beer receipt,” concludes Troels Pank Arbøll.
Digitizing ancient knowledge
The project ‘Hidden Treasures: The Cuneiform Collection of the National Museum’ is led by Nicole Brisch (University of Hamburg) and Anne Haslund Hansen (National Museum). The work is supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation and the Edubba Foundation.