Oddities, rarities, unusual things we want, or have, combined with the human desire to show off what we possess...this is the heart of the wunderkammer...or cabinet of curiosities. Originally only for the wealthy and elite, these "cabinets" might be affairs cobbled together by a cabinetmaker, or, should one be fabulously rich, they could take up a whole room, perhaps a whole wing of the estate. The wunderkammer was most popular in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries, when science had not yet drawn a line between the mystical and reality. Horns on a whale were thought to be creatures of fantasy come to life, objects brought back from across the seven seas were priceless proof of lands that existed only in legend.
Pages of Clay - Ancient Cuneiform Tablets
Recorded history is an ephemeral concept tied to paper,
parchment, stone, copper, lead and…clay.
In the Ancient World, paper was not used to record Man’s written
record. Libraries existed with hundreds
if not thousands of clay tablets, the writing pressed into the soft wet surface
with a s and then fired in a kiln to harden the tablet. Some have survived into today, but many
thousands have been lost…broken, discarded, used as building material…
What we have is merely a smattering, an incomplete record of
an entire civilization, a written record of their culture, their possessions,
their law, and their daily life…all pressed into the fragility of baked clay. We are looking at documents written all
across the ancient Middle East from 4000 to 5000 years ago…and still very
readable. Cuneiform was the name coined
in the last year of the 17th-century (1700) by British Orientalist Thomas Hyde,
as he gazed upon this strange writing.
He was a noted expert on languages from the East, and was court
interpreter for Eastern languages under three kings, Charles II, James II, and
William III.
It started with Napoleon…
The key to deciphering cuneiform was a bit more complex. The type was used across a wide variety of ancient middle east cultures, such as the Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Elamites, and ancient Persians. Many differing languages using this type of written language. Add into this the use of pictograms as well, à la Ancient Egyptian, and you have a much more difficult task. The Behistun Inscription was domino that led to the eventual breakdown of the language into something we could translate. It sits 330 feet up the side of a cliff in Western Iran (Persia) and is huge in scale…the carving itself being 49 feet wide and 82 feet long. It was not a secret and was well known in the ancient World, but the cuneiform itself, and the ability to read it was lost over in 3500 years since its creation. As time passed, even the King under whom it was created was misinterpreted. The relief came into being under Darius I, but was attributed to Khosrau II, who reigned a thousand years after. Time eventually wipes the reality of all memory, replaced with legend and frequently misleading tales…along with the loss of how to read what were once common tongues…like cuneiform. However, what is forgotten can eventually be reclaimed, and like the Rosetta Stone, the Behistun Relief had three different cuneiform scripts, or languages so to speak. Persian, Elamite and Babylonian cuneiform. Once one version is figured out, you can decipher the others. A number of years before the rediscovery of the Rosetta Stele, the Behistun Inscription, or relief, was visited and drawn by Carston Niebuhr. That 1768 encounter would probably have been lost to the history of how this ancient language was again rediscovered had it not been published by Niebuhr in a book on his journey in 1778. Using the book’s engraving, one Georg Friedrich Grotefend began the task of trying to decipher the ancient text. By 1802 he had discovered that the Persian cuneiform was alphabetical and the words were separated by slash symbol and had also deciphered 10 of the 37 “letters”.
Many hands and minds went to work on cuneiform over the
course of the next century, but Sir Henry Rawlinson was the driving force that
eventually made the Persian portion of the relief readable in its
entirely. From 1835 on, he set to work,
and with the assistance of many, many others, the Persian cuneiform language
was deciphered by the mid-1840s. From
there, both Elamite and Babylonian cuneiform could be translated, as well as
Assyrian, Sumerian, etc.
Today, we can read with some certainty ancient versions of
stories such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, differing versions of Noah and the
Flood, including a much different description of Noah’s Ark than the one in the
Bible, as well as household inventories of wares and food, giving us a greater
understanding of ancient material culture.
All from little brown slabs of clay…
