Poppies are blooming. I enjoyed their bright red blooms as I walked through the Valley of the Cross on my way to the Assyriologists' conference at the Bible Lands Museum Monday and Tuesday. Blue skies, warm sun, tiny yellow flower clusters setting off the poppies in the grass -- perfect walking weather.
The conference was about a trove (technically called "an archive" for being found together, though their provenance is either murky or secret) of hand-sized, cuneiform-inscribed tablets from the Babylonian Exile, some of them dating to very near the time when Judeans were first forcibly resettled in what is now Iraq. Scholars have been studying them for only a few years. The conference was about the contents of some of them, inferences which might be drawn from them, and what we know about the culture around them. Most or all of them are business documents such as contracts and promissory notes.
The museum has a lovely, temporary exhibit featuring these tablets and putting them in their context.
Their language is Akkadian, difficult to read because each cuneiform symbol can have more than one sound and each sound can be represented by more than one symbol. We're used to that in English: though, through, enough, thought, sew, sow, threw, cuff, cough. But English has only 52 letters (upper and lower case) plus ten numerals and a few other symbols such as &, %, and $. Cuneiform has several hundred.
Professional scribes handled the writing and reading. They signed their names to the tablets and dated them. In fact the names and dates are particularly interesting, for men and women name themselves with their given names, patronymics, and sometimes family names. From this and the dates scholars have been able to put together several family trees and, from the contents, figure out what kind of farming was going on and who was earning a good living at it and how. I learned, for example, that entrepreneurs put together plowing teams of oxen to be rented out during the short planting season, and that the owner of the lead ox received least payment because it did not have to be as strong.
I was left with questions whose answers may already be known. For example, the Judeans probably already know Aramaic, and the neo-Babylonians probably had also started speaking Aramaic, Yet the contracts are drawn up in Akkadian, a language which had been in the area for millennia, by local scribes who had trouble transcribing the newcomers'foreign names. Was there a legal requirement that contracts be written in Akkadian?
Scholars are left with many other questions. this keeps them happily employed.
The exhibit is quite good. It displays many of the tablets. Explanations, translations, derived family trees, and more are in the catalogue. You can read the catalogue at the table opposite the entrance to the temporary exhibit. It might be worth buying a copy upstairs.
Copyright 2015 Jane S. Fox
Labels: flowers, museum
