By Adiel Kaplan
The only things allowed in the Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts viewing room are a laptop, paper, camera and pencil. No pens. Using a gold key on a large hoop, I stowed my other belongings in locker 007 and waited for librarian Jane Siegel to bring out a collection of ancient cuneiform tablets.
Three days before, I discovered that Columbia has one of the largest, most varied collections of cuneiform tablets in North America. The more than 600-item collection had been there for over 120 years and is rarely visited. I needed to see them.
Columbia’s collection of tablets offered the rare opportunity to hold primary sources from an ancient civilization at the center of the modern dispute over who owns history: the subject of my research. I couldn’t read cuneiform, but I hoped to gain some insight into the Babylonian Early Dynastic Period in the 3rd century BCE – a time from which some of the oldest written records of human civilization and the main character of my story, Entemena of Lagash, came from – and how, in 2018, Columbia possessed such an extraordinary collection.
Siegel arrived with four cardboard boxes on a metal cart. By email she had asked me to select a few tablets from the collection to view, leading to a surprisingly complex search. Ancient cuneiform tablets, it turns out, aren’t catalogued particularly well. Searching through Columbia’s library database, I found several tablet catalogues with different number systems. Only the oldest had descriptions of what was written on the tablets, and the numbers in that one can’t be used to make requests. So I had to go through several stepping stones, matching numbers from one catalogue to a key in the next version, which was usually written several decades later by a scholar with different interests, before getting to the current library call system.
There was only one item in the collection from the time period I was most interested in – 2,500 to 2,340 BCE – so I selected others from the nearest years I could find. But there were over 300 tablets from the next era. Working somewhat blindly, I made choices based on brief content descriptions, skipping a list of utensils in favor of an account of grain, the names of laborers and several income lists – these lists, themselves, all samples from some of the earliest human archives – then hoped for the best.
The majority of Columbia’s tablets, more than 450, were donated in 1896 by Richard Gottheil, a professor of Semitic languages, who wished for them to be used as teaching tools. Gottheil purchased them the previous year from Libyan antiquities dealer Daniel Z. Noorian, who came to the U.S. and to the antiquities trade after working as a translator on several American archaeological expeditions in Iraq in the 1880s and 90s. Noorian discovered that selling ancient cuneiform artifacts was a far more lucrative business than interpreting, and relocated to New York. The Columbia collection was one of his largest sales, shortly after his arrival.
Siegel informed me that requests come in once every year or two to pull tablets out of the archive, and that I was likely the first to view the objects I selected in decades. They weren’t from a popular era.
The one piece from my era of interest wasn’t actually a tablet. Siegel explained that it was a ceremonial nail. Experts believe such nails served as cornerstones and were struck into the foundation of mud-brick buildings and temples to dedicate them as divine property.
She gave me brief instructions on how to handle the artifacts – hold them over the box so if you drop them they don’t fall far; don’t pick anything up that looks like it’s falling apart; and no, you don’t need gloves, the cotton fibers just get caught on the objects – then led me toward the glass-enclosed viewing room.
“That’s it?” I asked. These would be the oldest things I’d ever touched by a good 4,000 years and I was shocked there were no further rules, no worries about disintegration. I could feel the oils on the hand that gripped my pencil. “But they’re so old.”
Siegel laughed. “Older than your grandmother, that’s what I always say.” She then left my boxes and I at a table next to a gloveless man examining large leafs of parchment.
I opened the first box. The ceremonial nail was a foot long and heavy, made of solid clay baked 4,400 years ago. The top third was covered in tiny, intricate lines, separated into rows and columns, that made no sense to me, but were so precise and organized they clearly once had to someone. I tried to picture King Entemena, the last great ruler of Lagash, who I was on a quest to learn more about, dedicating a temple with this nail in 2,400 BCE. The time frame was right – the catalogue entry said the writing mentioned his reign – but I had no way of knowing who had touched this particular nail before me. Likely Entemena observed many such ceremonies with nails that are still buried in the sands of the Iraqi desert.
This nail was in remarkably good condition for something so much older than my grandmother. There was a crack around the middle and a flake missing from the top, but the lines of writing were clear and the shape recognizable. Nails hadn’t changed much in four millennia.
After a few minutes transfixed with this nail from six centuries before Hammurabi, I moved down my list. I did not have much time, it was 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon.
What I hadn’t been able to tell when I made my request was the size of what I selected. One of the newer tablets – from 2,100 BCE – took two hands for me to lift. Another fit comfortably in my palm, barely weighing anything.
Working my way carefully through the collection, I could feel bits of clay or dirt collect on my hands. A few tiny flakes of clay landed on my notes. I stared at them; these remnants of history would leave the archive with me.
The heavy tablet was the most impressive. The width of a sheet of paper, it had a flat bottom and round top, with writing over the curved edges. It was maybe two inches thick and was missing the top left corner. There were six neat columns of etched lines and triangles in tiny, tidy rows. My catalogue said it was an account of grain.
“Five minutes till closing,” the viewing room attendant called out.
I began quickly opening my remaining boxes, snapping photos of the proper tablets and scrawling brief notes. My pencil went dull. Searching through boxes which held sometimes twenty tablets, I saw many sizes and shapes, with colors ranging from almost-white to deep brown. The man with the parchment left. So did the few others in the room.
“We are now closed,” the attendant said, as I shut the last box.
I wheeled the cart over and thanked her. Then I walked back into 2018, afraid to wash the 4,400-year-old clay off my hands.