Reading the Zip Codes of 3,500-Year-Old Letters

American Friends of Tel Aviv University ^ | Thursday, August 5, 2010 | unattributed

[SunkenCiv]

...by adapting an off-the-shelf portable x-ray lab tool that analyzes the composition of chemicals, Prof. Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations can reveal hidden information about a tablet's composition without damaging the precious ancient find itself. These x-rays reveal the soil and clay composition of a tablet or artefact, to help determine its precise origin. But Prof. Goren's process, based on x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry, can go much further. Over the years, he has collected extensive data through physical "destructive" sampling of artefacts. By comparing this data to readouts produced by the XRF device, he's built a table of results so that he can now scan a tablet -- touching the surface of it gently with the machine -- and immediately assess its clay type and the geographical origin of its minerals. The tool, he says, can also be applied to coins, ancient plasters, and glass, and can be used on site or in a lab... as he tries to understand where ancient tablets and pots are made, based on the crystals and minerals found in the materials of these artefacts.

[SunkenCiv]

goren ossuary site:bib-arch.org

Google

[SunkenCiv]

It's another one of *those* topics. :')

Using his device, Prof. Goren was able to determine that the letter is made from raw material typical to the Terra Rossa soils of the Central Hill Country around Jerusalem. This determination helped to confirm both the origin of the letter and possibly its sender. "We believe this is a local product written by Jerusalem scribes, made of locally available soil. Found close to an acropolis, it is also likely that the letter fragment does in fact come from a king of Jerusalem," the researchers reported, adding that it may well be an archival copy of a letter from King Abdi-Heba, a Jesubite king in Jerusalem, to the Pharaoh in nearby Egypt.

Uh-uh.

• When the House of Akhnaton Died Out

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[bunkerhill7]

Reading the Zip Codes of 3,500-Year-Old Letters from Helen Thomas to Moses

[JimSEA]

Whatever his performance in the “James Ossary” case, the composition of the clay should nail down its origin pretty well and this technique seems to do that in a nondestructive manner. The source of 99.9% pure gold can be determined by the .1% impurities.

[SunkenCiv]

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[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Ironically, some parts of Iraq have enormous numbers of mud tablets, and Saddam made quite a bit of money selling thousands of them.

They were the mail of the day, and caravans made a lot of money by transporting hundreds of them from city to city, over many centuries. And like most mail, once read, they were discarded. Most of it was business mail, news and personal correspondence.

The funny part is in the content of some of these letters. One expert compiled a list of some cuneiform writings that would not be out of place today.

For example, one was from a student asking his parents for money, because his peers wore better clothes and ate better food than he could afford, and it was embarrassing.

Another was a creditor sent “third warning” to a debtor who had skipped town, warning him that he had better pay up, or the next letter would be to the authorities of his new town.

By far the funniest was by a young woman who was complaining to her mother that, “Men are no good. They only want one thing, and at the mere mention of marriage they take off.”

[ForGod'sSake]

Cool. Gotta wonder if the same process would work on odinga to determine his “geographical origins”. At times I question if he is of this world at all.

[SunkenCiv]

It should come in handy (as the article states) to figure out provenance for the much more numerous clay items like pots and jars. So much of the clay shards winds up in the rubbish tips because there’s no identifying features on it — now there may be. This will work out as a proxy to determine, for example, the departure point of ancient shipwrecks, and the origin of the rarities such as the clay tablets found in the archive at Hattusas, the Phaistos Disk on Crete (interesting because the characters on it were made with dies, rather than hand cut, implying that it was manufactured; at least one modern scholar thinks the PD is a fake), and the 26,000 year old ceramics of Dolni Vestonice.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks y. The tablet archives which were preserved were baked by fire when the sites were burned by invading armies (or maybe someone fell asleep and the hearth got out of control, but I doubt that). The Sumerian city of Kish was burned by a rival town and lucky us, because that was one of (if not the) largest archives of cuneiform ever found. Hattusas was burned, preserving its archive. One of the Amarna tablets evidently alludes to the destruction of Hattusas, the queen of H writing that the pharaoh should take a flying leap regarding his request for gifts.

[JimSEA]

So much of the media for writing can not survive time. Only in the desert would papyrus survive. Luckily the Chinese left cast bronze and turtle shells with records of their written language. How many civilizations wrote on wooden slats or banana leaves or some such in a humid climate? It would explain the "sudden" appearance of writing in many locales.

[SunkenCiv]

I wholeheartedly agree, even those civs which have left inscriptions and whatnot in durable media probably had most of their archives and libraries and ancient versions of the Post-It™ vanish, taking the bulk of what might have been learned into oblivion. Tamil books were written on palm leaves, and the oldest surviving versions of those are about 1000 years old. Elizabethan England used parchment strips (about 1 x 3 feet were the leaves) bound as books, and thousands of those survive -- but they have been carefully preserved. And that is only from four hundred years ago. No doubt many more of the originals went in the Fire of London. From quite near our own time, I'm sure we've all gone to estate sales and garage sales and have seen what were the family portraits and other family pictures about to enter oblivion, and possibly to end up as vintage greeting cards.

[SunkenCiv]