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 untouched, but researchers have now deciphered them, and uncovered texts ranging from magical rituals to royal records and everyday administrative notes.
About 5,200 years ago, people in what is now Iraq and Syria began pressing symbols into clay to record information. This early writing system, known as cuneiform, helped support the rise of complex cities and organized governments by allowing people to track objects, people, and decisions.
Over the last century, the National Museum has amassed an important collection of these tablets. However, they were not fully studied until recently. Researchers from the Museum and the University of Copenhagen have now completed the first comprehensive effort to analyse, identify and digitize the entire collection as part of the project ‘Hidden Treasures: The National Museum’s Cuneiform Collection’.
Rare texts from ancient Hama
As the team examined the tablets in detail, they found a wide range of material, including letters, accounting records, medical instructions, and magical texts.
A particularly important group comes from the Syrian city of Hama, which was first discovered by a Danish expedition in the 1930s. In 720 BC, Assyrian armies destroyed the city and took many of its valuables to their capital, Assur, located in modern-day Iraq. Some tablets were left in the ruins and eventually became part of the National Museum’s collection.
“The texts in the collection that came out of Hama are about 3,000 years old and relate to medical treatments and magical spells. They were left behind in what we believe would have been a large temple library. All the other texts were gone,” explains Troels Pank Arbol, an Assyriologist who is part of the Hidden Treasures project.
According to Arbol, these Hama texts are particularly rare because very few similar examples have been found from that region and time period. One bullet was particularly notable.
“One of the clay tablets contained a so-called anti-witchcraft ritual, which was of great importance to royal authority in Assyria because it had the remarkable ability to ward off bad luck – such as political instability – that might befall a king,” says Troels Pank Arbol.
This ritual lasted all night and involved burning small figures made of wax and clay while an exorcist recited specific mantras. Because such rituals were closely linked to the Assyrian center of power, researchers were surprised to find this text so far from the core areas of the empire. Hama is located on the outskirts of these cultural centres.
Kings, Legends, and Historical Records
Among the discoveries is a copy of a famous ruler list which records both mythological and historical rulers. This document is important because it traces Noah and the kings to the time before the flood.
The version found in the National Museum appears to have been used for teaching and includes rulers from the 3rd millennium BC. Other versions of this list also mention the famous king Gilgamesh, known from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Trolls Punk Arbol says, “It makes this royal list one of the few remains we have that suggests Gilgamesh actually existed. We had no idea we had a copy of that list in Denmark. It’s pretty cool.”
Letters, administration and everyday life
Another set of tablets was recovered in 1957 from excavations at Tell Shemshara, now located in northern Iraq. These texts include administrative records as well as correspondence between a local leader and an Assyrian king from around 1800 BC.
Such documents highlight how essential writing was to the management of early societies. Many tablets contain practical information, including inventory, personnel lists, and financial accounts.
Trolls Punk Arbol concluded, “Many of the cuneiform tablets we have today testify to a highly developed bureaucracy. There was a need to build advanced societies, and we have found a large number of cuneiform tablets that contain practical information, such as accounts and lists of goods and personnel. So it is not surprising that one of the tablets in the National Museum’s collection includes something as ordinary as a very old receipt for beer.”
Digitization of ancient knowledge
The ‘Hidden Treasures: The Cuneiform Collection of the National Museum’ project is led by Nicole Brisk (University of Hamburg) and Anne Haslund Hansen (National Museum). This work is supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation and the Edubba Foundation.