Ancient Babylonian City Found

Iraqi archaeologists have announced that they have discovered the remains of an ancient Babylonian city located 180 kilometers south of Baghdad. According to archeologists, the site is more than 20,000 square meters in area. Some of the remains discovered at the site include administrative quarters, temples, and other buildings which archaeologists describe as of “magnificent and splendid design.”

Archaeologists have been unable to identify the name of the ancient Babylonian city, but they believe that it belonged to the Late Babylonian Period, about 1000 BC. Archaeologists also discovered several cuneiform tablets. However, they were unable to read the tablets because those archaeologists who could read cuneiform have left Iraq.

To read the news release, click here.

It is a shame that the remains of this ancient Babylonian city cannot be studied by experts. Hopefully, some Western scholars will be invited to visit the site and analyze the findings, specially the cuneiform tablets, and make the results available for scholarly research.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Archaeology, Babylon, Cuneiform

A 4,000-year-old Cuneiform Tablet for Sale on EBay

The International Herald Tribune is reporting that a 4,000-year-old clay tablet that was smuggled out of Iraq illegally was offered for sale on eBay for $360. The tablet was dated to around 2000 B.C.

The tablet was written in the wedge-shaped cuneiform script. “Cuneiform tablets were used throughout the Middle East and ancient Persia during the last three millennia B.C. to record everything from great deeds of leaders to routine correspondence and bookkeeping.”

A German archaeologist spotted the tablet and recognized its wedge-shaped cuneiform script and alerted German authorities who then alerted Swiss authorities. The auction was stopped a few minutes before the tablet was sold.

When the museum in Baghdad was looted after the war, many ancient artefacts were smuggled out of Iraq. We just hope that some day in the near future these precious treasures of the past will be recovered and returned to its original home.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Cuneiform, Cuneiform Tablets

The Cuneiform Digital Library

If you are not familiar with the Cuneiform Digital Library, you should visit the home page of this wonderful project. The Cuneiform Digital Library seeks to make available to the public ancient cuneiform documents dated from the final third of the 4th and of the entire 3rd millennium BC. The texts are written in Sumerian, in early Akkadian, and in other languages, some of them, still undeciphered.

The Cuneiform Digital Library home page provides a good description of the project:

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now more than 200,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI.

Visit the Cuneiform Digital Library by clicking here.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Archaeology, Cuneiform, Sumerians