A man who had purchased an ancient cuneiform tablet for $120 from a private collector in Florida recently approached Robert Englund to ask if the UCLA professor of Near Eastern languages and cultures could help him to better understand the inscription, which depicted two sheep that had been brought into a temple household for slaughter.
That this relic of the earliest known written medium — in this case, some two millennia before the birth of Christ — was bought over the Internet on eBay may strike the casual observer as amusing, if not ironic. But Englund is more taken by the visceral response he noted in the tablet’s new owner.
“To see an attachment between that person and this thing he was holding that was written by some human 4,000 years ago … that’s somehow touching for me,” says Englund, a leading scholar of these clay artifacts of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. “I can’t quite remember what that first experience was like, how foreign it must seem to most people who don’t spend as much time with cuneiform as I do.”
Englund indeed spends a vast amount of time surrounded by bits and pieces of Mesopotamia’s past. He is heading an ambitious international effort to enable systematic analysis of the ancient texts by a broad group of researchers, while also making cuneiform less foreign to the world outside the circle of Assyriologists like himself who study it. He’s employing our most modern media tools — computers and the Internet — in an initiative to preserve and make available the form and content of the half-million excavated cuneiform tablets left behind by ancient peoples from approximately 3350 B.C. through the end of the pre-Christian era.
His work, and that of his colleagues, is perhaps even more relevant in these troubled times as the modern-day regions of ancient Babylonia are pummeled by war and lawlessness. A harsh reminder that some of the world’s most treasured ancient cultural artifacts are housed in today’s Iraq was delivered in April 2003, not long after U.S.-led forces seized Baghdad, when word spread that the Iraq National Museum had been looted. Suddenly, attention was focused on the precarious nature of ancient collections, and efforts to make them more secure through digitization seemed to take on greater urgency.
It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been wake-up calls in the recent past. “Religious fanaticism resulted in the Taliban edict to systematically demolish Afghanistan’s proud cultural heritage, to the horror of the international community,” Englund said in May as he accepted the National Humanities Center’s 2004 Richard W. Lyman Award for innovative use of information technology in humanistic scholarship and teaching. “We must try to imagine the truly desperate situation in Afghanistan, where whole generations of cultural history were looted or for all times destroyed by a ruling class run amok, to more clearly appreciate how much is lost to humanity when we do not thoroughly document national collections of shared world cultural heritage.”
As it turned out, the damage in the case of Iraq was considerably less than first reported. “The presumed plunder of the Iraq Museum shows the great potential of the Web for abuse as well as for good,” Englund says. “At first, there were wildly exaggerated reports going out like wildfire of 180,000 objects removed and either destroyed or taken away in all directions. Through the great power of the Web, this was established as fact.” The loss is currently estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000 objects, most of it coming from a single large collection of cylinder seals.
Rather than breathing a sigh of relief, Englund asserts that anyone interested in a shared world cultural history must think about what might have been and use the incident as a catalyst to digitally capture and preserve all of the most important collections of antiquities. To his dismay, that imperative appears to have returned to the back burner.
Englund and colleagues did receive funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop an online catalogue of the cuneiform collection of the Iraq National Museum, estimated to include at least 40,000 tablets. The project’s goals include development of a Web site with both English and Arabic descriptions of the archived materials and relevant educational data, and a Web-based learning center designed to assist scholars and non-scholars alike — including Iraqi citizens — in gaining a deeper appreciation of the cultural roots that can be traced to the soil of ancient Iraq, where early civilization once flourished.
“We hope to assist Iraqi colleagues in putting up data sets that affect a national image of Iraq which otherwise would be very difficult to keep alive in a country that now seems to be falling apart according to ethnic and religious differences,” Englund says. “If we are successful in our Iraq initiative, we give the world a digital capture of a very important historical collection, but we also provide a means of reaching an Iraqi nation that is just now connecting to the Internet itself.
“On the other side, we are starting to see Iraqis described as savages within the United States, as certain cells within Iraq use the Web to send horrific images of torture visited upon foreigners. In our small way, we can serve a much better function of explaining the intricate, deep history of Iraq and, potentially, fostering a cultural exchange.”
If it’s not history’s first writing form — recent finds in Egypt have opened the subject to debate — there is no doubting that cuneiform is far and away the most informative of the ancient writing systems, documenting in dramatic fashion the development of early script in Mesopotamia and opening a window on the civilizations of Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria, which began more than 5,000 years ago in the Near East encompassing most of modern Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Cuneiform’s wedge-like script is best known incised on stone slabs that could weigh several tons, but the vast majority of the texts were impressed with the aid of a stylus onto more portable clay tablets that hardened almost immediately in the region’s hot, dry climate. This hardening, and the fact that there was no reusing the lumps of clay, ensured that these documents of the times would survive in great numbers — more than 500,000 have been unearthed, with at least 10 times that many estimated to still be lying in ruins, awaiting discovery.
The tablets carry some of the world’s oldest pieces of literature (the Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Sumerian and Akkadian around 1800 B.C., describing the adventures of the king of Uruk and a version of the biblical flood story) and of law (the Code of Hammurabi, arguably more famous than any legal document surviving the ancient Middle East). Cuneiform has enabled scholars to verify the historical accuracy of Old Testament accounts of events that had previously been viewed as legend. But there are also plenty of everyday writings that, taken as a whole, reveal much about the day-to-day lives of thousands of years ago: a note from a son imploring his father to provide appropriate gifts for his teacher; the story of a cattle herder whose failure to pay the goods he owed as taxes resulted in the enslavement of his children; the tens of thousands of receipts, bills of lading, sales contracts and other documents from the administrative record that portray the conceptual roots of mathematics, a monetary system and a system for compensating labor.
“The beauty of the administrative texts is that unlike, for instance, Egyptian history or much of medieval history, there is no propagandistic effect in them,” says Englund. “They describe the destinies that were lived by people somewhat like you and me — how they were born, what they were born into, the kinds of households they had and the difficulties they experienced.”
As they were excavated in the 19th and 20th centuries, cuneiform tablets made their way to some of the world’s great museums, where their fragility — they have been known to crumble spontaneously — has precluded transportation and, for the most part, limited access to specialists with the dedication and means to travel the world over for their studies.
That began to change not long after Englund, then a research assistant studying the earliest cuneiform tablets while at the Free University of Berlin in the early 1980s, met Peter Damerow, a mathematician at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development, who was, like Englund, interested in advancing cuneiform study by electronically sorting and compiling data from the tablets. “As soon as I saw Damerow, I grabbed hold of him and said, ‘We’re going to work on this together,’” Englund recalls.
At the time, Assyriologists’ “computers” were their file cabinets. “Even today, if you go into the offices of most of the people in my field you will see, stacked around the tops of their bookshelves, shoe boxes full of what are effectively pre-electronic files on the cuneiform texts,” Englund says. For their publications, Englund’s colleagues have traditionally gone to a museum, made a hand copy of a cuneiform tablet and combined it with a text description and interpretation. “I don’t have a very good hand for that,” Englund quips.
What Englund and Damerow started on a mainframe computer evolved, with the advent of the World Wide Web and initial funding from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, into much more. The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, with Englund and Damerow as principal investigators, was established in 2000 as an international collaboration of Assyriologists, museum curators, historians of science and information-technology specialists whose mission is to digitally capture and disseminate online three millennia’s worth of cuneiform tablets. Approximately 100,000 cuneiform documents have been catalogued thus far.
While museums embrace the idea of producing digital facsimiles of delicate, 5,000-year-old tablets as a way of preserving the real articles, for Englund the CDLI is most importantly a research tool. “This allows us to take a full set of cuneiform tablets and make queries that would otherwise tax the capabilities of a genius,” he says. Much of the earliest cuneiform text remains indecipherable, Englund notes; with the CDLI data set, researchers can use linguistic and statistical tools to quickly analyze the many hundreds of thousands of lines of text transcriptions that the project has entered in standardized form.
The questions that can be addressed through the systematic analysis of the cuneiform record are far from esoteric. Englund points out that records of schooling in Mesopotamia are better than any that exist until the Middle Ages. Cuneiform text describes the origins of trade. Those interested in how hierarchical societies develop can consult the administrative record from the end of the third millennium B.C. — again, more illuminating than any written record prior to the Middle Ages.
But at the same time that Englund is pursuing the project’s lofty research goals, he is focused on using CDLI to make the cuneiform record more accessible — both by expanding the base of scholars who can study it, and by reaching non-scholars. “The real beauty of what we can now do electronically is that it breaks down the boundary between our field and others,” he says. Most lessons of world history start in earnest with the early Greeks, with only passing reference to Egypt and Mesopotamia. “If we can make this data more accessible to the broader community, that important conversation between the research and lay community can come to a new consensus about the pre-Christian, pre-Greek stages of history,” Englund says. He and his CDLI colleagues hope to appeal to a lay audience by making the site user-friendly to non-linguists, and through special projects. A proposed online educational component would explore technology-based learning strategies for museums and libraries to use CDLI resources to reach K–12 students and their families.
These efforts have drawn widespread praise. “The scholars, teachers and technical experts who evaluated the CDLI’s applications for funding have acknowledged that this digital library of cuneiform has altered the study of the ancient world by providing enhanced access to these highly dispersed tablets,” says George Farr, who retired in August after heading the Division of Preservation and Access at the National Endowment for the Humanities. “The CDLI’s interface enables everyone — from a student looking for a picture of the earliest writing to the most advanced Assyriologist — to examine the original documents and line drawings.” Says James J. O’Donnell, provost of Georgetown University and chair of the panel of scholars that selected Englund for the Lyman Award: “He combines scholarly eminence with innovative technique in the service of learning — and in the service of all who care deeply about where we come from in our cultures.”
By interpreting and making more accessible artifacts that originated in ancient Babylonia, Englund and his colleagues also hope to contribute, in their own way, to whatever healing can be drawn from a better understanding and appreciation of a shared world culture. Even amid the clouds of war that have kept many of these goals on hold, Englund has seen a silver lining — again, with the Internet cast in a central role.
Just before and during the invasion of Iraq, there was a huge spike in hits on the CDLI site from users with “dot-mil” addresses — many of them, Englund suspects, U.S. soldiers seeking to learn more about their new surroundings. “We were impressed by the fact that we were getting these significant increases in interest in our site from people who are in direct contact with the Iraqi nation,” says Englund. “To my mind, access to the culture and to the minds of ancient Babylonians best serves to remind us that when the differences between us are seen most clearly, they disappear altogether.”
