The Cabinet

What it is

A slab of pale limestone cut into a T, taller than a person — the biggest pillars on the site stand about five and a half metres. Animals are carved in shallow relief down the shaft. The enclosures the pillars stand in date to roughly 9600–8000 BC. That makes this the oldest thing in the cabinet by more than five thousand years.

The excavators changed their minds

Klaus Schmidt, who ran the dig from 1995 until his death in 2014, read the site as monuments that hunter-gatherers came to build but did not live in. One of his reasons was that nobody had found any houses.

His successors found them. Seasons from 2015 to 2019 turned up round and oval houses, hearths, bead-making debris, a burial under a floor, and grinding stones used to process cereals on a serious scale. The team dropped Schmidt's sequence of building phases, and in 2023 the project described the site as a settlement with a strong ritual component. E. B. Banning had argued for houses in 2011, and the team rebutted him for years before its own trenches came round.

That is not archaeologists getting it wrong. Digging more is the only way anyone has of finding out.

What is still inference

Whether the enclosures had roofs, what the big rock-cut pit was for, and whether the residue in the stone vats is from brewing are all argued. The residue is consistent with mashing grain, which is not the same as proof.

Why only about five per cent is dug

On purpose. The excavators are leaving most of the site in the ground for people who will have better methods than we do.

What it was

A length of the reed that grows along the Tigris and Euphrates, cut so the end had a straight edge and a sharp corner. Pressed in one way it left the long wedge; turned, it left the corner wedge. A trained hand did this very fast, and the whole Epic of Gilgamesh, eleven tablets of story and a twelfth tacked on, was written down this way, one press at a time.

Why none survives

Reed is plant matter, and in the damp, salty ground of southern Iraq it rots. The clay it pressed into was dried in the sun or fired, and clay lasts almost forever. So we have hundreds of thousands of tablets and not one of the reed pens.

Everything known about the reed stylus comes from four places: the shape of the wedges themselves, its name ("tablet reed"), carved pictures of scribes at work, and modern experiments by people cutting reeds and trying to match the marks. The picture on this card is a reconstruction of that kind.

How it worked

A thin board of silver fir, a tree that did not grow in Roman Britain, with one face hollowed out and filled with beeswax blackened with soot. You wrote with the sharp end of an iron stylus and rubbed words out with its flat end: "often turn your stylus," Horace told writers. Boards like this were hinged in pairs, wax facing in, by loops through the two small holes beside the notch. The Romans called boards bound together a codex, a "block of wood". The word stayed with the book.

Reading a tablet with no wax

The wax is gone. But where Tibullus pressed hardest, his stylus cut into the wood, and the letters survive as faint scratches, the upright strokes best. Only the top of the board survives; the note breaks off in its eighth line.

It is dated the Roman way, by the year's two consuls, Nero and Lucius Piso: AD 57, a year in which, Tacitus wrote, little worth remembering happened. The day is three worn strokes, read as VI by Roger Tomlin, who deciphered the tablets: six days before the Ides of January, counting the Ides itself, is 8 January.

What it is

A clay tablet about fifteen by thirteen centimetres, written in Akkadian cuneiform. It holds a piece of the Gilgamesh story: the hero tells his mother two dreams, and she reads them as a promise that a friend is coming. Oddly, on this tablet the names Gilgamesh and Enkidu are swapped for the gods Sin and Ea. It is dated to around 1600 BC, the time of the First Sealand Dynasty in southern Iraq; that date comes from the style of the tablet, not from anything written on it. It is widely identified with an unusual tablet the Assyriologist Andrew George published in 2007.

How it travelled

This part comes from the US government's court filings. In 2003 an American dealer bought it with other tablets from the family of a dealer in London, posted it to the United States, and had it baked and cleaned. In 2007 it sold for $50,000, and at some point it gained a forged letter claiming a 1981 auction sale. In 2014 an auction house sold it to Hobby Lobby, the American craft-store chain, for $1,674,000. Federal agents seized it in Washington, D.C. in 2019, a court ordered it forfeited in July 2021, and it was handed back to Iraq that September.

What nobody can tell you

Where it was found. Someone dug it out of the ground without writing that down, and that record is the thing a looted object loses forever. The words on the tablet survived. The place it came from did not.

What is on it

A clay tablet with the letters of the Aramaic alphabet, each one spelled out in cuneiform signs, in two columns. A third column lists the names of professions. It dates to about 500 BC, on the museum's reckoning.

The exercise is harder than it sounds. Cuneiform writes syllables, and an alphabet writes single consonants, so the pupil had to find a wedge-sign that came close to each letter's sound. For one letter, 'ayin, there was no suitable sign at all, and the pupil wrote out the letter's name instead.

Who was learning

Not everyone. Reading and writing in Mesopotamia were a trade taught to a few, mostly boys from families that already had scribes in them. This tablet is unusual evidence of those pupils working in two languages at once: Babylonian, which cuneiform had been built for, and Aramaic, which people increasingly spoke and wrote in ink on softer things that have not survived.

Where history touches the story

By this date the Epic of Gilgamesh had been copied in cuneiform for well over a thousand years. The script that carried it was already on its way out, and this tablet is a picture of that happening in a classroom.

What it is

A small two-handled drinking cup, about ten centimetres high, made in the eastern Aegean around 735–720 BC and carried west to Pithekoussai, a Greek trading post on the island of Ischia. The inscription was scratched in after firing, in three lines, running right to left. The second and third lines scan as verse.

The joke

In the Iliad, old Nestor owns a great gold cup so heavy that other men can barely lift it when it is full. This one is a plain clay cup. Its owner is bragging that it does something better than Nestor's.

What it does not prove

Scholars argue about what the joke tells us. Some read it as proof that a written Iliad already existed; others say only that everyone at the table knew the story. So this card says "a poem", not "the Iliad".

Where it was found

It came out of a cremation grave: someone's ashes were buried with it. The cup survived because it went into the ground with a person, and it is worth remembering that when looking at it.

What it is

A small cylinder of dark bituminous limestone from the Uruk period, about 3500–3100 BC, carved with a ritual scene in front of a temple front. The carving is cut into the stone backwards, the way a stamp is, because the stone is never the picture. The picture is what comes off it.

Cylinder seals appear in southern Mesopotamia around the same time as the first writing, and people kept using them for about three thousand years.

What the clay remembers

Seals were rolled over lumps of clay pressed onto jar stoppers, bundles, tablets and the pegs that fastened storeroom doors. You could open the door, but not without breaking the clay. Excavators often find many more sealings, the broken clay with the picture on it, than seals, because the clay was thrown away where the door was opened and the stone went home with its owner.

Where this one came from

Nobody knows. It has no excavation record, only a gift in 1983. That is common for seals: they are small, easy to carry and easy to sell, and a seal that turns up without a findspot has lost the one fact that would say whose door it locked.

The whole letter, in English

Written in Akkadian, the language of Ashur, by an Assyrian merchant living in Anatolia, about 1900 BC. Our English, checked against Larsen's edition and Hecker's corrections; where they differ, it follows Hecker.

To Walhishna and Kunaniya, say: thus says Ashur-muttabbil. To Walhishna, say:

In the City of Ashur I took one mina of silver from your sister: her rings and her dress pins. Then and there I told her: "For your silver that I took, both slave girls shall be yours." Now I keep hearing that Buzazu has seized your slave girls. Talk to him kindly about them, so they are released to you. If he turns to threats and will not let them go, take it to court. The slave girls are yours.

I left you a third of a mina and 5 shekels of silver. I sent you another 5 shekels with Nishashar, the slave girl from your father's house. That makes half a mina of silver I have left you. Galgaliya is to give you barley worth 7 shekels of silver.

Keep the house's seals safe. Don't keep going out. Guard the house. Don't let Shat-Ashur go hungry. Buy a sheep, so there is meat put by for the little girl. Until you see me again, take heart.

Who's who. Ashur-muttabbil sends it to Walhishna and Kunaniya; the envelope adds a man, Irma-Ashur, who isn't named inside. The letter also mentions Walhishna's sister in the City of Ashur, Buzazu, Nishashar, Galgaliya, Shat-Ashur and "the little girl". How they were related to Ashur-muttabbil, the card doesn't say (see below).

The envelope

The outside carries the address and the sender's name: "To Irma-Ashur, Walhishna and Kunaniya. Seal of Ashur-muttabbil." Under it he rolled his own cylinder seal, one seal only, on the front and both side edges, and twice on the back. The envelope is barely bigger than the tablet: a thin skin of clay, not a box.

The seal impression on our 3D envelope is illustrative. The real one is Pittman's seal 29: a sun god with his saw, one foot on a mountain, a worshipper carrying a goat, a goddess with her hands raised, an armed Ishtar and a youth striding on a platform.

Why an envelope

To keep the letter private: no one could read it without breaking the clay. To protect it on the way. And to prove who sent it, because the sender rolled his seal across the outside. The envelope was pressed round the tablet while it was partly dry, so the two would not stick, and the letter's signs came out as a faint raised mirror image on the envelope's inside.

Still sealed

Hundreds of letters and contracts from Kültepe are still sealed in their envelopes, most of them now in Ankara. For several decades now, nobody has opened them, because opening one breaks its seal impressions. In 2024 a portable CT scanner looked inside about fifty of them without breaking the clay, and scholars read some of the hidden letters. One was a two-tablet letter, like this one.

This letter itself has been opened: its envelope is broken and both tablets are out.

What this card will not tell you

Who Walhishna and Kunaniya were to Ashur-muttabbil. The letter doesn't say, and we have not read the most recent translation or the museum's own label.

When the envelope was opened, in antiquity or in modern times. That is not recorded in anything we have read.

What it is

A large silver coin, a decadrachm, probably struck at Babylon around 324–321 BC. One side shows the horseman and the elephant. The other shows a standing figure holding a thunderbolt, crowned by a winged Victory. Only a small number of coins from the whole series are known.

Why "probably"

Almost everything about it is argued. The mint, the date and the occasion are all inferred, and nobody can say whether the horseman is a portrait of Alexander or simply a type. The mainstream reading, set out by Frank Holt, is that the series celebrates the Indian campaign and was struck close to it. It is a strong reading, and it is still a reading.

The smallest thing on the shelf

The oldest object in the cabinet is a stone pillar taller than a person. The most famous man in it gets a coin about three and a half centimetres across.

How a stick tells you things

The shortest shadow of the day falls at noon, and it points north (anywhere north of the tropics). The length of that noon shadow changes through the year: shortest at midsummer, longest at midwinter. Mark the tip of the shadow day after day and you have a calendar drawn on the ground. The glowing dots in the picture mark the tip at the end of each hour through one midwinter day, the way later Greek sundials counted hours.

The famous use, and its catch

The best-known thing anyone did with a gnomon is measure the size of the Earth. Eratosthenes compared the noon shadow at Alexandria with Syene, far to the south, where at midsummer noon the sun stood straight overhead. But his own book is lost. What we have is a summary written by Cleomedes, centuries later, so the exact method and figures are that later writer's account, not his.

What Herodotus actually says

Only that the Greeks learned the gnomon, and the twelve parts of the day, from the Babylonians. What he meant by twelve parts is still argued; probably not hours on a dial. Whether he is right about where the idea travelled from is a softer question than whether he said it, so this card says "Herodotus says".

Why there is nothing to show you

A gnomon is any upright stick, and a stick in the ground rots or gets pulled out for firewood. Nobody could tell an ancient one from any other bit of wood. The proper sundials that came later survive because someone carved them in stone.

What it was

A staff with a horizontal cross at the top and a plumb-line hanging from each of its four arms. Line up two opposite strings with a marker pole in the distance and you have a straight line; turn to the other pair and you have a line at exactly ninety degrees to it. The Roman land-surveying manuals are full of it, and the surveyors were named after it: gromatici.

What it was for

Right angles, mostly: the corners of army camps, town blocks, and above all centuriation, carving newly taken land into squares about 710 metres a side to hand out to settlers, very often discharged soldiers. The surveying was a way of taking land over.

The one that survives

Only one groma has ever been found: metal fittings excavated at Pompeii in 1912, buried by the eruption of AD 79. The wooden staff and arms were gone. How the cross was mounted on the staff has been argued ever since. The usual reconstruction swings it out on a bracket, and at least one specialist has argued the cross is too heavy for that bracket ever to have held it.

What is written on it

Cn. Domitius Cn. f. Ahenobarbus imperator, and the number XX. Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, son of Gnaeus, hailed imperator by his troops after beating the Gauls in 121 BC, built the Via Domitia from the Alps to the Pyrenees, the first Roman road in Gaul. The stone stood twenty miles from the new Roman colony at Narbo, modern Narbonne. It is the oldest Roman milestone yet found in Gaul.

What a milestone is for

Partly distance. Mostly credit. A Roman milestone tells you how far you have come from a named place, and, before that, whose road you are on. This one names a general. Later milestones name the emperor who paid for the repairs. The roads were built to move armies before they moved anything else.

Where it touches Hannibal

Polybius, writing late in the second century BC, gave the distances of Hannibal's march of 218 BC from Spain to the Rhône, and added that the stretch from Narbo to the river had "now" been measured by the Romans and marked with a stone every eight stades, which is one Roman mile. He was measuring a march through country that had no Roman roads with the Roman road built over it afterwards.

What it was

A heavy lead weight shaped like a bell or a cone, on a long rope knotted or marked at intervals. You threw it over the bow, let it run to the bottom and counted the rope. Lead sounding weights turn up in quantity on Greek and Roman wrecks, because lead does not rot and nobody bothers to salvage a lump of it from the seabed.

Reading the bottom

Many of these weights have a hollow in the base. The usual explanation, taken from much later sailors, is that the hollow was packed with tallow so that sand, shell or mud stuck to it and came up with the lead. For the ancient weights that is a sensible inference rather than something an ancient writer says. What Herodotus does say is that the Nile's mud reaches far out to sea, and that you can tell you are nearly there by what the line brings up.

And Odysseus

Odysseus had twelve ships when his wanderings began. In the Odyssey he crosses open sea by the stars, keeping the Great Bear on his left hand, as Calypso told him to. A sounding lead is for the other end of a voyage: the last day, when you are looking for land you cannot see yet.

How long

Two ancient writers give figures, a century and a half apart.

Theophrastus lived through Alexander's reign. Describing a tree, he says it grows to twelve cubits at most, "the length of the longest sarissa". Polybius, writing in the second century BC, gives sixteen cubits as the original design and fourteen as what was carried in his day. A cubit was very roughly 45 centimetres, but which cubit each man meant is itself argued, so modern estimates run from about five and a half metres to about seven. This card gives a range because the evidence gives a range.

A tree that is not a spear

You will often read that the sarissa was made of cornel wood, citing Theophrastus. Read him closely and he is using the sarissa as a ruler to measure a cornel tree. He does not say the sarissa was made from it. It may have been; he just is not the evidence for it.

What survives

The iron head and the heavy iron butt-spike, which also balanced the pike and let it be planted in the ground. The long wooden shaft is gone, which is why the length has to be worked out from texts at all.

What it was

Two ordinary carpenter's tools, carried by a man riding a war elephant for the one purpose named above. Livy's Latin is exact — fabrile scalprum cum malleo, a craftsman's chisel with a mallet — and he places the blow precisely, at the joint where the neck meets the skull.

What the record will and will not say

Livy credits the invention to Hasdrubal Barca, Hannibal's brother, at the Metaurus in 207 BC, where Hasdrubal died. "First to introduce" is his claim rather than a verified fact, and modern work on Barcid elephant tactics is sceptical of it.

Worth saying plainly: Polybius, who is the better source on Hannibal's elephants, never mentions a goad or any driving implement at all.

What it was

A bronze tablet set up by Hannibal at the sanctuary of Hera Lacinia, on the cape outside Croton, probably in 205–203 BC, near the end of his fifteen years in Italy. It listed the troops he had sent to Africa and left in Spain in 218 BC, down to 21 elephants left behind with his brother, and the army he still had when he came down out of the Alps.

Livy mentions an inscription of Hannibal's at the same temple, on an altar, in Punic and Greek letters. It may be the same record or a second one. Nobody can check.

Polybius read the bronze tablet and decided it was "an absolutely first-rate authority". So nearly every troop number you have read for Hannibal's march traces back to a plate of bronze that no longer exists.

An elephant number from somewhere else

Polybius's other famous elephant number comes in his own account of the crossing, and he does not say it came from the tablet: 37 elephants, ferried over the Rhône on rafts. He never gives a count for the Alps. At the Rhône he calls the men who drove them Indoi, Indians. Most English translations quietly turn that into "mahouts".

Where it went

Nobody knows when the tablet disappeared. Bronze was worth melting down, and the sanctuary itself was later stripped for building stone. One column of the temple still stands on the cape. The stand in this picture is empty on purpose.

What it is

A small gold coin struck at Constantinople in the reign of Theodosius II, who ruled the eastern Roman empire from 402 to 450. It weighs about four and a half grams. Constantine had fixed the standard at 72 coins to the Roman pound, and it held for centuries. They survive in large numbers, which is why the picture on this card is based on many of them rather than one.

When the price was paid

Tradition attaches these terms to the peace of 443, after Attila's first war on the eastern empire. A minority of scholars move them to the settlement after 447. The Attila page on this site gives both, and so does this card.

What it cost

Priscus adds that senators sold their wives' jewellery to pay. That is hostile rhetoric, best taken as colour. Modern historians reckon the empire could afford the gold. What stung was being seen to pay it.

What it was

He left the Han court in 138 BC and was gone thirteen years — about ten of them held by the Xiongnu, the rest spent reaching the Yuezhi and getting home.

A bamboo shaft about eight chi long — a little under two metres — carrying three tiers of yak-tail tassels. The tassels could be untied: a Han official once stripped his and hid them in his robe so as not to be recognised.

The tassels were red. A yellow tier was added on top in 91 BC, to tell the emperor's staff from the crown prince's during the witchcraft affair. Zhang Qian died in 114 BC, so his was red and nothing else.

Why there is no photograph

No Han envoy's staff has ever been excavated. Not one.

The only excavated object that carries the name is a set of Chu bronze tallies from 323 BC, and those are a transit pass — a different thing entirely. Every picture of an envoy's staff, including this one, is reconstructed from figures painted on the walls of Han tombs.

What it is

Pieces of a woollen tapestry woven between about the first century BC and the first century AD. Joined back up, they show a warrior's face, large and blue-eyed, holding a spear, and above him a centaur blowing a long horn. The style is Hellenistic, the kind of art that spread east after Alexander, but where it was actually woven is argued.

Why "probable"

The excavation, the dates and the fact that the hanging was cut up into trousers are documented. Who the warrior is meant to be, and whether this was loot, trade or a gift before someone cut it up, are reconstructions. That is why the card says "Greek-influenced" and not "Greek".

The trousers

What makes it precious to us is what ruined it. A hanging worth weaving at this level of skill was cut up for its cloth, and the trousers went into a grave with the man who wore them. It is here because someone was buried in it.

And the road

Zhang Qian reached the lands west of the Tarim in the 120s BC and brought back the first Chinese description of them. This cloth comes from the kind of place, and roughly the century, that he was trying to describe.

What they are

Strips of wood a little over twenty centimetres long and about a centimetre wide, each holding a column of brush-written characters, laced into bundles with cord. The cord has mostly rotted, so the bundles come out of the ground as loose sticks, and putting documents back in order is half the work.

Why they survived

Because the forts were in desert. Wood and ink rot in wet ground, and the dry air of the Edsen-gol kept both. The same paperwork from a fort in a damp river valley would be gone.

Why the forts were there

The Han garrisons along this frontier came after the empire took the Hexi Corridor from the Xiongnu, from 121 BC on. Part of what turned the court's eyes west was one embassy's report. Zhang Qian had ridden out with more than a hundred men. Thirteen years later, two came back: Zhang Qian himself, and the guide who had set out with him as an enslaved man.

Reading them

Almost everything in them is ordinary: who was on watch, how much grain was issued, who was allowed through the gate. That is the Silk Road as its own officials saw it, which is mostly as a lot of paperwork.

What it is

A letter on paper, written in Sogdian, the language of the merchant cities around Samarkand, and folded small for carrying. The sender, Nanai-vandak, was one of the Sogdian traders settled in the towns of the Gansu corridor. He reports the sack of Luoyang, the Chinese capital, which happened in 311, and Nicholas Sims-Williams dates the letter to 313. That date is his and is broadly accepted.

Why it never arrived

It was one of a small bundle of letters found together in the ruins of a watchtower on the Han frontier wall. Something stopped that mailbag between the towns of the corridor and the road west, and it stayed put. Nobody knows what.

A word worth noticing

The letter blames the disaster on people it calls xwn, Huns. The Chinese histories name the attackers as Xiongnu. Whether the Xiongnu of China and the Huns who later reached Rome were connected is an old argument, and this letter is one of the few pieces of evidence that sits squarely in the middle of it. It proves what one merchant called them, not who they were.

Post, not a manuscript

It is a business letter: news, money, instructions. Its value to us is that it was never meant for us.

What it is

A big cast pot of copper alloy with two upright handles crowned by mushroom-shaped knobs. Cauldrons of this family turn up from Hungary to Central Asia and date to the Hun period, the late fourth and fifth centuries AD. The one from Törtel, on the Hungarian Plain, is the largest found in Hungary, where most stand between 50 and 60 centimetres.

What it was for

Nobody can say for certain, and the honest answer is that it may have been more than one thing. It is far too big for one household's cooking. It was probably used when many people ate or drank together, for a feast, a rite, or both, and then deliberately broken.

You will often read that Hunnic cauldrons were buried beside rivers as offerings to water. Zsófia Masek's 2017 review is sceptical: most archaeological sites lie near water anyway, many cauldrons were ploughed up or washed out rather than excavated, and Törtel itself lies about fifteen kilometres from the Tisza. The idea is possible. The evidence for it is weaker than its popularity.

What it says about the people who made it

The Huns are known to us almost entirely through their enemies, who wrote them up as people who made nothing and built nothing. This is a large, carefully cast object made for a community, and deliberately taken out of use. It is one of the biggest things they left behind, and we still cannot fully read it.

How it worked

Three materials, three jobs. A wooden core. Horn glued on the side that faces the archer, because horn resists being squashed. Sinew glued on the back, because sinew resists being stretched. Short enough to shoot from a horse, and bent back on itself when unstrung.

What actually survives

Almost never the bow. The antler strips that stiffened the grip and the ends are the only parts that last in the ground. The Wien-Simmering grave gave seven of them, the only nearly complete set known from inside the late Roman empire. Everything else in the familiar reconstruction comes from other sites, pictures of archers from Central Asia, and modern bowyers' judgement.

The part nobody has

Hunnic bows are usually shown lopsided, with one limb longer than the other. But the working limbs, the parts that would show that, do not survive in any European find. The lopsided shape is inferred from uneven tip plates and from bows found much further east. It may well be right. It is still an inference.

What this card will not tell you

How far it shot, or how hard it was to draw. No ancient writer records either, and every figure in circulation comes from modern replicas, some of them built from bows found far from Europe.

What it says

A barrel-shaped cylinder of fired clay about 22 centimetres long, written in Babylonian cuneiform and made to be buried in the foundations of a building, which is what cylinders like this were for. It was written after Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC, and it is a foundation document of an entirely conventional kind: the previous king neglected the gods, Marduk searched the lands for a righteous ruler and found Cyrus, Cyrus entered the city without a battle, and Cyrus has restored the temples and sent the gods deported to Babylon back to their own shrines.

Every move in that sequence is a move Babylonian kings had been making in writing for a thousand years. It is a new ruler telling a conquered city that its own god preferred him.

Where the other reading came from

Not from the clay. The Shah's government was calling it the first declaration of human rights by 1968; in 1971 it made the cylinder the emblem of the 2,500th-anniversary celebrations, and on 14 October that year the Shah's sister handed a replica to the UN Secretary-General. The phrase stuck, and it is still the first thing most people are told about the object.

There is nothing in the text about rights. The returns it describes are of the gods' statues to their shrines, and of the people of those cities to their settlements, ordered by a king restoring the religious arrangements his predecessor had disturbed — generous, politically shrewd, and not a declaration of anything.

Why this card says Legend

The badge is on the fame, not the object. The cylinder is genuine, it was excavated, and it has been published and translated for nearly a century and a half. What is legendary is the story told about it, and that story dates from the Shah's Iran, not from 539 BC. Both facts stay on the one card, because dropping either of them is where the lie would be.

What it is

A clay tablet 122 by 82 millimetres, incised on one side with a diagram and covered above and around it with cuneiform. The earth is a disc. A double ring runs round the outside — the marratu, the Bitter River, the sea that encircles everything. Inside the ring are the places the mapmaker was sure of: Babylon as a rectangle near the middle with the Euphrates running through it, and beyond it Assyria, Urartu, Susa, Der, Bit-Yakin and Habban, each an oval or a box with its name written in it.

The tablet itself is a later copy, dated by the British Museum to about the sixth century BC; Horowitz argues the map it copies was composed no earlier than the ninth century, probably the late eighth or seventh.

The labelled edge

Beyond the Bitter River are triangles. The word for them is nagû — outer regions — and the text does not map them so much as describe them: one is a place where "the sun is not seen". The readings of individual nagû are inference rather than settled fact, and Horowitz's edition is where to check them.

What is not in doubt is the structure, and the structure is the whole point. Somebody drew the entire world and then wrote, on the map, which parts of it he could not vouch for. Every page on this site is trying to do the same thing.

How anyone reads it

A photograph of this tablet is substantially a photograph of broken clay, which is why there are two pictures above. The first is the object, photographed in its case. The second is not a photograph at all: it is a hand copy, a line drawing of every surviving mark, published by R. Campbell Thompson in 1906 as plate 48 of Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum, Part XXII, and reproduced here from Bruno Meissner's Babylonien und Assyrien (1925). Copies like it, not the photograph, are how the map is read — the ring, the rectangle for Babylon, the triangles beyond — and Horowitz's 1988 recollation is now the standard. The object and the drawing somebody made so the object could be understood are two different things, and knowing anything about this tablet needs both. That is why both are here, and why each is labelled as what it is.

What it is

A fragment of a clay tablet about fifteen centimetres tall, from the library the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal gathered at Nineveh in the seventh century BC. It is one copy of the eleventh of the epic's twelve tablets, the last of the story proper, and it holds the part where Gilgamesh, looking for a way not to die, finds the man the gods made immortal, together with his wife. Utnapishtim tells him how he got that way: a god warned him of a flood, he built a boat, the storm drowned everyone else, and when the boat grounded he sent out a dove, a swallow and a raven.

Why it made a stir

Smith read it out to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 3 December 1872, with the Prime Minister in the audience. A Babylonian flood with a boat and birds, on a tablet written centuries before the oldest surviving copy of Genesis, was news, and a newspaper paid for Smith to go to Nineveh and look for the missing pieces. The story itself is older than this tablet: Babylonian scribes were already writing a flood like it down by about 1650 BC, in the poem of Atrahasis.

Why the photograph is a visitor's

The British Museum's own photographs of this tablet are licensed under a non-commercial licence. This one was taken in the gallery by a visitor in 2010, who gave it away with no conditions, so it can hang here.