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A lexical list records nine types of musical strings, twenty-three types of musical instruments and musical terminology, including stringed instruments such as harps and lyres, as well as several instruments whose identities remain unknown. The list also includes lapis lazuli, beds, copper utensils, textiles, domestic animals and sinews, jewellery, weapons, leather components of yokes, straps and sacks, varieties of sheep, knives, aromatics and perfumes, objects made of reed, grains and flours, and much more.

Uncovered in modern Iraq and preserved within the corpus of Early Dynastic lexical lists, this tablet fragment (analogous to recensions recorded at Fara and Tell Abu Salabikh) reveals that music in Mesopotamia was not merely an informal oral art. It was a rigorous, standardized discipline taught inside the edubba (the Sumerian scribal academy).

The Artifact: Lexical Precision in Cuneiform

The tablet belongs to the Mesopotamian genre of lexical lists—systematic glossaries used by scribes to codify language, professional titles, animals, and material culture. Rather than a poetic narrative, the text serves as a technical taxonomy.

The inscription itemizes nine distinct names for instrument strings alongside 23 separate types of musical instruments and acoustic terminology. Each entry is introduced by circular stylus depressions marking a new line—a standard formatting convention of 3rd-millennium BC scribal houses.

Among its most significant philological details is the inclusion of the word ki-na-ru. This marks the earliest recorded appearance of the Semitic root for stringed instruments, which migrated across millennia into the Ugaritic kinnaru and the biblical Hebrew kinnor (harp/lyre).

Acoustic Engineering of the 3rd Millennium BC

The string terminology documented on the tablet corresponds directly to physical artifacts excavated from sites like the Royal Cemetery of Ur (c. 2500 BC).

Mesopotamian musical theory relied on a heptatonic diatonic scale system generated through alternating intervals of fourths and fifths. The nine string terms recorded in these early lists provided the foundation for a standardized tuning cycle:

1. String Identification: Scribes assigned specific numbers and technical names to each string.

2. Interval Generation: Tuning procedures involved adjusting pairs of strings to establish symmetrical consonances (fourths, fifths, and thirds).

3. Modal Shifts: By tightening or loosening specific string pairs, musicians could cycle through seven distinct modal scales across an instrument’s soundboard.

Institutional Music Education in the Edubba

In early Sumerian society, musicians (nar) and ritual lamentation priests (gala) occupied formal positions within temple and palace administration. Performing sacred liturgy like the Balag or Ershemma required absolute precision.

The existence of this tablet demonstrates that musical instruction was integrated directly into the scribal curriculum. Students were required to memorize:

• Instrument construction materials (boxwood, lapis lazuli, gold, copper).

• Pitch hierarchy and string numbering conventions.

• Functional classifications distinguishing handheld lyres, large bovine-headed frame harps, and reed instruments.

Far from being a primitive art form, music in 26th-century BC Sumer was an exact science—codified on clay nearly five thousand years ago to ensure its theoretical framework would survive the fall of empires.

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Sources: Primary Artifact: Cuneiform Lexical List MS 2340 (Early Dynastic III period, c. 26th Century BCE, Sumer). The Schøyen Collection, Oslo and London.

• Principal Text Publication: Civil, Miguel. The Lexical Texts in the Schøyen Collection. Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology (CUSAS), vol. 12, Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection, Cuneiform Texts V. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2010, Text 6.3.1, pp. 203–214.

• Comparative Lexical Material: Civil, Miguel. “Les textes lexicaux d’Ebla.” In Ebla 1975–1985: Dieci anni di studi linguistici e filologici, edited by Luigi Cagni, pp. 133–158. Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1987.

• Organological & Tuning Context: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., s.v. “Mesopotamia,” vol. 18, p. 74.

• Comparative Archaeology: Woolley, C. Leonard. Ur Excavations II: The Royal Cemetery. London: Publications of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania to Mesopotamia, 1934.

A Sumerian building plan on clay from the Ur III period, with walls drawn as parallel lines and dimensions written into the rooms in cubits. The strips around the central image are the tablet's four edges, photographed separately. Credit: CDLI contributors. 2026. Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. August 26, 2026.

Measurements in cubits, fists and open hands

The unit is the kuš, the cubit, about fifty centimeters. Above it sits the ninda or GAR, twelve cubits, so around six meters. Below it are fractions with names taken from the hand. A fist is a third of a cubit. An open hand is a half.

One plan in the Ashmolean gives a room as one and a half ninda less a fist in length and eleven cubits in width. Another gives one ninda, two cubits and two fists. This is a working notation, precise enough to build from and awkward enough that somebody had to be trained in it.

Seven of the eight checkable plans were drawn to scale

The claim that Mesopotamians designed to scale is testable, because some plans give enough dimensions to compare against the drawing.

Eight of them do. Seven turn out to be drawn to scale. The exception is RTC 145, where the top-to-bottom dimensions are compressed relative to the sides, and not by any consistent factor. Rooms drawn at two, three and three times the wall thickness are given as six, twelve and eight cubits.

The likeliest explanation for that one is mundane. The scribe was fitting cuneiform text into the rooms, and the space the writing needed shaped the drawing more than the building did.

The likeliest use was working out how many bricks you needed

Mesopotamia built in mud brick, and mud brick has to be counted before it is made.

Administrative tablets from the end of the third millennium record this side of the work in detail, with estimates of brick quantities and labour. For the first terrace of the ziggurat at Ur, the figure is a thousand workers over five months producing 7.6 million bricks. A plan with dimensions on it is the document that makes an estimate like that possible.

Very few of these survive, and there may be a reason for that

Given how much was built, the number of surviving plans is small.

Two explanations get offered. One is that plans were destroyed once the building was finished, having served their purpose. The other is that most were drawn on something impermanent, wax tablets being the usual suggestion, and that the clay examples we have are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Whichever is right, the survivors are not obviously special buildings. Most have fairly ordinary layouts, which argues against the idea that only prestige projects got planned on clay.

Gudea had himself carved holding one around 2120 BC

The practice was well established before the Ur III tablets. In the Louvre there is a headless diorite statue of Gudea, ruler of Lagash, seated with a tablet across his lap. On the tablet is the ground plan of Eninnu, the temple of Ningirsu at Girsu, with buttressed walls and towers flanking the doors. Beside it lie a stylus and a graduated measuring rule.

The statue is known as the Architect with a Plan. A second one, Statue F, shows the same arrangement with the rule and stylus present and the tablet blank.

What is worth noticing is that Gudea chose to be portrayed this way. Not with weapons, not receiving tribute, but holding a drawing and the instruments for making it.

What the plans show is a house built around a courtyard

The layouts are consistent. Rooms sit around the edges of an open central court, left unroofed for light and air, with the rooms facing inward. The same arrangement runs through southern Mesopotamian domestic architecture for the better part of two thousand years.

Wall thickness is readable from the drawings and it matters. A wall of one cubit, fifty centimeters, will carry a single storey. The plan published from the Rylands collection indicates walls of around a meter and a half, which is enough for a second floor and for keeping the heat out.

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Sources. Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative on Ashm 1911-238 and related plans. Battini, L., on RTC 145, Revue d’Assyriologie 2016. Heisel, J.P. (1993), Antike Bauzeichnungen. Bagg, A. (2011). Louvre, statues of Gudea AO 2 and AO 3293. University of Hamburg, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, on architectural plans on clay.

Painted detail from Henettawy's coffin. Merit held the same title in an earlier dynasty, and her own coffin has not been published. Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The excavation is directed by Abdelghaffar Wadji of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The find came late last year and the ministry announced the wider discovery earlier in 2026, which also included the tomb of a purification priest and a deposit of thirty mummified cats.

The coffins were moved there by other people, long after the burials

Merit’s coffin was not in her grave.

The team was digging out more than a century and a half of accumulated archaeological spoil piled over the tomb area when a concealed tunnel opened up behind it. Inside was a shaft holding around ten wooden coffins, several richly decorated, some carrying the names of the people inside them.

Wadji’s reading of the evidence is that the shaft functioned as a collection point. The coffins were removed from their original burial places and gathered here for reburial.

This was normal practice at moments of crisis. In 1898 Victor Loret, working near the Valley of the Kings, opened the burial chamber of Amenhotep II and found it holding the coffins of Thutmose IV, Amenhotep III, Seti II and three Ramesside kings. They had been put there for safekeeping by Pinedjem II, High Priest of Amun in the Twenty-first Dynasty.

Hesham Hussein of the Ministry of Antiquities in Sinai, who was not part of the excavation, describes the temple priests at Dra Abu el-Naga as behaving like curators, moving decayed or threatened burials out of the reach of robbers. When remains were at risk, they were relocated quickly.

Dra Abu el-Naga was in continuous use for roughly two and a half thousand years, from the late Middle Kingdom around 2000 BC through to the Coptic period, and it sits directly across the river from Karnak.

The outer coffin of Henettawy, a chantress of Amun-Re, shown here for comparison. This is not Merit's coffin, which has not been published. Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Waking the god in the morning and singing it to sleep at night

The title translates two related Egyptian words. Heset means singer and appears as early as the Old Kingdom. Shemayet means musician and is better documented from the New Kingdom. Because nearly all the evidence comes from titles written on coffins, telling the two apart is close to impossible, and both are conventionally rendered as chantress.

The work was daily as well as ceremonial. In the temple routine the singers woke the deity in the morning and sang it to sleep in the evening. Priests cleared and swept the sanctuary, burned incense and laid out an offering of bread, duck, melon, onion, lettuce and cuts of ox, with wine.

Suzanne Onstine, who wrote the standard study of the office and was not involved in the discovery, puts the hymns at the centre of it. The chanting is what draws the god’s attention and brings it into the temple. Everything volatile, the smell of the food, the incense, the sound, is what can reach the plane where the gods are.

At the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, the chantresses walked in front of the barks carrying Amun, Mut and Khonsu across the river to bless the necropoleis. At the Opet festival they led the procession from Karnak down the avenue of sphinxes to Luxor temple. They drummed, clashed hand cymbals and shook the sistrum, and the noise did two jobs at once, calling the god and telling the city the god was coming.

Onstine’s point about that is practical. There were no loudspeakers. A band announcing what was happening was how people knew to come out and see the statue.

The title meant different things in different centuries

This is where the underlying research is sharper than the headlines.

Onstine’s study analysed 861 cases and found the social profile of the title shifting substantially over time. Middle Kingdom holders came from modest backgrounds and were rare. Eighteenth Dynasty women, Merit’s period, came from the highest-ranking families and were comparatively few. Nineteenth Dynasty holders came from more modest backgrounds and were considerably more numerous. By the Third Intermediate Period almost all of them belonged to priestly families at Thebes, and the sheer number of them indicates how powerful the cult of Amun had become.

So the title was at its most exclusive in exactly the period Merit lived. Hussein notes that women holding it generally came from powerful families, as wives or daughters of priests or officials.

The National Geographic account credits Hatshepsut with that change, arguing she consolidated her position partly by adding religious processions to the calendar and by making the chantress role a distinct profession alongside the priestly hierarchy. Onstine’s formulation is more careful. By the Eighteenth Dynasty the word is no longer describing an activity. It has become a title attached to a temple and given to women of elite status.

What is not known about her

A good deal.

We have her name, her title, her temple and her dynasty. We do not have her family, her dates, her tomb or her grave goods, since the coffin was moved before it reached us.

The comparison usually drawn is with Nauny, a chantress of Amun-Re from around 1050 BC who lived into her seventies, carried the title king’s daughter, and was buried with a Book of the Dead scroll more than five metres long showing her heart weighed against Maat. That is the kind of evidence Merit’s burial might once have had, and no longer does.

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Sources. National Geographic, 25 August 2026, reporting by Taylor Mitchell Brown, with comment from Abdelghaffar Wadji, Hesham Hussein and Suzanne Onstine. Onstine, S. (2005). The Role of the Chantress (Shemayet) in Ancient Egypt. British Archaeological Reports.

Three plates found at an Etruscan port in the summer of 1964

Massimo Pallottino was excavating the sanctuary at Pyrgi, the port serving the Etruscan city of Caere on the Tyrrhenian coast, when three gold plates came up on 8 July 1964. The site is now Santa Severa. The plates date to around 500 BC, two of them inscribed in Etruscan and the third in Phoenician, and all three carry nail holes, so at some point they had been fixed to a door or a wall.

The text records a dedication by Thefarie Velianas, ruler of Caere, of a sacred place to Astarte, whom the Etruscan version identifies with the Etruscan goddess Uni. The Phoenician inscription is catalogued as KAI 277. All three plates are now in the Villa Giulia in Rome.

They are usually called an Etruscan Rosetta Stone, and the museum that holds them disagrees

The claim attached to these plates is that they gave scholars the same text in a language they already knew, and that Etruscan opened up as a result. That is not what happened, and the Villa Giulia says so plainly in its own description of them. The two texts do not correspond closely, both are short, and the comparison with the Rosetta Stone does not hold. They advanced the study of Etruscan. They did not decipher it.

The places where the versions part company are the most interesting thing about them. The Phoenician uses the root MLK, which denotes sole rule and is normally rendered as king. The Etruscan does not use lauχum, its own word for king. It uses zilac, meaning magistrate. Velianas is presented as one kind of ruler to a Phoenician-reading audience and another to an Etruscan one.

Pallottino read the whole document politically, as evidence of Carthaginian backing for a ruler in Caere at a point when Etruscan power at sea was slipping. Others have tied it to the early treaty between Rome and Carthage that Polybius describes and admits he can barely construe.

Thin leaves of gold, folded and placed in graves across seven centuries

The other body of material is entirely private. These are gold leaves, often only a few centimetres across, inscribed, folded and laid with a body. The earliest date to the late fifth century BC and the practice continues for roughly seven hundred years, with finds in southern Italy, Thessaly, Crete and Rome.

What is written on them is a set of directions. On arriving in the underworld the soul will see a spring to its left, beside a white cypress. It must not drink there, because that water brings forgetting. It should go instead to the water running from the lake of Memory, where guardians will block it and ask who it is. The soul is to answer that it is a child of Earth and starry Heaven, that it is dying of thirst, and to ask for the cold water. The guardians let it drink.

Scholars call these a Totenpass, a passport for the dead. The leaf from Hipponion, found in 1965 and dated to around 400 BC, runs to twenty-one lines of hexameter and is among the fullest. The one from Petelia in Calabria, found in the 1830s and in the British Museum since 1843, is the most quoted.

Not every tablet follows that script. The Thurii leaves open by declaring that the soul comes pure from the pure. Two found at Pelinna in Thessaly in 1987 instruct the dead person to tell Persephone that Bacchios released them, and to say they have died and been born on the same day.

The Pyrgi Gold Tablets, c. 500 BC. Three gold sheets bearing Etruscan and Phoenician dedicatory inscriptions, discovered at the sanctuary of Pyrgi and now preserved in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. Pyrgi Gold Tablets, Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The tablets are called Orphic and none of them mentions Orpheus

The field is uneasy about the label. Radcliffe Edmonds put the word in quotation marks in the title of the volume he edited. Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston covered themselves by naming both traditions, Orpheus and the Bacchic gold tablets.

The reason is straightforward. Orpheus does not appear on any of them. What appears is Dionysus under the name Bacchios, along with Persephone, Eukles and Eubouleus, and the Hipponion text calls the initiates mystai and bakchoi. Whether that amounts to a coherent Orphic theology or to a looser family of mystery practices remains one of the livelier arguments in the study of Greek religion.

Why anyone writes on gold in the first place

For Pyrgi the answer is public and obvious. A dedication meant to be seen and to outlast the man who paid for it goes on the most durable and most conspicuous material available.

For the leaves in the graves the reasoning runs the other way. Gold does not corrode, and what the text promises is that the initiate will not either. The material is making the same argument the words make, to an audience of one.

One detail closes the point. The Petelia leaf was later fitted into a gold pendant case on a chain, manufactured roughly four centuries after the leaf itself. Someone in the Roman period was walking around with their instructions for the afterlife hanging at their throat.

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Sources: Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia on the Pyrgi tablets. Pallottino, M. (1964), Scavi nel santuario etrusco di Pyrgi. Graf, F., and Johnston, S.I. (2007), Ritual Texts for the Afterlife. Edmonds, R. (ed.) (2011), The ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets and Greek Religion. Bernabé, A., and Jiménez San Cristóbal, A.I. (2008), Instructions for the Netherworld. British Museum on the Petelia tablet.

BM 34757 alongside a modern reconstruction of the procedure it describes. Jupiter's daily motion falls from 12 minutes of arc to 9 minutes 30 seconds over sixty days, and the area of the resulting trapezoid, 10 degrees 45 minutes, is the distance travelled. The dotted line marks the bisection that gives the halfway point. No such drawing appears on the tablet itself. Credit: Trustees of the British Museum and Mathieu Ossendrijver

The tablet is catalogued as BM 34757 and designated Text B in the study that made it famous, published in Science in January 2016 by Mathieu Ossendrijver, an astrophysicist turned historian of ancient science at Humboldt University in Berlin.

The area of the trapezoid is the distance the planet travelled

Jupiter does not move at a steady rate against the stars. Its apparent daily displacement changes as it goes.

The Babylonian procedure takes that changing daily displacement as one dimension and time as the other. Plotted against each other, they describe a trapezoid, and the area of that trapezoid is the total distance the planet has covered. The tablets state this outright, giving Jupiter’s travel over the sixty days following its first appearance as 10 degrees 45 minutes.

Then they go further. The trapezoid is divided into two smaller trapezoids of equal area, which gives the moment at which Jupiter has covered half the distance. That is a harder problem than the first one.

Four tablets sat unexplained until a colleague sent a photograph

Ossendrijver had been working through Babylonian mathematical astronomy for years, and had examined around 110 tablets. Geometry was conspicuously missing from them. The procedures are chains of arithmetic, additions and subtractions and multiplications, which can be laid out as flow charts.

Four tablets with trapezoid procedures were known, and nobody could say what they were computing. The answer arrived when Hermann Hunger in Vienna sent him a photograph of an undeciphered tablet in the British Museum, BM 40054, which set out a full cycle of Jupiter’s motion. With that in hand, the other four became legible.

Historians had placed the invention of this method in fourteenth-century Europe

The reason this reached the front pages is the comparison it invites.

Computing distance as the area under a velocity against time figure is credited to fourteenth-century Europe. The Oxford Calculators at Merton College formulated the mean speed theorem, and Nicole Oresme in Paris proved it graphically, using a trapezoid of width t and heights u and v.

Ossendrijver’s position is that the Babylonian procedures are concrete instances of the same computation, carried out at least fourteen centuries earlier.

Not everyone reads it that way

Francesca Rochberg of Berkeley called the connection Ossendrijver drew an exciting one.

James Evans, a physicist and historian at the University of Puget Sound, is more cautious. His objection is concrete. There are no drawings on these tablets. Babylonian mathematical tablets dealing with land measurement do carry geometrical figures, and these do not. He doubts the scribes would have understood what they were doing in the way Oresme did, though he allows they had a working grasp of the mean speed relation.

That distinction is worth holding onto. A procedure that produces the right answer is not the same as a graphical method for representing motion, and the tablets give us the procedure without telling us how the scribes pictured it.

Ossendrijver himself has continued to revise the reading. In a 2018 paper he replaced one of his own 2016 interpretations of a key term, taking it as a length rather than as an astronomical station.

There are no limits and no infinitesimals on these tablets

Popular accounts of these tablets frequently describe them as the earliest known integral calculus. That goes too far.

What is on the tablets is the area of a trapezoid, worked out by hand. There are no limits, no infinitesimals, no summing of arbitrarily many pieces. Oresme’s fourteenth-century work is sometimes described as an early form of integration, so the honest version of the claim is that the Babylonians anticipated a precursor of calculus rather than calculus itself.

That is still a considerable thing. It is a piece of abstract mathematics, applied to a quantity that has no physical extent, in a tradition that historians had until recently thought was purely arithmetical.

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Sources: Ossendrijver, M. (2016). “Ancient Babylonian Astronomers Calculated Jupiter’s Position From the Area Under a Time-Velocity Graph.” Science 351, 482 to 484. Ossendrijver, M. (2018). “Bisecting the Trapezoid.” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 72, 145 to 189. Comment from Francesca Rochberg and James Evans reported by Physics World, January 2016.

Old Akkadian love incantation on clay, about 2340 to 2200 BC, from Tell Ingharra at Kish in modern Iraq. Shown from six sides. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Catalogued as MAD 5, 8.

The tablet came out of Tell Ingharra, the eastern mound of the sprawling city of Kish in what is now central Iraq, excavated between 1923 and 1933 by a joint expedition of the Field Museum in Chicago and the University of Oxford. The finds were divided between the two institutions, which is how this one reached the Ashmolean. Its precise findspot is unknown, and that is not unusual for this dig. Even by the standards of the day, the expedition’s documentation of provenance was poor, a problem compounded when the principal excavators died within a few years of one another and the Second World War interrupted publication.

What can be established comes from the writing itself. The script is a fine Old Akkadian hand, which places the tablet somewhere in the Sargonic period, roughly 2340 to 2200 BC. Very few incantations survive from that period at all, which makes this one significant regardless of its subject.

The title the scholars gave it

Joan Goodnick Westenholz and Aage Westenholz published the definitive edition in the journal Orientalia in 1977. Their title was direct. They called the article “Help for Rejected Suitors.”

The text’s function follows from that. It is an incantation intended to overcome a young woman’s resistance to a man’s advances. Someone commissioned it, someone recited it, and the intended result was that a named individual’s feelings would be changed against her stated position. It is not a private lament or a poem about longing. It is an instrument, and its target is another person’s will.

This tends to get softened when the tablet circulates online, usually as a warm story about lovesickness before dating apps. The softening is understandable and it is worth resisting, because the accurate version is the more interesting one. A man in the third millennium BC encountered refusal, and the technology available to him for overriding refusal was ritual. He used it, or paid someone to use it on his behalf.

Written in the language of love poetry

The genuinely arresting feature of the text is its register. The composition works through the imagery of a fertile garden, one of the standard figures of Mesopotamian love literature. In Sumerian love poetry and in the Dumuzi and Inanna cycle, the beloved is repeatedly a garden or an orchard, a place of date palms and running water and growing things, while the lover is the one who enters or waters or tends. The same figure reappears more than a millennium later in the Song of Songs, where the woman is a garden enclosed and the man comes into his garden to gather spices.

The incantation borrows that vocabulary. It also dwells on the body with a directness that surprised its modern editors, attending closely to the mouth and to the eyes. One line describes the lips as oil and a harp. Scholars working on the history of intimacy have cited the text precisely because of this attention to the mouth as an object of desire.

The result is a document that sits awkwardly between categories. It is written like a love song and it functions like a binding spell, and Assyriologists have disagreed about which side of that line it belongs on since it was first published. That ambiguity is not a flaw in the text. It is a feature of how this kind of magic worked, using the language of desire in an attempt to manufacture desire.

The gods who enforce it

Mesopotamian love magic draws on a small and consistent set of powers.

Ishtar, Inanna in Sumerian, is the most prominent, goddess of love and war and fertility, associated with the planet Venus, worshipped from at least the Uruk period and eventually across the whole of Mesopotamia. She is also, in the mythology, a figure who responds badly to refusal. When Gilgamesh declines her proposal, she goes to her father and demands the Bull of Heaven be released to destroy him.

Alongside her stand Ishara, a goddess connected with love and with oaths, and Ea, god of wisdom, fresh water, and incantation, the deity you invoke when the magic needs to work. Related Akkadian love charms make the mechanism explicit, with formulas conjuring the target by Ishtar and Ishara, seizing the mouth, the eyes, the body.

The significant detail is that this is oath language. Ishara’s association with oaths matters, because a spell that binds a person by the authority of these gods is not making a request. It is applying the same category of force that made a contract enforceable, and directing it at someone’s private feelings.

A demand that never went away

The Kish tablet is early but far from isolated. Love incantations recur across Mesopotamian history. Claus Wilcke published a group from Isin several centuries later. Robert Biggs edited the corpus known as ŠÀ.ZI.GA, a genre concerned with male potency rather than female consent. Nathan Wasserman has published an Old Babylonian spell that binds love magic to the preparation of kohl, so that the black eye paint carries something with it when the woman looks.

Read as a sequence, these texts document a persistent market. Across two thousand years of literate civilization, someone was reliably willing to write a spell of this kind, and someone else was reliably willing to pay for it.

The demand did not stop at Mesopotamia’s borders either. The Greek magical papyri from Egypt contain numerous binding spells aimed at named women. Theocritus built an entire poem around a woman working love magic on the man who left her. European trial records from the medieval and early modern periods are full of the same material. The Kish tablet is the earliest surviving link in a chain that has never fully broken.

What the tablet does not contain

There is a reading of this object in which it is simply poignant. A young man, an unreturned attachment, a bit of superstition, a moment of recognition across four thousand years.

There is another reading in which the woman at the centre of the text holds a position, that position is refusal, and the object exists to defeat it. She commissioned nothing. She left no tablet. Her name is not recorded and will not be recovered. What survives is his account of the situation, fired into clay and preserved by accident for more than four millennia, while whatever she thought about it went into the ground with her.

Both readings are accurate, and the second is the one that makes the object worth examining carefully. It is small, finely written, and genuinely poetic, and its purpose is to override another person’s will. Mesopotamia left us its law codes and its king lists and its astronomical observations. It also left this, which records something those documents never will.

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Sources: Westenholz, J.G., and Westenholz, Aa. (1977). “Help for Rejected Suitors, The Old Akkadian Love Incantation MAD V 8.” Orientalia, New Series 46/2, 198 to 219. Kogan, L.E., and Nurullin, R.M., “Old Akkadian Love Incantation MAD 5, 8, Introduction, Translation and Commentary,” Vestnik Drevnei Istorii. Wilcke, C. (1985). “Liebesbeschwörungen aus Isin.” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 75/2, 188 to 209. Biggs, R.D. (1962). “The ŠÀ.ZI.GA Incantations, Sumerian and Akkadian Love Charms.” Cunningham, G. (1997). Deliver Me From Evil, Mesopotamian Incantations 2500 to 1500 BC. Moorey, P.R.S. (1978). Kish Excavations 1923 to 1933.

It came out of the ground in 1899 and then sat in a drawer

Workers on the University of Pennsylvania’s excavation at Nippur, in what is now southern Iraq, turned it up in 1899. It measures about 21 by 18 centimetres and is a few centimetres thick. Hermann Volrath Hilprecht published a photograph in 1903, and the tablet has been in the Hilprecht Collection at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena ever since, catalogued as HS 197.

The surface was carefully prepared and the lines cut with a steady hand. Numerical measurements run along the walls in the sexagesimal system used throughout Mesopotamia, and place names appear in both Sumerian and Akkadian.

The cartographer left most of the city out

What the tablet records is the skeleton of Nippur in the second half of the second millennium BC. The city walls run in angular segments, pierced by seven gates, each with its name written beside it. Canals and moats frame the settlement. Inside the walls are the temple precinct of Ekur, dedicated to Enlil, the Ekiur associated with his consort Ninlil, a garden, and an enclosure whose function is not clear. The Euphrates appears to one side.

The residential quarters, which is to say most of the city, are largely absent. Attention goes to the defensive circuit, the watercourses and the sacred core, which tells you something about who the document was made for. Oelsner and Stein, who produced the standard edition in 2011, suggest the moat system was included for strategic rather than religious or administrative reasons.

Measurements along successive stretches of wall are given in the nindan, a unit of roughly six metres. Set against modern survey of the site, those figures resolve to a consistent scale of approximately one to nine thousand two hundred.

For seventy years it was read the wrong way round

When the map was properly published in 1905 it was taken to show only the eastern part of the city, and it was printed turned ninety degrees with the Ekur at the bottom. That orientation was chosen because it seemed to match the excavated remains as they were then understood. It did not match them well. Structures on the tablet sat awkwardly against what the trenches had produced, and the map picked up a reputation for being schematic or simply wrong.

Samuel Kramer argued in 1956 that it showed the entire city, and published it again in 1970 with Inez Bernhardt under a title calling it the oldest city map in the world. The question closed in the following decade. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago noticed on an aerial photograph that a ridge at the site appeared to coincide with a corner of the city wall as drawn on the tablet. His thirteenth season, in 1975, opened Area WC in the southernmost corner of the city and found fortifications where the clay said they would be. Miguel Civil, the expedition’s epigrapher, went back over the wall measurements and showed they only worked if the map covered the whole city and was oriented as Gibson proposed.

Nobody is certain how they did it

Mesopotamians were accomplished surveyors, and administrative tablets recording field boundaries and house plots survive in large numbers, drawn up for taxation and the management of land and water. The Nippur plan covers a far larger and more complicated area than any of them.

Augusta McMahon, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago and director of the school’s Nippur excavations, suggests knotted ropes, measuring rods, and possibly a rudimentary trigonometry for calculating angles. Whatever the method, it would have meant laborious incremental measurement over many days, then patient transfer onto clay.

It may be a plan rather than a record

Nippur had declined badly in the centuries before the tablet was made, and much of it stood abandoned. Then the Kassites took power in Babylonia and set about restoring the old religious center.

Johannes Hackl, professor of Assyriology at Jena, points to a Mesopotamian conception of kingship in which rulers held a duty to build. On that reading the tablet is not a picture of Nippur as it stood but a working document for its reconstruction, which would make it the earliest known urban blueprint as well as the oldest known city map. It is a proposal rather than a demonstration. Nothing on the tablet says what it was for.

Nothing else quite like it has survived

HS 197 remains unique. Smaller fragments of Mesopotamian city plans exist, but none combines topographic accuracy, detailed measurement and urban scale in the same way.

The tablet is still legible after three and a half thousand years. It records the walls and watercourses of a city, and beyond that a decision by particular people to measure the place their gods lived in, and set it down.

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Sources: National Geographic, December 2025 issue, "The Oldest Known Map of This Mesopotamian City Is Startlingly Precise." Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago, Nippur, Sacred City of Enlil, including McGuire Gibson on the Kassite map and Miguel Civil's reading of the wall measurements. Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine, Ancient Cartography. Hilprecht Collection, Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

It was excavated during the University of Pennsylvania’s Babylonian Expedition, which ran from 1888 to 1900, and it is on display in the museum’s Middle East Galleries.

Nobody agrees on when it was written

Penn dates the tablet to Early Dynastic IIIB, 2500 to 2340 BC.

Other dates circulate. The commonest is 2100 BC with an attribution to the Ur III period, and 2400, 2200 and 2600 all appear in print. The museum’s own catalogue shows where this comes from. The original register entry calls the tablet pre-Sargonic and describes it as a ritual text. A later hand crossed out ritual, wrote in medical text, and added Old Akkadian and Ur III as alternative periods.

Ground to powder, dissolved in beer, applied

Fifteen of them, and none says what it is for. No illness is named anywhere on the tablet.

The ingredients come from plants, animals and minerals. Thyme, mustard, plum, pear, fig, willow, fir and pine appear on the botanical side, along with beer and wine. Turtle shell and water snake are among the animal materials. Salt and saltpetre are among the mineral ones.

The method is consistent. Ingredients are ground to powder, dissolved in beer or wine, and applied. One prescription washes a wound with alkali and oil, which is the chemistry of soap, and is often cited as among the earliest instances of it on record.

There is no magic. No incantations, no gods invoked, no ghosts or demons held responsible for illness. Later Mesopotamian medical texts routinely carry all of this alongside the prescriptions.

Most of what circulates about it comes from gift shops

A quantity of embellishment attaches to this tablet, most of it repeated by sellers of reproductions and by content sites working from them.

The usual version says Penn scholars translated it in 2005 and found cannabis, opium and aloe vera in it, and that it records the first known use of aspirin. Samuel Noah Kramer and the chemist Martin Levey published a translation in the 1950s. The aspirin claim comes from willow bark, which contains salicin, though the tablet does not say what the willow was for and salicin is not aspirin. Identifications of cannabis and opium in Sumerian plant vocabulary are disputed, and a good many of the plant names in these texts have never been identified at all.

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Sources: Penn Museum, object CBS 14221, including the CBS register entry. CDLI P269190. Kramer, S.N., History Begins at Sumer. Levey, M., on Sumerian pharmacology. Penn Museum Bulletin VIII, no. 1 (January 1940), “Nippur Old Drugstore.”

A library and a medical handbook

Ashurbanipal ruled Assyria from 669 to around 631 BC and set out to collect all knowledge in one place. He commissioned specialists to gather medical texts from across the empire and bring them to Nineveh, where scribes compiled them into a single structured work.

The result is the earliest known systematized handbook of therapeutic medicine. The British Museum describes it as the most standardized and structured collection of medical literature anywhere before Galen, who wrote in the second century AD. Each tablet ran to at least 250 lines, and the whole came to more than 10,000.

Its organisation is anatomical and moves down the body. The opening section covers diseases of the head across five tablets, treating the scalp, eyes, ears and nose in general terms. Then come treatises on individual parts in detail, four tablets for the eyes, six for the neck, two for the teeth, one each for the nose and the ears. After the head the Encyclopaedia works through the torso, the legs and the feet.

Nineveh burned in about 612 BC. Fire destroys papyrus but bakes clay, which is why these tablets are among the best preserved documents to survive from Mesopotamia. The library was excavated in stages between 1851 and 1932 and produced more than 30,000 tablets and fragments, of which roughly 660 medical tablets are now in the British Museum.

Ringing, whispering, roaring

Babylonian and Assyrian tablets record noises in the ear using terms translated as ringing, whispering and roaring. A review published in the Journal of Neurology in February 2026, surveying descriptions of tinnitus across ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Greece, Rome and China, notes that these references are common and that they were frequently understood as evidence of interference by the dead.

The mechanism invoked was the hand of a ghost. In Akkadian medical texts a wide range of conditions were attributed to this cause, and treatments varied while the underlying diagnosis stayed the same. Reginald Campbell Thompson published a set of these prescriptions in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1929 under exactly that title.

JoAnn Scurlock and Burton Andersen, whose Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine remains the standard reference, point out that the reasoning was consistent with how strange noises were treated outside medicine as well. Unexplained sounds in a house were held to come from ghosts. A sound heard by a patient with no external source fell into the same category.

Whether the specific ear treatise in the Encyclopaedia frames its cases this way is a separate question from whether the association existed in Assyrian medicine generally. The association is well documented. Reading it onto any single tablet requires the text.

Prescription and ritual together

The Encyclopaedia does not separate what a modern reader would call medicine from what a modern reader would call magic. Therapeutic prescriptions and ritual elements appear together in the same texts, and the compilation is now cited in arguments against treating the two as opposed categories in Mesopotamian practice.

Assyrian healing involved two distinct professions, the asû, who prepared and administered drugs, and the āšipu, who dealt with the causes of illness through incantation and ritual. Their work overlapped rather than competed. A prescription of oils, plants and minerals poured into the ear canal and an incantation addressed to the ghost responsible were part of the same treatment.

How the texts reached print

Campbell Thompson published the medical tablets from Ashurbanipal’s library in facsimile in 1923 as Assyrian Medical Texts. Franz Köcher produced six volumes between 1963 and 1980 under the title Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen, the first four covering material from sites other than Nineveh and the last two adding new joins of broken fragments and further Nineveh material.

The British Museum’s own project, Introducing Assyrian Medicine, has since reconstructed the Encyclopedia and translated it into English, which for the first time makes the corpus accessible outside a small circle of specialists.

Sources: British Museum, Reconstructing a 2,500 Year Old Medical Encyclopaedia, and Ancient Healthcare Fit for a King. Huppert, D., Gerb, J., and Filippopulos, F. (2026). "Tinnitus, Well Known in Antiquity, Highly Relevant Today." Journal of Neurology 273, article 142. Scurlock, J.A., and Andersen, B. (2005). Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine. University of Illinois Press. Thompson, R.C. (1929). "Assyrian Prescriptions for the Hand of a Ghost." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Thompson, R.C. (1923). Assyrian Medical Texts. Köcher, F. (1963 to 1980). Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen.

The aggrieved king was Tushratta of Mitanni, ruler of a Hurrian kingdom that stretched across what is now northern Syria and southeastern Turkey. The shipment came from Akhenaten, the newly enthroned pharaoh of Egypt. And the story behind the substitution reveals considerably more about Bronze Age power than a simple case of fraud.

A daughter, a dowry, and a dead pharaoh

The arrangement began with a marriage. Tushratta had sent his daughter, Tadukhipa, to Egypt to marry Amenhotep III, sealing an alliance between two of the era’s great powers against the rising threat of the Hittites. Tushratta’s own sister had already made the same journey a generation earlier. These were not romantic matches but instruments of statecraft, and they came with an elaborate exchange of goods flowing in both directions.

According to Tushratta’s account, he had specifically requested statues of solid cast gold, one representing himself and one representing his daughter. Amenhotep III, he claimed, had gone further, promising not only the gold statues but additional pieces in lapis lazuli, along with quantities of gold and other goods he described as beyond measure. Crucially, Tushratta insisted that his own messengers stationed in Egypt had personally watched the gold being prepared and the statues being cast.

Then Amenhotep III died. His son took the throne as Amenhotep IV, soon to rename himself Akhenaten, and the shipment that eventually arrived in Mitanni was not what had been promised. The statues were wooden, plated. The accompanying goods had been substantially reduced.

Fragment of a letter from Tušratta, the king of the land of Mittani, to Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), the Egyptian king. Credit: CDLI contributors. 2026. Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. July 24, 2026. https://cdli.earth/cdli-tablet/556.

The letters that survive

Two tablets preserve Tushratta’s response, and the difference between them is instructive.

The first, catalogued as EA 26, is short, roughly 15 centimeters tall and 9 wide, and it is not addressed to the pharaoh at all. Tushratta wrote instead to Queen Tiye, Akhenaten’s mother and Amenhotep III’s widow, appealing to her as a witness to what her late husband had actually agreed to. He reminds her of the mutual affection between himself and Amenhotep III, then notes bluntly that her son has sent plated wooden statues, and asks why such a thing should cause distress when gold in Egypt is as common as dirt.

The second tablet, EA 27, is more than twice the size and runs to some twenty-seven paragraphs. This one goes directly to Akhenaten. The nineteenth-century Assyriologist William Moran, whose translation remains the standard, titled it simply as concerning the missing gold statues again, and that word again carries the weight of the whole exchange. Written from the Mitanni capital of Washukanni early in the pharaoh’s second regnal year, it opens with lavish declarations of love, claiming Tushratta felt ten times more affection for Akhenaten than he had for his father, and lists the greeting-gifts he was dispatching to the pharaoh, to Tiye, and to his own daughter, Hurrian-style garments, eye-stones mounted in gold, containers of sweet oil. Only then does it turn to the grievance.

Amarna letter EA 27 is a letter addressed to Amenhotep IV and concerns "The Missing Gold Statues Again". Credit: By Wolfgang Sauber

Gold as common as dirt

That image, gold lying about in Egypt like dust or dirt, recurs throughout the Amarna correspondence, and it was not merely a figure of speech. Egypt controlled the Nubian gold mines, and to the other great courts of the period the country genuinely looked like an inexhaustible source. Kings of Babylon, Assyria, Hatti, and Mitanni all wrote to Egypt asking for gold, often insistently, sometimes with a barely concealed edge.

The rhetorical strategy in those requests was consistent. A king would recall the generosity of the pharaoh’s predecessor, describe the warmth of the relationship in earlier days, and then contrast that golden past with the disappointing present. The Italian historian Mario Liverani identified this as a deliberate framework, one in which the past is always constructed as better than the present precisely so that a complaint about current terms becomes natural, even obligatory. Read that way, Tushratta’s letters are not just an outburst. They are negotiation, and skilled negotiation at that.

The system behind the grievance

What makes the episode more than a squabble is what these exchanges actually were. Scholars including Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook have described the Amarna correspondence as the earliest documented international system, a network in which the rulers of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Hatti, and Mitanni addressed one another as brothers, communicated through professional messengers in a shared diplomatic language, Akkadian cuneiform, and maintained their relationships through the constant, obligatory exchange of gifts.

Those gifts were never optional. The Akkadian term šulmānu covers them, and the expectation of reciprocity was absolute. Each shipment demanded a comparable shipment in return, and the quality of what a king sent was read directly as a statement about how he valued the relationship, and about his own standing. Sending inferior goods was not a minor discourtesy. It was a message, and everyone involved knew how to read it.

Which is why gold-plated wood stung so sharply. The statues were probably not worthless objects, and gilded wood was a legitimate and skilled Egyptian craft. But that was not the point. Tushratta had been promised solid gold, his messengers had reportedly watched it being cast, and what arrived told him something about where he now stood with Egypt’s new king.

What was really breaking

The deeper problem was that the alliance had been personal. Tushratta’s bond was with Amenhotep III, built over years of correspondence, marriage, and mutual flattery. Dynastic succession put all of it at risk, and Tushratta’s letters, with their insistent appeals to what the old pharaoh had promised and their attempts to enlist the queen mother as a witness, read like a man trying to hold together a relationship that was slipping away from him.

He was right to worry. Egypt under Akhenaten turned inward, absorbed in the religious revolution at the new capital of Akhetaten, and Egyptian attention to its northern allies waned. Mitanni, squeezed between an expanding Hittite empire and a resurgent Assyria, would not survive the century as a great power. Tushratta himself was eventually murdered, and his kingdom fractured.

The tablets outlasted all of it. Discovered at Amarna in the late nineteenth century by local residents who sold them on to collectors, they preserve a king’s exasperation over a shipment of gilded wood, and with it, a remarkably clear view of how the ancient world’s first great powers actually talked to one another when the flattery ran out.

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Sources for further reading: Amarna letters EA 26 and EA 27, translated in Moran, W.L. (1992), The Amarna Letters, Johns Hopkins University Press. Cohen, R., and Westbrook, R., eds. (2000), Amarna Diplomacy, The Beginnings of International Relations, Johns Hopkins University Press. Liverani, M. (1990), Prestige and Interest, International Relations in the Near East. Rainey, A.F. (2015), The El-Amarna Correspondence.

A royal letter to Sargon II flanks a relief of his court from the palace at Dur-Sharrukin. Letter, British Museum K 588. Relief, Musée du Louvre.

The surviving letters, now catalogued in the modern State Archives of Assyria series and numbering in the hundreds, constitute the largest body of administrative correspondence to survive from any ancient Near Eastern state. Where most contemporary powers left behind monumental inscriptions recording royal achievements, the Neo-Assyrian Empire also left behind something considerably rarer, the working papers of the officials who gathered the information those achievements depended on.

The structure of a reporting network

The letters describe a layered system of information collection extending along Assyria’s frontiers, particularly toward its most persistent rival, the mountain kingdom of Urartu, centered around Lake Van in what is now eastern Turkey. Provincial governors, military commanders, client rulers, and merchants operating in foreign territory all appear in the correspondence as sources of intelligence, their reports typically routed through senior officials at the center of Assyrian administration before reaching the king himself.

One such official, Gabbu-ana-Aššur, who held the position of palace herald, appears repeatedly in the archive corresponding directly with King Sargon II regarding developments along the Urartian frontier. His letters, among them the tablet catalogued as SAA 5 113 and held today in the British Museum, illustrate how the monitoring of Urartu’s king functioned as one of the central, ongoing responsibilities of Assyrian intelligence gathering, a task sustained over years rather than mounted only in moments of crisis.

The scholar Peter Dubovský, whose 2006 study Hezekiah and the Assyrian Spies remains the foundational modern reconstruction of this system, has traced how information moved through multiple channels before reaching the king, with reports cross-checked against one another and, in at least one documented instance, formally summarized for royal review, a practice Dubovský attributes specifically to the innovations introduced by crown prince Sennacherib.

Sargon II Khorsabad relief. Image credit: Louvre Museum

An heir apparent in the role of intelligence director

Perhaps the most striking feature of this correspondence is the identity of the official who oversaw much of the reporting on Urartu during the reign of Sargon II. That role fell to Sennacherib, Sargon’s son and heir to the Assyrian throne, whose own letters to his father demonstrate sustained, detailed engagement with frontier intelligence gathering years before he assumed the kingship in 705 BC. Modern scholarship, including Dubovský’s subsequent 2014 study of Sennacherib’s later invasion of the Levant, argues that this apprenticeship in intelligence work shaped Sennacherib’s later approach to governance in ways that extended well beyond military affairs, toward a broader emphasis on information management as an instrument of imperial control.

A case study in corroborated reporting

The correspondence surrounding the collapse of Urartian power in 714 BC offers a particularly well-documented illustration of how this system actually functioned under pressure. Around 714 BC, Urartu’s King Rusa I confronted an invasion by the Cimmerians, a nomadic people advancing from the Caucasus, and suffered a catastrophic defeat. According to the Assyrian sources, Rusa’s forces were shattered, a substantial number of his senior officers were killed or captured, and the king himself abandoned his position and fled, losing contact with his own commanders in the process.

The account of this collapse reached Sargon through his son. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s summary of the episode records, Sennacherib, dispatched north specifically to gather intelligence on Urartian affairs, reported to his father that Rusa’s entire army had been destroyed in Cimmerian territory and that the king had fled back toward his own heartland, cut off from his generals and governors. Wikipedia’s sourced account of Rusa I’s reign adds a further detail corroborated by the wider historical record, that Rusa’s flight into the mountains of Guriania occurred without the knowledge of many of his own officials, and that in his apparent absence his son, Melartua, was either crowned in his place or moved to seize the throne outright. When Rusa subsequently returned to the Urartian capital of Tushpa, Melartua was killed by officials still loyal to his father, a succession crisis compressed into what appears to have been a matter of weeks.

The ancient fortress a few kilometres west of present-day Van in the eastern-most part of Turkey, originally the seat of the Urartian kingdom. Credit: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen , CC BY-SA 3.0

Consequences on the ground

Sargon acted on this intelligence with considerable speed. Within the same year, Assyrian forces launched a major campaign into the weakened Urartian kingdom, a campaign Sargon later commemorated in his own words in the so-called Letter to the God Aššur, which describes Rusa abandoning his chariot to escape on horseback as Assyrian forces overran his fortified camp, and describes the subsequent Assyrian advance in vivid and deliberately brutal terms. The campaign culminated in the sack of Musasir, the religious center housing the principal sanctuary of the Urartian state god Haldi, an act of both military and symbolic significance that historians generally regard as marking the definitive end of Urartu’s ability to contest Assyrian dominance in the region, even though the kingdom itself would persist, diminished, for more than another century.

Clay tablet, on obverse a considerable portion is broken out, a letter from Sennacherib, to the king (Sargon ?) on public affairs, Neo-Assyrian. Image credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

What the archive preserves

What makes this episode unusual is not the outcome itself, since ancient empires recorded military victories as a matter of routine, carved into palace walls and public monuments for posterity. What survives here instead is the preparatory work behind the outcome, the intermediate layer of reporting, cross-checking, and analysis that connected raw field observation to royal decision-making. The correspondence shows information moving from frontier observers through intermediate officials to a designated analyst, in this case the heir to the throne himself, and finally into a policy decision executed within the same campaigning season.

The tablets themselves survived by accident of history rather than design, buried in the ruins of Nineveh and Nimrud following the empire’s eventual collapse in the late seventh century BC, and recovered by archaeological excavation beginning in the nineteenth century AD, roughly two and a half millennia after they were written. Their survival offers historians something genuinely rare, a documented view not simply of what an ancient empire achieved, but of the administrative machinery, however imperfect and partial the surviving record remains, through which that achievement was actually planned.

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Sources. Dubovský, P. (2006). Hezekiah and the Assyrian Spies. Reconstruction of the Neo-Assyrian Intelligence Services and Its Significance for 2 Kings 18 to 19. Pontificio Istituto Biblico. Dubovský, P. (2014). “Sennacherib’s Invasion of the Levant Through the Eyes of Assyrian Intelligence Services,” in Sennacherib at the Gates of Jerusalem, eds. I. Kalimi and S. Richardson, Brill. State Archives of Assyria (SAA), Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, University of Helsinki. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Urartu.” Fales, F.M. (2017). “The Letter to the God Aššur Recounting Sargon’s Eighth Campaign (714 BCE),” in The Context of Scripture, Volume 4.

A 2018 satellite image of northeastern Afghanistan, near the border with Tajikistan, showing the outline of Ai-Khanoum. Credit: Google Earth.

Today the settlement is known as Ai-Khanoum, or Oyxonim, but its original name has been lost to history. The city sits in Takhar Province in Afghanistan’s northeast, between the Amu Darya and Kokcha rivers, surrounded by fertile farmland.

Two zones, and Greek influence everywhere

Little survives of the ancient city today, but archaeologists have identified two distinct zones. A lower city, dominated by an extensive palace complex, held administrative buildings, an arsenal, a gymnasium, several temples, and a large, open-air theater. Above it stood a fortified upper city, an acropolis serving primarily defensive functions. From the architecture to the artwork to the very layout of the settlement, the imprint of ancient Greek culture is unmistakable throughout.

The city was inhabited for a relatively short span, from the late fourth century BC to the mid-second century BC. By 145 BC, it had been abandoned. Local nomadic groups, seizing on internal troubles within the ruling empire, sacked this remote outpost and drove its inhabitants into the surrounding hills.

Artifacts excavated at Ai-Khanoum, on display at the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. Credit: Ninara via Flickr.

Whose city was it

Given its dating, some once suspected Ai-Khanoum was a creation of Alexander the Great, a product of his relentless campaigns across Asia. Most scholars now believe instead that the city was founded during the reign of Seleucus I, who ruled from 305 to 281 BC and established the Seleucid Empire, Alexander’s successor state stretching from southeastern Europe to the borders of India.

A popular story holds that the site was discovered in 1961, when Afghanistan’s last king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, noticed the outline of a city while out hunting in the region. In fact, evidence of an ancient settlement here was first identified back in 1925, by French archaeologist Jules Barthoux. It would take until 1963 for another French researcher, Daniel Schlumberger, to establish that the site’s character was distinctly ancient Greek.

The city was investigated through a series of excavations by the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, but progress stalled in 1979 following the Soviet invasion. Instability has continued ever since, through the Afghan Civil War of the 1990s and the American-led invasion that began in 2001, bringing excavation work to a standstill.

Today Ai-Khanoum has been thoroughly plundered by looters and left in a state of neglect, seemingly forgotten once again.

A crossroads that brought both riches and ruin

Ai-Khanoum reveals just how rich and unusual this ancient land’s history actually was. Sitting at the crossroads of Asia, the region’s mountain passes formed a vital route for the Silk Road, carrying the flow of goods and ideas between China, India, Persia, and the Mediterranean world for thousands of years.

That same strategic position brought the region no shortage of trouble. Across millennia, it became a place fought over and repeatedly passed between a remarkable succession of empires, the Achaemenid Persians, Alexander’s Macedonians, the Kushans, the Sasanians, the Arabs, the Mongols, and the Mughals, to which should be added the modern empires that have tried, and failed, to claim it for their own.

An ancient Greek city thousands of kilometers from the Aegean Sea might seem strange at first glance. But for Afghanistan, it is only one detail in a very long and remarkable history.

Sources. IFLScience (July 10, 2026); Bernard, P. (1982). "An Ancient Greek City in Central Asia." Scientific American, 246(1), 148 to 159; La Brújula Verde, "Ai-Khanoum, the Lost Greek City in Afghanistan"; Wikipedia, "Ai-Khanoum."

The Grave of an Ancient God Found Near Sikachi-Alyan in Russia’s Far East. Image credit: Khabarovsk Krai Today

The meaning of that mysterious rite is still to be deciphered, but the find is already being described as unique, the first time a petroglyph has ever been discovered underground.

The discovery was presented publicly at the conference “Russia and China, History and Prospects of Cooperation,” held in Blagoveshchensk and continued across the border at universities in the Chinese cities of Heihe and Mudanjiang. The gathering drew specialists well beyond archaeology, including physicians, physicists, chemists, and economists from leading institutes in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other cities, along with Chinese colleagues. A report titled “A Ritual Complex of the Early Iron Age in the Sacred Landscape of Sikachi-Alyan” drew keen interest from the scientific community of both countries, according to Evgeny Chernikov, head of the archaeology department of the Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

The cluster of stones uncovered in the test pit near Sikachi-Alyan, part of a mound-like ritual structure raised in the early Iron Age. Photo Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

They stumbled over a stone

The story began in the autumn of 2025, during the routine work of defining the boundaries of archaeological heritage sites. As often happens in science, the breakthrough came entirely by accident. The archaeologists literally tripped over a boulder protruding from the ground. Looking closer, they saw parallel cut marks on its surface, an unmistakable sign of human modification, since no animal is capable of making such traces.

Where it all began. The stone in the forest, the carved boulder on the shore, and the site that connects them, near Sikachi-Alyan on the Amur. Credit: Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

The strange boulder proved to be only the first piece of the puzzle. The team opened a test pit and, within a small area, uncovered a whole heap of stones piled together. The stones had probably been carried up from the riverbank, where the famous basalt boulders of Sikachi-Alyan lie, including one on which previously unknown images were identified not long ago. As the excavation continued, it became clear that the heap had once been part of a surface structure resembling a burial mound. At its base lay a dark, humus-stained patch, the trace of a hearth. And at the bottom of the hearth pit, among a cluster of small stones, the archaeologists found a fragment of an anthropomorphic image pecked into stone.

A Neolithic face in an Iron Age fire

Here the history takes its strange turn. The fragment belongs to a mask-face, or lichina, of the type famous at Sikachi-Alyan, and dates to the Neolithic, making it at least 4,500 to 5,000 years old. The hearth, however, turned out to be far younger. Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal from its fill showed that the fire went out about two thousand years ago, in the early Iron Age. The carved image, in other words, ended up in the fire at least two millennia after it was made.

The sequence the archaeologists reconstruct is remarkable. The image was moved from the riverbank into the forest, painted with red pigment, burned in a fire, and a mound of boulders was heaped up nearby. As Chernikov stressed, there is no practical reason to burn a stone. What the evidence points to is symbolic action.

The ritual complex at Malyshevo Settlement-1 under excavation. Field photographs of the trench beside an annotated 3D plan showing the collapsed stone structure, the raised stonework with its hearth pit, the fragment of a carved figurative image in yellow, and scattered sherds of hand-molded pottery across the 2.5-meter excavation. Image Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

A rite wrapped in mystery

The deeper context makes the scene even more evocative. The Neolithic on the Lower Amur came to an unexpected end around three and a half thousand years ago, in the first half of the second millennium BC, for reasons still unknown, with climate change among the suspected causes. The river country stood largely empty for a long stretch, until new people settled the territory centuries later at the dawn of the early Iron Age. The burned mask thus belonged to one cultural tradition, and the fire to a completely different one.

Chernikov suggests the fragment was deliberately taken, or perhaps stumbled upon, by these later inhabitants, and that the burning may have been a way of resolving some problem connected with the image. It could, for instance, have been a source of anxiety, a powerful relic of vanished people that demanded ritual treatment. He is careful to note that a full reconstruction of the rite is impossible, since the data are too scarce. What is clear is that the complex served no utilitarian purpose and took shape through ceremonial, ritual actions.

Not everyone is convinced. Among the experts at the conference, opinions on the interpretation split. Some congratulated the team on a discovery, while skeptics proposed a plainer scenario, in which people two thousand years ago simply picked up the stone from the bank along with others, never recognized the face carved on it, and put it to ordinary practical use.

An open ending

One question may remain open forever. Will the rest of the mask ever be found? The team has already looked. In the spring of 2026, during monitoring of the ice drift at the especially valuable heritage site “Sikachi-Alyan. Petroglyphs,” they re-examined the shoreline near the spot where the complex was found, and came up empty.

Chernikov is not discouraged. More than 400 images are already recorded near the villages of Sikachi-Alyan and Malyshevo, and new ones are constantly coming to light. The boulder bearing the rest of the face may simply be buried in sand, and a major flood could one day wash it clean and leave it on the surface. Perhaaps other archaeologists will find it many years from now, he reflects, or perhaps it will be his own team, simply on the next visit. Time will tell.

Source: Khabarovsk Krai Today (todaykhv.ru), interview with Evgeny Chernikov, Khabarovsk Regional Center for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

Archaeologists decipher 4,000-year-old Linear Elamite script from ancient Iran

Desset, an archaeologist specializing in Iran from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, worked alongside colleagues Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran, Gian Pietro Basello, and Gianni Marchesi. Their proposed decipherment, first announced in 2020 and detailed in a peer-reviewed study published in 2022, has drawn wide attention for cracking a script that had resisted scholars for over a century.

The breakthrough drew on a set of previously inaccessible inscriptions on silver beakers held mainly in the Mahboubian Collection in London. The vessels are thought to originate from the Kam-Firuz area near the ancient city of Anshan in southwestern Iran. The additional texts gave researchers enough material to identify recurring royal names, which served as the key to unlocking the script’s phonetic values.

Linear Elamite consists of geometric signs and was used during the Bronze Age, roughly between 2300 and 1900 BC, by the Elamite civilization that flourished in what is now southwestern Iran. Desset and his colleagues have argued it may be the oldest known purely phonetic writing system, a claim that remains debated among specialists, with some scholars maintaining the script is partly logographic.

The script was first uncovered in the early 1900s during French excavations at the ancient city of Susa, but it remained unreadable for more than a hundred years because so few inscriptions survived. Earlier scholars such as Ferdinand Bork, Carl Frank, Walther Hinz, and Piero Meriggi identified the values of a handful of signs but could not complete a decipherment, largely because the available corpus was too small.

Regularised Linear Elamite characters as interpreted by Desset et al. in 2022. Credit: François Desset

Desset has said his engagement with the script deepened after 2006, when he took part in excavations in southern Iran. The turning point came when he identified a repeated sequence of symbols matching the ending of the name of the Elamite ruler Shilhaha, who reigned around 1950 BC. Recognizing that pattern allowed the team to assign sound values to several signs and gradually read the rest.

The achievement has invited comparison with Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century by recognizing royal names such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Desset has described Shilhaha as playing the role in his own work that those names played for Champollion.

Following the breakthrough, researchers have been able to read dozens of Linear Elamite inscriptions, from a known corpus of only around 40 to 50 texts. Desset has said he next intends to turn to the even older and largely undeciphered Proto-Elamite script, one of the earliest writing systems in the world, of which more than 1,600 inscriptions survive.

The Elamite civilization emerged during the early urbanization of the ancient Near East in the fourth millennium BC. Centered first at Anshan and later at Susa, Elam covered much of present-day Khuzestan and Ilam provinces in Iran and extended into parts of southern Iraq. Its language is considered unrelated to any known language family and remained in official use during the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Desset has expressed hope that the work will support the preservation of Iran’s cultural heritage and contribute positively to Iranian culture and identity.

A painted wooden Aztec mask of Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the underworld. Credit: The Walters Art Museum.

Known today as the Mask of Mictlantecuhtli, the artifact is held by The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. It dates to around AD 1450–1521, the final period of Mexica power before the Spanish conquest. The mask is made of wood, ground, and paint, and measures 17.2 by 14 by 7.2 centimeters.

Although it is called a mask, the object was probably designed as a sculptural or devotional element rather than as something worn over a human face. Its lack of eye openings suggests that it was likely attached to a wooden figure, statue, post, or ritual image representing the god.

A wooden face of death

The mask shows Mictlantecuhtli with a skeletal face, one of his most recognizable features in Aztec religious art. The sunken eyes, black pupils, triangular nose, and exposed teeth create the impression of a skull rather than a living face.

The teeth are marked with vertical black lines, while the cheeks preserve traces of small reddish circles. These red marks are thought to represent decay, a visual feature associated with the death god in other Mexica images, including representations in painted manuscripts such as the Codex Borgia.

Both ears appear to have been pierced. This detail matters because Mictlantecuhtli was often shown wearing ear ornaments connected with bones or human remains. The mask therefore does more than show a skull. It presents a specific divine identity, using details that would have been recognizable within Mexica religious imagery.

The object is especially valuable because surviving Aztec wooden masks are rare. Organic materials such as wood often decay over time, and many ritual objects were destroyed, repurposed, or lost after the conquest. This mask’s survival makes it an important piece of Mexica devotional material culture.

Mictlantecuhtli and the underworld

Mictlantecuhtli was one of the major death deities of the Aztec pantheon. His name is usually translated as “Lord of Mictlan.” Together with his wife, Mictecacihuatl, he ruled the underworld realm associated with the dead.

In Mexica belief, the fate of the dead depended on the manner of death. Different categories of death could lead to different afterlife destinations. Mictlan was the underworld realm ruled by Mictlantecuhtli, often described as a place reached through a difficult journey across several levels or regions.

Later summaries of Aztec religion describe Mictlan as a multi-stage underworld, sometimes described as having nine levels. The journey of the dead could take years and involved trials before the soul reached its final resting place. In this context, Mictlantecuhtli was both a ruler of death and a guardian of the boundary between the living and the ancestral dead.

Mictlantecuhtli was usually portrayed with a skull-like head or skeletal body. Full-body images often show him with raised arms, a posture associated with his role as a fearsome underworld lord. Some descriptions also connect him with gruesome attributes, including necklaces of human eyes or ornaments made from bones.

Masks and ritual transformation

Masks played an important role in Mesoamerican religious life. They could be worn in ceremonies, used in reenactments of myths, or attached to sacred images. By changing the face, the wearer or object could become a divine being, ancestor, mythic figure, or supernatural force.

The Walters Art Museum explains that in Mesoamerican ritual thought, the face was deeply connected with identity. To cover or replace the face was to cross an ordinary human boundary. In ritual performance, a person could temporarily assume the presence of a god or mythic being.

Skeletal masks were especially important because death occupied a central place in Mexica religion. Death was one of the twenty day signs in the calendar, and it formed part of a wider cosmic cycle of destruction, renewal, and rebirth.

The Mictlantecuhtli mask belongs to this religious world. Its form suggests it was made for ritual display or attachment to a sacred figure. Rather than functioning as a simple costume piece, it likely formed part of a larger image of the god.

Death and regeneration

To modern viewers, the mask may first appear as a grim image of death. In Mexica thought, death also carried a connection with renewal. The underworld was frightening, but it was also a place where the materials of new life could be found.

One important myth illustrates this idea. In the story, Ehecatl, the wind aspect of Quetzalcoatl, descends into Mictlan to retrieve the bones of earlier humans. These bones are needed to create the present human race.

Mictlantecuhtli first agrees to surrender the bones, then changes his mind and tries to prevent their removal. In one version of the myth, the underworld lord gives Quetzalcoatl a shell without holes and sets him a task involving a shell trumpet. Quetzalcoatl succeeds through cleverness and eventually escapes with the bones.

The recovered bones are then ground and placed in a sacred vessel. The gods shed their blood into the bone powder, and from this act the current generation of humans is created.

This myth shows why Mictlantecuhtli was more than a simple god of death. He was connected to the deep structure of existence: the dead, the ancestors, the underworld, and the raw material from which new human life could emerge.

A rare devotional object

The Mask of Mictlantecuhtli is important because it preserves several layers of Mexica religious meaning in a single object. Its skeletal form identifies the death god. Its painted details evoke decay and the body after death. Its pierced ears connect it to known iconography of Mictlantecuhtli. Its probable attachment to a statue or figure places it within ritual display rather than ordinary use.

The mask also shows the artistic skill of Mexica woodworkers. With simple but precise carving, the maker created a face that is both human and skeletal, physical and divine. The black pupils, red cheek marks, and lined teeth would have made the object visually powerful in a ceremonial setting.

Because masks of this type have survived only in small numbers, the object offers rare evidence for how wooden ritual images may have looked in the Aztec world. Stone sculptures, codices, and colonial descriptions preserve many details of Mexica religion, but wood, paint, and other organic materials give a different view of ritual practice.

The mask today

The mask entered The Walters Art Museum as a gift from John Bourne in 2009. Its recorded provenance includes Throckmorton Fine Arts in New York and John G. Bourne’s collection in the 1990s. The museum identifies it as an Aztec, or Mexica, work from Mexico, dating to the Late Postclassic period.

Today, the mask is studied as both an artwork and a religious object. It belongs to a world in which gods could be made present through image, performance, costume, and ritual. For the Mexica, death was a divine force woven into the cosmic order.

The face of Mictlantecuhtli therefore represents fear, power, ancestry, and renewal at the same time. More than 500 years after it was carved, the mask still carries the visual force of a deity who ruled the underworld and guarded one of the most important boundaries in Aztec belief: the passage between death and life.

Sources:

1. Live Science’s report by Kristina Killgrove gives the object’s basic details: name, material, Aztec origin, date range of AD 1450–1521, description of the painted features, and the interpretation that the mask was likely attached to a figure because it lacks eye holes.

2. The Walters Art Museum’s object record identifies the piece as “Mask of Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Underworld,” an Aztec/Mexica Late Postclassic object made of wood, ground, and paint, and gives its measurements, provenance, and interpretive description.

3. Britannica summarizes Mictlantecuhtli as the Aztec god of the dead, usually shown with a skull face, ruling Mictlan with Mictecacihuatl and associated with the underworld journey of the dead.

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Archaeologists working in northeastern Romania have identified a prehistoric structure so large and unusually placed that it is forcing researchers to rethink how early farming communities in Europe organized themselves. The building was found at Stăuceni-‘Holm’ in Botoșani County, a Cucuteni-Trypillia settlement connected to one of the most remarkable Neolithic cultural zones of southeastern Europe.

The discovery comes from a study published in PLOS ONE by Doris Mischka, Carsten Mischka, Adela Kovács, Constantin Aparaschivei, and Elena Marinova. Their research combined geophysical survey, field collection, and excavation work carried out between 2021 and 2024. According to the survey results, the settlement contained roughly 45 buildings and was enclosed by several ditch and palisade systems.

What makes the find stand out is not simply its age, but its scale. The structure covers about 350 square meters, making it far larger than the ordinary houses at the site. Most nearby buildings measured around 70 to 120 square meters, with a median size of about 91 square meters. The building also occupied a highly visible position near the probable entrance area, a placement that strongly supports its interpretation as a true “mega-structure.”

In Cucuteni-Trypillia archaeology, mega-structures are not just oversized houses. Researchers generally define them as rectangular buildings larger than normal dwellings, often placed in open or highly visible parts of a settlement. Some may have had different architectural features or special social functions. Earlier studies had already documented many such structures across sites in Ukraine and Moldova, but only a small number had been excavated in detail.

The Stăuceni-‘Holm building is important because it brings physical excavation evidence to a debate often dominated by magnetometry. Geomagnetic surveys can show hidden plans beneath the soil, but they do not always reveal what those anomalies truly represent. At this site, some interior features suggested by the survey could not be confirmed archaeologically, showing that magnetic readings need excavation before strong conclusions are made.

Excavation revealed a carefully planned construction process. The builders first created a rectangular foundation ditch, then placed posts into pits at regular intervals of about 70 to 90 centimeters. Some of the posts appear to have been stabilized with reused fragments of burnt clay from older buildings. Inside the structure, large central postholes may have supported a roof or helped divide the building’s interior space.

One of the most striking construction details was the floor. The builders placed halved tree trunks flat on the ground, then covered them with a smoothed clay layer. The researchers cannot yet say whether this clay surface was intentionally fired or whether it burned later when the structure was destroyed by fire. Either way, the preserved floor makes this mega-structure especially valuable for understanding Neolithic architecture.

Dating the structure has added another layer of intrigue. Radiocarbon samples taken from archaeobotanical remains between the wooden floor elements placed the building in the 40th or 39th century BC. This creates a tension with traditional pottery-based dating for the Cucuteni A3 phase, which has often been placed earlier. The researchers argue that the samples came from secure contexts and short-lived plant material, making them difficult to dismiss.

A small ceramic vessel found deep in a posthole also connects the construction event to the pottery tradition at the site. The vessel was recovered more than a meter below ground level in the foundation trench, suggesting it may have been deliberately placed during construction. Such deposits can be important clues, because they tie architecture, ritual behavior, and chronology together in a single archaeological context.

The finds inside the structure were surprisingly limited. Archaeologists recovered pottery fragments, a vessel with a bull-head protome, pieces of ladles, a clay cone, and 87 flint artifacts. Plant remains included cereals, weeds, gathered fruits, and traces of henbane, a plant known for medicinal and psychoactive properties. These finds suggest activity inside the building, but they do not point clearly to one single function.

That uncertainty is exactly what makes the discovery significant. The building does not look like a simple storage facility. The evidence also does not strongly support large-scale communal feasting or a clearly defined cultic function. For now, the researchers leave several possibilities open: it may have been a large house for an important household, a meeting place, a decision-making space, or a building connected to emerging social hierarchy.

This matters because Cucuteni-Trypillia communities have often been described as relatively egalitarian. Their settlements could be large and well organized, yet archaeologists have struggled to identify obvious palaces, ruling elites, administrative buildings, or written records. A structure like the one at Stăuceni-‘Holm complicates that picture. It suggests that even without kings, scripts, or monumental stone architecture, some communities may have developed special buildings for coordination, authority, ritual, or collective identity.

The discovery does not prove that prehistoric Romania had centralized rulers. But it does show that early European farming societies were more architecturally and socially complex than older models allowed. A 6,000-year-old wooden and clay building may not look monumental in the same way as pyramids or temples, but in its own cultural world, it may have been just as powerful a statement.

At Stăuceni-‘Holm, the question is no longer whether people could build large, planned structures this early. The evidence says they could. The deeper question is why they built them, and what kind of society needed such a space.