This cuneiform tablet found at the Alalah excavation site in Turkey likely served as a Bronze Age … [+]
In the 15th century BCE, an ancient accountant recorded a furniture order of more than 200 wooden tables, chairs and footstools. How do we know this? From a tiny cuneiform tablet discovered in southern Turkey that appears to have served as an itemized receipt for the large haul.
While an ordinary object for its time, the clay tablet offers an extraordinary look at business practices 3,500 years ago in the ancient city of Alalah, once the bustling capital of the long forgotten Mukish kingdom. Alalah’s location along the Mediterranean coast near the modern-day city of Antakya positioned it as a commercial and administrative hub.
In addition to its value as an intriguing historical artifact, the tablet symbolizes the resilience of cultural preservation efforts, and the local community, in the face of adversity. Archaeologists discovered the object while doing restoration work at Alalah after a series of earthquakes devastated southern Turkey and northern Syria in February 2023, leaving tens of thousands dead and injured and widely and severely damaging property, including standing monuments made of sun-dried mud bricks at Tell Atchana, the excavation site for Alalah. British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley first started excavating there in the 1930s.
It was outside Alalah’s city gate earlier this summer that archaeologists led by current Tell Atchana excavation director Murat Akar, a professor of archaeology at Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal University, unearthed the tablet. It turned up in excellent condition, bearing only a few surface scratches.
The tablet needed to be cleaned before it could be deciphered, but archaeologists found it in … [+]
The tablet is an administrative text, an ancient form of bookkeeping that accounts for the raw materials used by palace workers and the finished products they produced and distributed.
“We don’t know yet if the furniture is coming or going,” said Jacob Lauinger, a Johns Hopkins University professor of Assyriology who’s working to decipher the signs impressed into the cuneiform tablet. “It’s either a work order of furniture to be made or a receipt for furniture to be delivered.”
The tablet containing that information measures just 1.6 inches by about 1.4 inches, and is only a little over half an inch thick. But it could help broaden our understanding of everyday life more than three millennia ago.
“We believe that this tablet, weighing 28 grams, will provide a new perspective in terms of understanding the economic structure and state system of the Late Bronze Age,” Mehmet Ersoy, Turkey’s minister of culture and tourism, said in a statement.
An ‘Aha’ Moment
The tablet contains data recorded in Akkadian, an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia and written with a distinctive, wedge-shaped script. Lauinger is in the process of analyzing the tablet’s content with Zeynep Türker, a doctoral student in Johns Hopkins’ department of Near Eastern studies who will be lead author of an upcoming study on the find.
Scribes would have made the clay markings using reeds. Lauinger and Türker began peering through microscopes at the writing after the Alalah excavation’s conservator cleaned the clay item of dirt that had settled into its crevices, making the 12 quarter-inch-tall lines of text on the tablet’s front impossible to read. The translation work combines inductive and deductive reasoning, Lauinger said in an interview. That means the researchers consider observations of past patterns along with the newly available physical evidence.
“Our ‘aha’ moment was being able to immediately identify the cuneiform sign that precedes objects made of wood,” he said. “We knew that the excavations from the 1930s had uncovered a small group of tablets that documented the work of a furniture workshop, and when we compared our new tablet to those, they lined up in format very closely, although the amounts of furniture in the new tablet were much greater.”
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University are currently working to decipher the lines impressed on the … [+]
What Was The Furniture For?
The researchers have a preliminary hypothesis that the receipt details a large amount of furniture built around the same time, rather than representing a bunch of small orders made over time.
“We are really excited about exploring some of the different historical scenarios that could have resulted in the construction of so much furniture all at once,” Lauinger said. “Was it for some special occasion at Alalah, like a royal marriage? Could it have been for a religious festival? Was Alalah producing furniture for export?”
Last century, archaeologist Woolley discovered an archive of cuneiform tablets in a fortress adjoining the gate, so the tablet found in July by Akar’s team either comes from that stash or a different unexcavated one in the fortress, Lauinger said, and washed down to the gate. Tell Atchana fell into decay for years after Woolley finished excavating there in the 1940s, and archaeologists began explorations there again in the year 2000.
Tell Atchana has yielded many discoveries over the years, including ancient palaces, and some of these finds can be seen in museums. Among items on display at the British Museum in London are a limestone statue of a king named Idrimi dug up from a pit hidden beneath a temple floor. It’s also possible to view the Idrimi statue in detail as a digital 3D model—its cuneiform inscription offers a fascinating window into the politics, geography and cultic practices of the eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age.
Tiny tablets might seem rather insignificant compared with palaces and statues of rulers. But during a lecture on heritage preservation efforts following the earthquake delivered by Professor Akar earlier this year at the British Institute of Ankara, he described their markings as a rich source of information on taxation, the exchange of goods and even the ecological wealth of the region.
For example, another tablet, found at the site in the 1930s, serves as a sales contract for items including land, six jars of wine and 10 jars of oil. In doing so, the document also highlights the relationship between the kingdom’s economic richness and its agricultural variety, he noted.
That tablet records the buyer as a man named Yarim-Lim. He made the purchase from a woman named Hebat-sehirni and her son Abi-Addu with silver shekels and parcels of barley. “They have been paid,” the tablet says of the sellers, “and their heart is satisfied.”
