My name is Sebastien Rey, I am the curator for ancient Mesopotamia and director of the
Girsu Project, and I'm just about to travel to Iraq where the sun is radiant (almost always)
and the archaeology is truly heaven. I'm Ashley Pooley, I'm one of the archaeologists here,
and it's a bit wet. Hi my name is Dr Gareth Bereton and I'm the object registrar at the
site of Tello ancient Girsu. Hello my name is Stefka I'm the objects conservator for
the Girsu Project. Hi I'm Ellie I'm the photographer for the Girsu Project. Hello I'm John Taylor
I'm curator of Cuneiform Collections at the British Museum and welcome to my corner!
SEBASTIEN REY: Girsu is one of the great treasures of the Iraq heritage. This is one of their
greatest archaeological sites. This is the site which revealed to the world the existence
of the Sumerians, the Sumerians having invented of course writing at the end of the fourth
millennium BC. The site was excavated by a team of French archaeologists in the late
19th and early 20th centuries. Now this was the pioneering age of archaeology in Iraq.
Most of the remains, including the finds, were unearthed at great speed and they were
poorly recorded. Now one of the aims of our new project is to go back to these late 19th
and early 20th century excavations; to salvage what can be salvaged, what the French archaeologists
left behind. And these are huge, huge spoil heaps - the dumps of soil that the French
archaeologists moved in order to excavate the sites. And so today we are going through
the spoil heaps discovering and rescuing objects, including tablets. These tablets belong to
the great palace archives of the kings of Girsu. And after six weeks of work in October-November
last year we were able to rescue more than 200 of these clay tablets. So in this video
you'll see the journey; the ideal journey; of a tablet being rescued from a 19th century
spoil heap, brought to the dig house, registered, conserved on-site, photographed, the photographs
sent to the British Museum for preliminary translation, and then sent at the end of the
season to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.
ASHLEY POOLEY: So behind me there's a big spoil heap which was left by the French excavators
in the early years of the last century. After a lot of consideration, we came to the conclusion
that under the spoil heap there's possibly the remains of part of the administrative
centre of the ancient city of Girsu. On a daily basis - it varies between where we're
digging so we can control it a little because we know where the tablets are coming from
now thanks to our massive trench - we vary between 4:20 tablets each day. And in total
we've recovered around about 200 tablets. Most of the tablets are in they're either
very small about the size of a postage stamp or a bit larger. But today we found a tablet
which is complete and is much larger and will be easier for you to see, and to see the kind
of deposits that it's coming out of, and how we excavated as well. Okay so this is what
the French material looks like. It's sort of very loose. It's basically composed of
mud brick and little lenses of charcoal and within it we have this tablet which is more
or less complete. So you can see that it's rectangular it's it it sort of swells slightly
in section but it has very well defined corners and this is unusually complete it's not uniquely
complete but it is pretty unusually complete so we will leave it in this condition and
it will go back to the house cleaned up very carefully photographed and then pass down
the chain eventually to John at the British museum for him to read it and tell us what's
on it the man who found this Ali has been working with us for a long time now um we
we know Ali as as Mr brick because he's very very very good at mudbrick yeah maybe Professor
brick today [Laughter] Ali is just basically cleaning off the face we'll look for the tablets
sort of bulging out of the section and then we'll sort of carefully work around them and
then take them out remove them while damaging them as little as possible the writing is
really small I mean you're talking about letters which are sort of maybe two or three millimetres
and it's very, very easy to damage and to destroy a sign here or there and this this
can make all the difference in in terms of the reading of the word.
GARETH BERETON: So after a morning of hard excavation work by the archaeologists, they
come to me in the afternoon with their bags of muddy objects and then put them in my inbox
here. my job is to basically, at this stage, record all the available information that
we have about this object. So that could include for example: the site it came from, which
is Tello. The year: so it's 2022. The area it was excavated from on the site. The context:
that's the archaeological context where the object was found. We have something called
the small finds number, which is a number that was given by the archaeologist to that
specific object. And I register all this information in a database. I then look at the object,
figure out what it is - and most of the time it's fairly obvious, write a short description,
record the measurements and then give it a special number that only this object has.
So here we have a tablet that's just been excavated. As you can see it's very small,
but it's complete which is great because most the tablets we do find here are fragmentary.
Complete tablets are quite rare. We know it's rectangular in shape and we know from the
horizontal lines that we can kind of see across the surface that it was probably inscribed
on both sides of the tablet. But at the moment, it's covered in silt and clay and needs to
be cleaned, so we do not know yet what information this tablet contains. So now this tablet is
going to go to my colleague Stefka for conservation and then hopefully once she cleans it we'll
be able to see what's inscribed upon the surface. STEFKA BARGAZOVA: So once the object is registered
and a first assessment is made by our registrar Garreth, the object comes to me and I investigate
further under magnification, just to determine what's the best approach to treat the object.
So my first assessment obviously is looking at stability, because from the moment an object
is taken out of the ground we basically change its environment. So we expose it to external
factors that could damage it. So my job is basically to prevent this damage from happening,
like a first line of preservation let's say. So I make sure that the object that comes
to us it's preserved in its original state, it's cleaned to make it legible to read, and
it's stabilized and packed and safe ready to go to the museum in Baghdad. So it looks
on the first look that physically, structurally the tablet is stable but it's covered with
soil so I cannot really see much of the inscription. I can see that there is something underneath.
The soil doesn't have any signs of salts, which is a good sign and as we've worked on
this type of tablets already, so I know that the clay actually it's quite stable - very
good quality. So I would expect the soil will be easier to clean, and hopefully there will
be a fully preserved inscription underneath.
This season is a bit more challenging from object a conservation point of view, as we
received a lot of cuneiform tablets. They are non-fired, only very lightly sun dried
clay. The challenge is basically to keep them intact and stable. Depending on which context
they are found and which layer some of them come already dry and the soil is very hard
so those are really hard to clean and also to see whether there is any inscription preserved.
Another tablet from another context arrives actually wet. I leave them to dry a little
bit, but only to a stage where it's possible to clean, otherwise soluble salts start appearing
on the surface which causes cracking and also loss of surface, which we don't want. That's
why the sooner I clean and stabilize the environment and slowly dry the tablets the better the
dry very dry cuneiforms I need to actually make sure that I'm not removing surface while
trying to remove a very hard soil on top so I basically there is the opposite treatment
where I have to slightly damp the soil it will reduce the risk of damage it's and loss
of surface as a object's conservator this has been most probably the most challenging
job
in general ever very rarely someone gets to actually work on just freshly excavated from
the ground cuneiform they're very rare and usually you find them on in museums already
conserved and stable so it is a big opportunity for me as well
ELLIE ATKINS: I've just received a tablet that's come from conservation, and I'm going
to photograph it. So I need to photograph finds of all sorts. We get through the studio
about 12 to 15 tablets a day and it takes anywhere between 10 minutes to half an hour
depending on how broken the tablet is or how curved the tablet is. We have to photograph
the tablet with the light in the top lefthand corner so that the shadows are in the correct
place for it to be read.
I photography the tablet 6x. The writing on the tablet reads down the front, and then
we flip it on its horizontal axis and then read down the back of it, and some of the
writing goes on top or bottom or either side of the tablet.
So we photograph: front, bottom, back, top, left and right. And then we put it into a
net in Photoshop and send them to John Taylor in London, who then transcribes them.
JON TAYLOR: My role is to read the texts that come out of the ground, and to explain to
the rest of the team what they are and how it might help them to understand what they're
digging. We’ve found a number of different groups of tablets from the site. Some of them
are school practice tablets basically. Others are to do with one type of thing, perhaps
there’s a group that mentions a particular official - they must have belonged together
at one point in the ancient world. This one is a piece of administration. It's the kind
of thing we expect from the site, most tablets from this period are paperwork from big institutions
like a palace or a temple. They're sucking in raw commodities, they're processing them
and they're distributing them to other organizations or to people who need to use them.
These types of tablets are usually quite easy to identify just from looking at them really.
So you start out and perhaps you get the size and the shape and you have a little look at
the writing. You look for key things like maybe there are numbers, and very quickly
you'll get an idea of roughly what it is. So you can generally tell these administrative
texts quite quickly. Before actually reading the text I would expect that it would be something
to do with barley or sheep, as the foundations of the economy. And actually having read it,
it is indeed something to do with barley mostly. It's different types of flour.
And the text says that these are ‘regular offerings for’ something called ‘the household’.
And we're not sure which household that is actually, but it will be probably one of the
temples. So there are different grades of flour, there's a fine one, there's a coarse
one, and a few other types. And one of them we think is semolina. And they are being distributed
to various officials. So in the case of this particular tablet we
have a number of people mentioned. There’s somebody called Barimu. There's somebody else
called Utu-me’e. And there's somebody called Ush’e. Unfortunately, we don't yet know
those people from other tablets. And at the end there's a total where, hopefully
if the scribe has done his sums right, there'll be a figure that he can carry forward to his
end-of-year accounts to work out whether there's a debit or a credit.
So I've got here another tablet. It's not the tablet from Tello, it's another one that's
been in the collection for many, many years. It's very similar to that tablet though, in
that it's a list of different types of flour and grain and things being distributed to
people. In this particular example there are a few juicy details actually. One of them
is that there's a group of 37 people who are receiving these rations I guess, and they're
described as ‘translators’. Unfortunately though, it doesn't say which languages they're
translating between.
From these tablets we can learn all sorts of different occupations that people might
have had, whether they're working in the fields, there are leather workers, there are skilled
silversmiths. And if we're really lucky, the tablet might have something we call a ‘year
name’, which is their way of counting time. But rather than counting from an arbitrary
start point and going: ‘1, 2, 3, 4…’ each year has a specific name of something
really exciting that happened in the previous year. And that's quite valuable information
for us, because we have very little political history from this time; the kings and what
they do, the building and the battles and things like that. So actually the year names
from the paperwork can often tell us of the bigger picture, the political history of the
ancient city. Once I've read the text, I will go back to
a Google Sheet that we all share and I will put in basic information, it's really just
the headlines, the key information about the date, the content, what type of text it is
or if it mentions an institution or a person, something like that. After the main excavation
report is published, we'll have to also do a more detailed study of the tablets themselves
and exactly what they say, and we will do that in collaboration also with an Iraqi colleague
who will join me as what we call an epigrapher of the site.
And in order to make the most use out of these tablets, we need to put them back into groups
if we can, because individually they're not particularly exciting. They're not a great
story of literature or they're not, you know, the heartfelt pleas from one person to another.
It's administrative material. It's paperwork. It's bureaucracy. But when you put them together
into these groups, you can understand perhaps the career of an official. You can understand
perhaps the scale of the economy, how things are moving around. And you can understand,
you know, life in the ancient city. Once you collect them back into what might have been
their archives, if you like. The dossier that they came from. After the main excavation
report is published, we'll have to also do a more detailed study of the tablets themselves
and exactly what they say, and we will do that in collaboration also with an Iraqi colleague
who will join me as what we call an epigrapher of the site.
NICK: Is there anything else you want to say? ASHLEY POOLEY: So I I think it's important
to say that a lot of Iraq's archeaology is in other places it's been taken elsewhere
the culture's been appropriated in some way we have collections in Istanbul and in London
and in Paris but this tablet and all of the others that we find will go to Baghdad and
they will stay in Baghdad Iraqi people will have collections of of tablets of their of
archives from from their past and that that fundamentally is why I'm here