The Work on Site: Clay Tablets under the Microscope
Anmar A. Fadhil and Carmen Gütschow
Clay tablets need to be properly conserved and stored to avoid their deterioration. This applies to both unfired and fired objects — in all collections around the world. There is also a lot to do in this respect in the Iraq Museum.
A century-old find as a case study
As a cuneiform specialist and clay tablet conservator, we are currently working in Baghdad on the tablets from the temple library of the ancient city of Sippar. In 1985/86, the 8th excavation campaign of the University of Baghdad brought to light a spectacular find: a collection of more than 300 cuneiform tablets and further numerous fragments were found in the wall shelves in which they had been stored in the first millennium BCE (ABB). Benjamin R. Foster of Yale University described it in the Washington Post as “the kind of discovery that one waits 100 years to see.” These tablets fill in gaps in the reconstruction of some of the most important texts in Babylonian literature, for example the Story of the Flood.
Iraqi researchers (including Anmar’s father Abdullilah Fadhil) quickly began to publish this treasure, but the wars from 1991 onwards prevented continuous work. Today, almost 40 years after their discovery, not even a tenth of the tablets have been published. After their excavation, many could only be provisionally conserved. Records of the restoration measures taken at the time no longer exist, and so it is impossible to say for sure whether the tablets were also subjected to desalination after firing (a common procedure at the time). According to today’s assessment, this does not seem to have been the case, and this circumstance is probably the main reason why the state of preservation has often deteriorated considerably. On an unfired tablet, one can observe the massive growth of salt crystals, which break through from the interior in countless small elevations onto the entire surface, drastically impairing the legibility of the cuneiform writing.
Salt damage has caused many tablets to disintegrate into fragments. On others, the surface is flaking off in flakes or as powder, gradually losing the substance. The wedges that make up the characters are often only 1-2 mm deep, and so the loss of the surface always means a loss of the written information. In the worst case, only a lump of clay remains.
Wedge by wedge to new insights
What to do? Clay tablets are objects that have to be picked up again and again for philological work. Conservation and restoration provide the necessary stability. The surface usually needs to be reinforced, some also need additions to compensate for the stability of missing parts — always without affecting the cuneiform writing: too thick an application of adhesives, for example, can lead to undesirable gloss or make wedges illegible.
Central to our new restoration of the tablets is checking how visible the cuneiform writing is. Practically every tablet can be made more legible if it is carefully cleaned, wedge by wedge. In the past, tablets were simply brushed, but this did not remove all the dirt. In many cases, wedges are incompletely exposed or whole passages are still completely covered by soil. Under the microscope, the differences between the clay of the tablet and such overlays of clay and sand are clearly visible, and precise cleaning is possible with pointed scalpels, needles and brushes. In this way, unclear passages of text can be greatly improved in their readability, and sometimes entire lines come to light anew. Such discoveries sweeten the great amount of work!
Let's wrap it up
But it is also about seemingly very simple things. A central point of preventive conservation is the packaging and storage of the tablets. Ideally, each tablet is well protected in its own sturdy box of the right size. At the Iraq Museum, most of the tablets are currently still packed in rather thin cardboard boxes, some of which are already torn. In some cases this has already led to breakage, as the lack of protection can cause new damage with every movement. Some boxes are too small for the tablets, which are therefore easily damaged when pieces stick out. In other cases, several fragments lie together in a box and bump and rub against each other when they roll around. Some boxes are padded with a little cotton wool, but this too is problematic. On the one hand, this is now dirty, but above all, this hygroscopic material supports the dangerous activities of salt in a humid atmosphere and also mould growth. Therefore, we pack the tablets in stable and acid-free boxes lined with mats of polyethylene foam, a non-hygroscopic material, which guarantee a stable position of the clay tablet.
We have a lot planned for the CAIC project. As a clay tablet conservator, Carmen will regularly spend time in Baghdad working her way through the hundred thousand or so clay tablets and fragments in the Iraq Museum, conserving many of them herself, but above all training two museum employees, because this major task must mainly be carried out by Iraqi specialists on site.
Digital recordings for today and tomorrow
Only a few tablets in the Iraq Museum have been digitally photographed so far. In a young subject like Assyriology, where the first clay tablets were excavated barely a century and a half ago, the long-term documentation of the material is still a challenge. Today, modern conservators often consider the solutions adopted by their earlier colleagues to be inappropriate. Burning the tablets, once the universal method for their preservation, is now considered invasive and unnecessary. Just as old conservation approaches have been proven wrong, it is likely that some contemporary ideas will also be viewed critically in the future. For this reason, the CAIC project has set itself the goal of comprehensively documenting the clay tablets photographically. This photographic material will be used by future generations in the same way that we use any old photograph today that still shows the tablets in a better physical condition.
Our photographic documentation therefore has a double purpose: it serves us today as working material in the editorial processing in Munich and it should preserve an easily accessible image of the tablets for the future. To fulfill both purposes, our strategy tries to reconcile speed and longevity and to collect as much information as possible in files of manageable size. For each tablet, two sets of digital images are created: one in High Dynamic Range (HDR), which is currently the best method for obtaining superbly legible photos that are easy to share, and the other in Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), which allows for the subsequent virtual illumination of the object and is particularly suitable when there are differences in the depth of the surface - as always with cuneiform writing. We are also experimenting with 3D imaging.
Modern approaches to research that focus on the physical aspects of documents have largely had to ignore the rich material from the Iraq Museum. With the progressive photographing of the tablets and making them available online, this should change soon. A dedicated photo studio is currently being set up at the museum so that the work within CAIC can move forward quickly.