Klaus Wagensonner Photos
Seals from the city of Uruk dating to the second half of the 4th millennium frequently depict a prominent figure, probably the ruler, feeding the temple flock.
The students in school have become lazy, and parents are resorting to bribing teachers to give them good grades. A political leader is building a wall to keep out foreigners, but it doesn’t seem to be working. A couple people are considering avoiding an import tax by hiding precious metals in their underwear.
These aren’t the headlines from today’s paper. They’re written on cuneiform tablets that are part of “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection,” a special exhibit at the Peabody Museum on Whitney Avenue that, in giving voice to the distant past — the cradle of civilization — creates startling connections to the present.
The exhibit runs through June 30, 2020.
“Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks,” curated by Agnete Wisti Lassen, Eckart Frahm, and Klaus Wagensonner, came about due to a Yale administrative decision in May 2017 to connect the university’s collection of Babylonian artifacts — housed in Sterling Library, where the floors are reinforced to support the weight of all those clay tablets — with the Peabody Museum. The museum’s administration suggested an exhibit to commemorate this, and so the museum’s first-floor gallery is now full of artifacts dating from thousands of years ago, detailing the political struggles, scientific discoveries, and realities of day-to-day life in what is now Iraq and Syria. The artifacts and their accompanying texts and displays offer much more than a passing glimpse of how people got by in that region so long ago, from marital disputes to making meals, an immediacy made all the more poignant by the conflicts that are ravaging that region today.
Frahm.
The artifacts date from about 4000 BC to 500 BC, or “more than half of history,” as Frahm put it. The oldest cuneiform tablets are from the city of Uruk, where the writing was invented. The first tablets recorded economic transactions — receipts, essentially — of livestock like goats and sheep, or cataloged the natural world around the writers, naming birds, trees, and fish. There was, Frahm said, an “encyclopedic fervor” among the early Mesopotamians. As writing spread, literature, along with a host of other things, wasn’t far behind. Writing a letter in cuneiform, said Wagensonner, required maybe 60 separate signs, and many people could do it. A piece of Mesopotamian scholarship — say, on astronomy — needed maybe 600 or 700 signs. That the medium was clay, as opposed to the papyrus the Egyptians used to the west, made Mesopotamian documents that much more permanent, and is one reason why the Peabody’s exhibit is so rich in detail.
Also unlike the Egyptians to the west, who imagined an afterlife in vivid detail, the Mesopotamians “considered the netherworld a dim, dusty place, so it was important to be remembered.” That’s one of the main concerns of The Epic of Gilgamesh, world literature’s first epic poem and possibly also its first recorded existential crisis. First passed around in the region’s oral tradition, in time it began to be written down, leading to “different versions and different stories,” Frahm said. Yet amid the fragments found, there are still pieces of the story missing. “It’s fun — you have to think about what should be in the gaps,” Frahm said.
The monster Humbaba from The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Much early Mesopotamian literature was handed down anonymously. But in time someone put her name on what she wrote down. The “first author in world history,” Frahm said, “is a woman” by the name of Enheduana, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, a king who in the third millennium BC unified parts of western Asia under his rule. Enheduana was a priestess of the moon god Nanna in Ur. She wrote religious texts, a collection of hymns, and works in praise of Inana, a goddess of love and war — made “as an act of rebellion against her father,” Frahm said.
Mesopotamia was riotously polytheistic, with one list from the second millennium BC cataloging more than two thousand gods whom people paid homage to in hopes of warding off evil and improving their lot in life. They also, however, had demons who could not to assuaged, such as Lamashtu, who had the head of a lioness, the teeth and ears of a donkey, and the feet of a bird. Often found nursing a pig and a dog, she was “certainly not nice,” Frahm said, and was held responsible for killing pregnant women and babies — the higher child mortality rate made incarnate. As with other polytheistic faiths, it could feel at times almost more practical. The question that plagues monotheism — why does God let bad things happen to good people? — is solved in polytheism. Christians studying the religious beliefs of ancient Mesopotamia, said Frahm, found that the gods were “far too much like human beings.”
And as “Mesopotamia Speaks,” the ancient Mesopotamians were in other ways very much like us. The curators cheekily included millennia-old erotica in the form of small statues, one depicting a sex act much more suggestive of lust than love. In the position she’s in, the woman doesn’t even have to stop having sex in order to drink beer from a straw. “They were probably not very sqeaumish,” Frahm said of Mesopotamian mores about sex. Frahm and Wagonsonner speculated that these pieces were perhaps from taverns or brothels, though they couldn’t say for sure. (Parents: these particular pieces are quite small and high up enough to not be at eye level for small children — nor, apart from the positions the figures are in, are they explicit.)
Four unique tablets contain recipes for various types of stews, soups, and pies. Three of these tablets date to the early second millennium and are therefore the earliest written recipes in human history.
The curators also included love poems, between women and men and between men and men (perhaps curiously, they couldn’t find examples of love poems from women to women). Marriage contracts sealed the deal, as they do today, but could be undone by divorce, just like today. For marriages that stayed together, among the collection are even lullabies for children, “some of the earliest recorded in history,” Frahm said. The idea was that screaming and crying children could irritate the spirits in the hourse, and the lullabies talked about quieting down to “keep the house ghosts and house gods happy.” The exhibit even contains numerous recipes for meals that Frahm claimed to have eaten and enjoyed, information about music — there was a prayer for every string of a harp — and games made out of clay that people used to pass the time.
And just as the depictions of day-to-day life are full of sparks of recognition, so too is the part of the exhibit about politics. The famous Nebuchadnezzar may have tried to portray himself as nearly flawless and powerful, but that was news to a detractor who was imprisoned for throwing far too much shade the leader’s way, or to the spy who write his ruler to thwart a coup attempt, or the unruly magnates that Nebuchadnezzar killed in a purge. Similarly, near the end of the third millenium BC, King Shu-Suen of Ur decided to build a wall to keep out the Amorites, who were semi-nomadic. This project failed to keep the Amorites out. But instead of conquering them, the Amorite immigrants adopted elements of Mesopotamian civilization and contributed to its advancement toward today.
The history of why we can see all of this and more in the Peabody is fraught, and the exhibit doesn’t shy away from it. Yale’s Babylonian collection was a gift from J. Pierpont Morgan in 1911; the banker had assembled the collection by buying the artifacts on the antiquities market. At that time, it’s certain that not every transaction was legitimate. Some of the reliefs in the exhibit were taken from a palace in the ancient Iraqi city of Nimrud in the 1850s by Christian missionaries. Yale is, of course, not alone in this. The acquisition of Middle Eastern artifacts by European powers, irrefutably, went hand in hand with colonialism and empire building.
Yet Yale’s success in preserving these pieces counts for something too. That palace in Nimrud, for example, was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. As Frahm related, in addition to religious considerations, ISIS has been demolishing sites from antiquity as a rebuke, not only to the West, which ISIS sees as fetishizing the Middle Eastern past, but also to the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who sought to unite disparate groups in Iraq — perhaps cynically — by asserting their common Mesopotamian heritage. Frahm estimated that during the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, hundreds of thousands of artifacts have gone missing. Tens of thousands of them have resurfaced in the black market. The others may be lost, though Frahm has also noted, with mixed feelings, the way the destruction of archeological sites has sometimes produced a greater outcry than the heavy losses of life in the same conflicts.
Meanwhile, Yale is in the process of preserving its collection of Mesopotamian artifacts and making it more available for study by creating 3D digital images and actual 3D models of them, some of while are on display in the exhibit to touch. If nothing else, it seems important to get the information out, to let as many people see it and learn from it. This release of information, given the way Middle Eastern politics turn on history and identity, is itself a bit of political move — even a little subversive in the way it takes a little power away from leaders seeking to turn what has come before into a political tool. After all, Frahm said, “whoever wins the war to define the past also gets to define the future.” An exhibit like “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks” gives us the chance to recognize ourselves in the past, and define it more carefully.
“Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks: Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” runs at the Peabody Museum, 170 Whitney Ave., through June 30. Visit the museum’s website for hours and more information.
