4,000-Year-Old Clay Tablets Show Ancient Sumerians’ Obsession With Government Bureaucracy
The artifacts were excavated from a city dating back to the third millennium B.C.E. by researchers from Iraq and the British Museum
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In southern Iraq, archaeologists have excavated a remarkable collection of carved clay tablets—ancient records of Akkadia, the world’s oldest empire. Marked with the administrative details of government, the tablets have illuminated the complicated bureaucracy of an ancient Mesopotamian civilization.
The tablets were discovered in the Sumerian site of Girsu, called Tello today. Settled around 4500 B.C.E. in modern-day Iraq, Sumer is the world’s oldest known civilization. During the third millennium B.C.E., Sumerians built Girsu, a “megacity,” and dedicated it to the deity Ningirsu, according to the Girsu Project—a collaborative research project by the British Museum and Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.
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Around 2300 B.C.E., the Mesopotamian king Sargon—a native of the elusive Akkad—conquered Girsu and other Sumerian cities, and he whipped them into administrative shape.
“Sargon developed this new form of governance by conquering all the Sumerian cities of Mesopotamia, creating what most historians call the first empire in the world,” Girsu Project Director Sébastien Rey, the British Museum’s curator for ancient Mesopotamia, tells the Observer’s Dalya Alberge.
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The Girsu Project researchers found more than 200 tablets and some 50 cylinder seal impressions of Akkadian administrators in Girsu. These clay records are incredibly detailed, showing fierce governmental oversight by the Akkadian Empire.
“They note absolutely everything down,” Rey tells the Observer. “If a sheep dies at the very edge of the empire, it will be noted. They are obsessed with bureaucracy.”
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Written partially in cuneiform—an ancient Middle Eastern writing system—the tablets contain records of state affairs, blueprints for buildings, maps of canals and accounts of commodities like livestock, fish, barley, cloth and gems. One tablet lists “250 grams of gold / 500 grams of silver/ … fattened cows… / 30 litres of beer,” as conservator Dana Goodburn-Brown, who is cleaning the artifacts, tells the Observer.
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As Rey tells the Independent’s Bryony Gooch, the tablets “record all aspects of Sumerian life, and above all they name real people, their names, their jobs.” The listed citizens include women, men and children, and occupations range from stone-cutter to temple-sweeper. And though the Akkadian Empire was led by men, some women did hold important roles, like that of “high priestess,” Rey tells the Observer.
Girsu was first rediscovered in the 19th century. Since World War II, it’s been looted and neglected, “left open and exposed with no conservation work to address long-term stability or issues of erosion,” per the Girsu Project. The site’s missing or decontextualized artifacts previously made for fuzzy conclusions about the Akkad government. The newly-discovered tablets—unearthed in the footprint of a mud-brick, multi-room archive building—paint a clear picture.
“The new finds were preserved in situ, so in their original context, and we can say for sure that we have indeed the very first physical evidence of imperial control in the world,” Rey tells the Observer. “This is completely new.”
