Fragments of a Forgotten Past

Semitic Museum exhibit reveals daily life in ancient world

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

"No! Absolutely not! Not a word of it is true! I did not have sex with her!"

The man who spoke these words was a politician, but don't go jumping to conclusions. His name was Kushshi-harbi, and almost 3,500 years ago he was mayor of the city of Nuzi in what is now northeastern Iraq. A group of Kushshi-harbi's fellow citizens brought charges against him that included not only illicit sexual relations but kidnapping and appropriation of temple property.

These charges, along with the outraged mayor's furious denials, are known to us through a series of clay tablets discovered at Nuzi and now displayed in the second floor gallery of the Semitic Museum. They are part of a new exhibition called "Nuzi and the Hurrians: Fragments of a Forgotten Past."

A Treasure Trove of Documents

The pillow-shaped tablets, small enough to be held in the palm of one hand, and crowded with marginless lines of tiny cuneiform writing, appear to be depositions in Kushshi-harbe's trial. The verdict has not been found.

Almost 5,000 clay tablets, along with numerous other objects, were unearthed at Nuzi between 1927 and 1931 in a Harvard-sponsored dig. A large portion of those objects became part of the permanent collections of the Semitic Museum, the Fogg, and the Sackler. This is the first time in more than 60 years that the Nuzi artifacts have been placed on public display.

The exhibition was planned to coincide with an important conference taking place at Harvard July 5-10 -- the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale -- which will bring Assyriologists from all over the world to discuss the latest discoveries and issues in their field. Assyriology takes its name from the Assyrians, who dominated the ancient Near East from the 9th to the 7th century B.C.

According to curator James Armstrong, the Nuzi archives are the Semitic Museum's most important collection because of the insight they provide into the workings of second millennium B.C. Near Eastern society.

"What the Nuzi archives give us is a detailed look at the workings of this society with a fineness of focus and detail that is unparalleled anywhere else," he said.

Riveting Human Stories

Most of the tablets deal with legal and financial matters, but as with comparable documents in our own time, there are riveting human stories told between the lines.

One tablet, for example, tells of a struggle between a rich woman named Tulpannaya and her poor dependent, Kisaya. Tulpannaya adopted Kisaya as a daughter, but in effect the younger woman was little more than a slave, and her mistress reserved the right to marry her to a male slave of her choice.

Kisaya rebelled and tried to convince the court that she was not really Tulpannaya's property and should be allowed to marry whom she pleased. But Tulpannaya, who obviously possessed an efficient filing system, was able to produce the original contract, stamped with the seals of 20 witnesses, and the court chose in her favor. Kisaya was forced to return to servitude.

Another group of tablets relates a family saga worthy of a TV mini-series. A man named Huya built up a fortune in real estate, but his sons quarreled, and one of them, Tarmiya, prospered at the expense of the other. Pai-tilla, the son of this unlucky brother, continued the family's downward slide. One tablet shows him ceding land to his prosperous uncle. Another records what seems to be the family's complete disintegration. Pai-tilla complains that a man named Akip-tashinni (a creditor perhaps?) has sold his mother and sister into a foreign country and that he has lost his household gods.

The Nuzi collection is also valuable because of the light it throws on the Hurrians, an ancient people who are historically important, but not very well known.

Originating in Anatolia (present-day Turkey), the Hurrians migrated southward, settling in the upper Tigris-Euphrates valley by the mid-third millennium B.C. Their first capital was called Urkesh and has been recently excavated.

In the second millennium they established the empire of Mittani (not a true empire according to Armstrong, but "an area of domination"), whose capital of Washshukkanni has not yet been identified. Mittani rivaled Egypt and Babylonia in power, but by 1200 B.C. it had vanished, wiped out by the Hittites and the Assyrians.

Borrowers and Innovators

Culturally, the Hurrians were great borrowers. Although there are a few cuneiform tablets in the Hurrian language, most are in a Hurrian dialect of Babylonian, the civilization to their south which exerted a powerful cultural influence.

They borrowed graphic motifs as well. A fresco found in the palace at Nuzi has been reproduced in vivid colors on the walls of the exhibition space by artist Diane Gilson. The images used include an Egyptian Hathor head (a woman with bull's ears), a Mycenean bull's head combined with the symbol for the Sumerian goddess Inanna, and the Hurrian symbol of the tree of life.

"It was a very synthetic, polyglot culture," Armstrong said.

They were also great technological innovators. Excavators at Nuzi have discovered a number of significant firsts. These include the earliest glass industry ever found and the earliest examples of true glaze applied to pottery. The glazes and glassware are badly faded now, but a broken glass ingot reveals the vivid sea-blue color that originally graced these objects.

The earliest examples of brass from the ancient Near East were also discovered at Nuzi, in the form of two brass rings from the temple area. The composition of the rings was unknown until last year when Harvard loaned them to MIT archaeology professor Heather Lechtman to be analyzed by students in her course on ancient metallurgy. Boston University graduate student Christine Bedore identified the distinctive alloy of copper and zinc that made up the rings, thus pushing the history of brass production back about 1,000 years.

Another exhibition case displays the delicately carved cylinder seals that people of the ancient Near East used to impress their personal mark on legal documents, letters, and other objects. Another shows an assortment of fine ceramics.

Several cases display material from Nuzi's temple, which was dedicated to Ishtar, goddess of love and war. There are strings of glass beads that may have hung from the temple walls, ceremonial weapons brandished by Ishtar in her warrior aspect, and a number of ceramic representations of lions. Some of the lions are quite short and squat and look suspiciously like pigs, but their paws identify them clearly as the king of beasts.

What is remarkable about these examples of art and technology is that Nuzi was no royal city where the finest craftsmen might have congregated, but an ordinary provincial farming town. It was part of the small kingdom of Arrapha, which formed part of the federation of states known as Mittani, which itself existed on the outskirts of the older and more culturally dominant civilization of Babylonia.

"Nuzi is politically provincial to Mittani and culturally provincial to Babylonia," said Armstrong. "There are many excavations that give us a picture of the central areas of the ancient Near East. Nuzi is one of the few places that give us a clear picture of the periphery."