rot or not, and cuneiform

.

This week's Archaeology's Dirty Little Secrets topic is "What has survived for us to find?  And what have we lost?"


Dr. Alcock lectured about things that can make or break the archeological record.  On one hand there is human activity, and on the other, natural (climatic and/or environmental) events.


Today I listened to (and watched) a conversation about what would happen to a collection of items if they were buried under the Brown University quad for 100 years, and what would happen to them if they were buried in Egypt for those 100 years.

The items they imagined burying included a doll in ethnic dress (plastic face, and the rest is all natural fibers); a modern claw hammer; an arrow with a glass point, a wooden shaft, and natural feather fletching; a ceramic bowl; a bronze bowl; beaded leather baby shoes; and a stone figure of a man riding a horse.

It is so dry in Egypt that things like feathers and food and fiber (cloth, papyrus) very often survive.  The microorganisms that would cause decay can't survive in that dry climate. 

It's so dry in Egypt that in the early days of mummification (before they really figured out what they were doing) a mummified body wouldn't last as long as an un-mummified one that was put straight into the sand.  (!!!)  The only natural problem that was mentioned in Egypt was termites, eating wood.  (People destroying stuff -- primarily because they need the space -- is a huge problem in Egypt.  We were told that every archaeological site in Egypt is at risk.........) 

It's much wetter on the campus of Brown University (where Sue Alcock's day job is, which is why that location was featured). 

In Egypt, wood buried 100 years would probably be gone, but everything else would be pristine.  At Brown, the ceramic bowl and the glass arrowhead would survive (but might well be broken, buried in damp soil that would freeze and thaw), all the wood would be gone, as would the doll (aside from the plastic face), and the arrow's feathers.  The bronze bowl would survive at Brown (but would be a lot more corroded), and in Egypt it "would survive for 1000 years, not just 100, and *might* have a bit of deterioration."  The hammer head would be very rusty at Brown, and pristine in Egypt.  The baby shoes would be fine in Egypt, but at Brown, only the beads would remain, and figuring out they had embellished baby shoes would be extremely problematic.

And the stone figure would be just fine everywhere...................

None of this is surprising (well, ok, termites in a very dry environment?  I thought that was surprising....), but isn't it interesting to hear what sorts of things survive where?  We also heard about a lot of Roman writing -- ink on birch tablets -- which survived at Vindolanda (near Hadrian's wall), because of the particular clay soil there, but which is vanishingly rare in the rest of the Roman empire.....  The particular place things were abandoned has everything to do with whether they survive.  Unless they are stone or ceramic in which case, they may survive regardless. 

(Digression:  What about glass, I wonder?  It wasn't mentioned except in passing.....  End of Digression.)



Another topic this week is cuneiform.  Cuneiform is the script they used for writing on clay tablets, starting about 5000 years ago.  Cuneiform was developed so people could write in Sumerian, but like the Roman alphabet it was used for many different languages, including Hittite and Akkadian.

If the tablets on which cuneiform was written were exposed to fire (deliberately or accidentally), they became impervious to weather in Babylon (Iraq).  Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets have survived to this day (most of which have been put in drawers somewhere and never studied.....).  The earliest of the clay tablets we have today were clerical -- a way to tally and keep track of beer and barley (if I remember correctly from A History of the World in 100 Objects....).  Not long thereafter, there were historic texts, and literary texts.  The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down in Sumerian, Hittite, and Akkadian (we have the tablets....).

Cuneiform means "wedge shaped" -- the stylus used to write cuneiform has square edges and corners.  When one of those corners is pressed into damp clay, it leaves a wedge-shaped mark.  A group of wedge-shaped marks make up a syllabogram -- which represents one syllable.  (If you click through the cuneiform link, scroll down a bit to see the "all wedges, all the time" sort of script.)

(Digression:  I knew there were writing systems where each symbol is a sound, and I knew there were writing systems where each symbol is a word, but I didn't know there were writing systems where each symbol is a syllable.  Apparently Mayan script is also composed of syllabograms.  End of Digression.)

We (and by "we" I mean "humankind") have cuneiform tablets written by children who were learning how to be scribes.  Tablets full of vertical wedges.  Tablets full of horizontal wedges.  Tablets full of diagonal wedges.   Tablets turned into squished handfuls of clay (by frustrated students?). 



Cuneiform was in regular daily use from 3000 BCE ("before common era") to about 0 -- which means that the last regular users of cuneiform were (much!) closer in time to us than to the people who invented/developed cuneiform.

Wow, eh?



Isn't it cool that we know all this stuff?


I am finding this class to be so interesting!  I would definitely listen to these lectures just for fun, and would read the readings, likewise!

.