4.5: What Was the Physical Medium and Context of the Text?
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The analysis of clays used to make tablets in the cuneiform tradition is in the early stages of development (Taylor 2011). Most significant has been the work of Yuval Goren and colleagues in applying mineralogical and chemical analyses to corpora of clay tablets in order to explore issues of provenance and movement of inscribed clay tablets (Goren et al. 2004). The basic premise of their work is that “Even within an assemblage of documents composed by the same individual, each tablet should be treated as a unique artefact, created under very special and distinctive circumstances” (Goren et al. 2004: 316). As mentioned above, methods have built upon earlier uses of Neutron Activation Analysis, applying Inductively Coupled Plasma analyses combined with systematic study of micropalaeontology and micropalaeobotany in order to characterise inclusions within clay matrices (Cartwright and Taylor 2011). In a pioneering and exhaustive study by Goren et al. of around 300 clay tablets found at el-Amarna in Egypt, dated to the mid-14 th century bc, these approaches have been integrated with geological and historical studies in the generation of truly significant interpretations relating to the selection of clays for tablet manufacture, the deliberate addition of inclusions to the clay, the processes of firing of tablets to ensure durability, and a host of insights into the historical specifics of cuneiform communication between city-states of several regions of the ancient Near East in the international age of the Late Bronze Age.
The most promising recent development has been the application of a new generation of portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF) analysers to clay tablets from the Near Eastern past, as conducted by Goren et al. (2011) on tablets from the Hittite capital Hattusa and other sites. Increasingly sensitive capabilities of pXRF, coupled with the ability to characterise clay elements through non- invasive, non-destructive means, have opened a new chapter in archaeometric investigation of clay tablets and clay sealings. As touched on previously, the full implications of the new technology have yet to be articulated and realised but there is hope that access can increasingly be had to multiple museum collections of tablets and sealings in systematic programmes of analysis and interpretation. Such programmes will need to comprise integrated strategies involving archaeologists, historians, geologists and materials scientists.
The materiality of each text has a specific and contingent trajectory. The display of Neo-Assyrian texts, cut into stone slabs, within their palatial contexts has been an especially fruitful arena for integrated epigraphical and archaeological investigation, centring on the physicality of text. To the forefront has been the work of John Russell (1999) whose meticulous study of the location of stone inscriptions within Neo-Assyrian palaces begins with a vivid description of the materiality of text in Assurnasirpal II’s 9 th century BC palace at Nimrud:
“Once upon a time, a long time ago, anyone fortunate — or unfortunate — enough to enter the palace of ‘the king of the world, king of Assyria’, would have been surrounded by texts. In the first great Neo-Assyrian palace, the palace of Assurnasirpal II at Kalhu (Nimrud), texts were everywhere. The bull and lion colossi in the major doorways carried texts. The pavement slabs in those doorways, and in every other doorway, carried texts. Every floor slab in every paved room carried a text. And each one of the hundreds of wall slabs, sculptured and plain, carried a text” (Russell 1999: 1).
Russell (1999) interprets the role of texts within the architectural scheme of Neo-Assyrian palaces at several levels, including the materialisation of a desire to mark royal ownership of the newly-built palace, the decorative transformation of “dull structural fittings into active royal monuments”, the affirmation of a royal aura to the palatial monument, and above all the agency of texts as “visual icons of kingship” (Russell 1999: 230).