Scholars of the ancient Near East are fortunate in that the subjects of our study wrote on clay. We already have hundreds of thousands of cuneiform-script clay tablets in our museums, and there are certainly many times that number still to be excavated — hopefully only through modern legal archaeological investigation. The recent looting and destruction of entire ancient cities in southern Iraq (Stone and Farchakh Bajjaly 2008) has without doubt led to serious disruption to the evidential base of cuneiform culture, in particular as regards its all-important archaeological context, but we have no way of measuring the full extent of that disruption. Nevertheless, it is important that we consider how representative is our so-far recovered collection of cuneiform texts. A thoughtful comment on this topic is provided by Aage Westenholz (2002):
“I reckon that of all the texts that were produced, 99 percent were destroyed, most of it quite soon — the clay of the tablets was recycled. Of the 1 percent that survived and is still buried in the ground, about 1 percent has been recovered in excavations; and of that, about one-half has been made available to scholarship in often less-than-adequate publications. A sample of one in 20,000, quite unevenly distributed by random chance!” (Westenholz 2002: 23–24).
It is worth noting that ancient Near Eastern scribes also wrote on materials other than clay tablets and stone monuments, especially towards the end of the cuneiform period. Writing-boards, papyri and parchments are attested by occasional archaeological evidence, such as waxed boards from Nimrud (Wiseman 1955) and the Ulu Burun ship-wreck (Payton 1991; see also Whittaker, this volume), and by depictions on Assyrian reliefs. The Great Temple at Hattusa, capital of the Hittite empire of Anatolia, employed in the 13th century bc no fewer than 52 scribes, 33 of whom were noted as writing on wooden boards not on clay tablets (Bryce 2002: 60). This scribal proportion suggests that as much as 60% of the Hittite written record may have been recorded on wood. Needless to say, none of those wooden tablets have yet been found in the archaeological record while so far more than 30,000 clay tablet fragments have been recovered from Hattusa and other Hittite sites (Collins 2007: 141). There are also rare instances of cuneiform script cut into metal plaques such as the famous bronze treaty of Tudhaliya IV from the Sphinx Gate at Hattusa (Otten 1988).
We can make a final point about the durability and materiality of cuneiform culture. The transmission of knowledge from the ancient Near East to scholars today is largely direct and physical, without intermediaries, unlike most extended texts from the Classical world which reach us in the form of the modern printed page (or digital screen) having been copied and often altered over centuries of transmission through a variety of media. Today we can hold in our hands the very first exemplars of writing from the city of Uruk, impressed on the soft clay some 5200 years ago. We can feel the weight and shape of the tablet, even smell its clay, very much as the ancient scribe did. Our encounter with cuneiform culture through the shape and texture of its surviving clay tablets keeps us firmly attached to its ancient materiality, preserved indeed from far-off days.
I conclude by briefly considering some issues of broader relevance relating to the materiality of writing. One main area of study addressed in several papers at the conference (see Piquette and Whitehouse, this volume) relates to the sources of raw materials and the processes of manufacture of the supports used for writing (primarily clay tablets in the case of cuneiform writing); these studies are relevant to assessing who the writers and readers might have been, as well as who else might have been involved in the creation and consumption of the finished artefacts. The combination of traditional epigraphic studies (concerned with the content of texts) with the study of both the materiality of the inscribed artefacts and their archaeological contexts offers the greatest interpretative possibilities.
The relationship of materiality to the contexts of storage and display is also important: in the cuneiform world there is a strong contrast between the clay tablets, the majority of which come from archive contexts and were probably intended for use by those who could read them, and inscriptions on stone which were mostly situated in public or semi-public places and were meant to be seen and to impress a wide range of people including those, probably the majority, who could not actually read them, as in the Neo-Assyrian palaces described above. The materiality of writing on stone set up in public places is clearly related to the exercise and display of power by elites.
Another important aspect of the materiality of writing supports, as well as that created through the application of materials to surfaces, relates to their likelihood of preservation and survival both in ancient times and down to the present day. Taking of account of what types of writing or related cultural context may not be represented archaeologically is equally important for understanding the various roles it played in past lives. The development of holistic, integrated approaches to the materiality of cuneiform texts is well underway, as I aim to have illustrated here. The application and continued development of methods which integrate material perspectives alongside general archaeological and philological methods are vital for fuller understandings of written culture.
