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At this point it may be useful to insert a few general remarks about excavations and publication of texts because little is known about these problems outside the small circle of the initiated.A modern excavation is a highly complex enterprise. A staff of architects, draftsmen, photographers, epigraphers, and philologists have to assist the archeologist in his field work. But this is only the first and easier phase of an excavation. The preservation of the ruin, the conservation of the objects found, and, most of all, the publication of the results, remains the final task for which the work in the field is only the preliminary step.
Here a sad story indeed must be told. While the field work has been perfected to a very high standard during the last half century, the second part, the publication, has been neglected to such a degree that many excavations of Mesopotamian sites resulted only in a scientifically executed destruction of what was left still undestroyed after a few thousand years. The reasons for this fact are trivial. The time required for the publication of results is a multiple of the requirements for the field work. The available money is usually spent when a fraction of the original planned excavation has been completed, benefactors are hard to find to pay for many years of work without tangible or spectacular results, and.the scholars get interested in special aspects of the problem involved or go out for new material instead of performing the tedious work of publishing the thousands of details which the accidents of excavation have provided. The final result is not much different from the one obtained by the treasure-hunting attitude of the earliest excavators.
Many an excavation, if not all, had to be stopped before completion or had to restrict itself from the very beginning to a few trenches crossing the ruin in the hope of getting a general insight into the character of the stratification. Then one or another promising building was investigated in greater detail. What resulted is a ruin left with deep scars, an easy prey for the natives to extract all exposed bricks, to tunnel for more without too many difficulties, and to have access to deeper layers and thus to continue the excavation" in their own fashion and for their own benefit. In this way the natives must have found thousands of tablets which were then sold at high prices by antiquities dealers to the very same museums which spent the initial money for the removal of many tons of sand and debris.
Let me illustrate the effect upon the special studies under discussion here. Until 1951 not for a single astronomical or mathematical text was its provenance established by excavation. The only apparent exceptions are a number of multiplication tables from Nippur or Sippar but nobody knows where these texts were found in the ruins. Consequently it is, e. g., completely impossible to find out whether these texts came from a temple, a palace, a private house, etc. Not even the stratum is known to give us a more accurate date of the texts. In other words, if those texts, which were officially "excavated", would have been found by Arabs, we would be no worse off than we are now. But while the Arabs in their "clandestine" exploits dig only relatively small holes, a scientific excavation has destroyed beyond any hope all traces of the locality where the texts have been found. Thus we are left with the texts alone and must determine their origin from internal evidence, which is often very difficult to interpret.
A long story could be told about the "methods" to obtain the needed information. Texts which for more than 50 years were lying in the basement of a great museum could be relatively dated from the newspaper in which they were wrapped. That gave a plausible date for the "expedition" which found the texts and hence the place from which they were excavated.
A whole class of texts was identified as follows. A German expedition before 1914 had worked in the city of Uruk, a most important site because it contains structures which reach from the earliest periods down to Seleucid times. There the Germans must have found the debris of an archive of which, however, all the good tablets had been removed by the Arabs. These tablets finally found their way into the collections of Berlin, Paris, and Chicago, forming one of the most important groups of texts for the study of Seleucid astronomy. The Arabs were not interested in small fragments. These were left at the site and were then carefully sifted and photographed by the expedition. By courtesy of theBerlin Museum Atlantic . Finally, the small fragments themselves were rediscovered in Istanbul
The Mesopotamian soil has preserved tablets for thousands of years. This will not be the case in our climate. Many tablets are encrusted with salts (cf. Pl. 9a left and photograph which shows incrustations along the crack; the right-hand photograph gives the same tablet after cleaning). A change in moisture produces crystals which break the surface of the tablets, thus rapidly obliterating the writing. I have seen "tablets" which consisted of dust only, carefully kept in showcases. To prevent this, tablets must be slowly baked at high temperature and thereafter soaked to remove salts. But only great museums possess the necessary equipment and experienced staffs, not to mention the fact that these methods of conservation were often kept as museum secrets. Many thousands of tablets have been acquired at high cost by big and small collections only to be destroyed without ever being read or recorded in any way.
The publication of tablets is a difficult task in itself. First of all, one must find the texts which concern the specific field in question. This is by no means trivial. Only minute fractions of the holdings of collections are catalogued. And several of the few existing rudimentary catalogues are carefully secluded from any outside use. I would be surprised if a tenth of all tablets in museums have ever been identified in any kind of catalogue. The task of excavating the source material in museums is of much greater urgency than the accumulation of new uncounted thousands of texts on top of the never investigated previous thousands. I have no official records of expenditures for excavations at my disposal, but figures mentioned in the press show that a preliminary excavation in one season costs about as much as the salary of an Assyriologist for 12 or 15 years. And the result of every such dig is frequently many more tablets than can be handled by one scholar in his lifetime.
There exists no simple method of publication. Photographs alone are in the majority of cases not sufficient, even if their cost were not prohibitive. Tablets are often inscribed not only on both sides but also on the edges. Only multiple photographs taken with variable directions of light would suffice. Thus cost and actual need have resulted in the practice of hand copies. Many different styles of copying were developed by individual scholars, varying between an almost schematic reproduction of the signs to a minute reproduction of details. The reader may get an impression of this situation from pls. g and g which show an ephemeris for Saturn (Seleucid period) and an Old Babylonian mathematical text in hand copies and photographs.
The ideal method of publication would be, of course, direct copying from the text. In practice this is often excluded by the scattering of directly related material all over the world. Even with great experience a text cannot be correctly copied without an understanding of its contents. Practically no text falls at the first attempt. Thus repeated collation, joining with other fragments, and comparison with other texts are needed. It requires years of work before a small group of a few hundred tablets is adequately published. And no publication is "final”. Invariably a fresh mind will find the solution of a puzzle which escaped the editor, however obvious it might seem after.
Here a sad story indeed must be told. While the field work has been perfected to a very high standard during the last half century, the second part, the publication, has been neglected to such a degree that many excavations of Mesopotamian sites resulted only in a scientifically executed destruction of what was left still undestroyed after a few thousand years. The reasons for this fact are trivial. The time required for the publication of results is a multiple of the requirements for the field work. The available money is usually spent when a fraction of the original planned excavation has been completed, benefactors are hard to find to pay for many years of work without tangible or spectacular results, and.the scholars get interested in special aspects of the problem involved or go out for new material instead of performing the tedious work of publishing the thousands of details which the accidents of excavation have provided. The final result is not much different from the one obtained by the treasure-hunting attitude of the earliest excavators.
Many an excavation, if not all, had to be stopped before completion or had to restrict itself from the very beginning to a few trenches crossing the ruin in the hope of getting a general insight into the character of the stratification. Then one or another promising building was investigated in greater detail. What resulted is a ruin left with deep scars, an easy prey for the natives to extract all exposed bricks, to tunnel for more without too many difficulties, and to have access to deeper layers and thus to continue the excavation" in their own fashion and for their own benefit. In this way the natives must have found thousands of tablets which were then sold at high prices by antiquities dealers to the very same museums which spent the initial money for the removal of many tons of sand and debris.
Let me illustrate the effect upon the special studies under discussion here. Until 1951 not for a single astronomical or mathematical text was its provenance established by excavation. The only apparent exceptions are a number of multiplication tables from Nippur or Sippar but nobody knows where these texts were found in the ruins. Consequently it is, e. g., completely impossible to find out whether these texts came from a temple, a palace, a private house, etc. Not even the stratum is known to give us a more accurate date of the texts. In other words, if those texts, which were officially "excavated", would have been found by Arabs, we would be no worse off than we are now. But while the Arabs in their "clandestine" exploits dig only relatively small holes, a scientific excavation has destroyed beyond any hope all traces of the locality where the texts have been found. Thus we are left with the texts alone and must determine their origin from internal evidence, which is often very difficult to interpret.
A long story could be told about the "methods" to obtain the needed information. Texts which for more than 50 years were lying in the basement of a great museum could be relatively dated from the newspaper in which they were wrapped. That gave a plausible date for the "expedition" which found the texts and hence the place from which they were excavated.
A whole class of texts was identified as follows. A German expedition before 1914 had worked in the city of Uruk, a most important site because it contains structures which reach from the earliest periods down to Seleucid times. There the Germans must have found the debris of an archive of which, however, all the good tablets had been removed by the Arabs. These tablets finally found their way into the collections of Berlin, Paris, and Chicago, forming one of the most important groups of texts for the study of Seleucid astronomy. The Arabs were not interested in small fragments. These were left at the site and were then carefully sifted and photographed by the expedition. By courtesy of the
The Mesopotamian soil has preserved tablets for thousands of years. This will not be the case in our climate. Many tablets are encrusted with salts (cf. Pl. 9a left and photograph which shows incrustations along the crack; the right-hand photograph gives the same tablet after cleaning). A change in moisture produces crystals which break the surface of the tablets, thus rapidly obliterating the writing. I have seen "tablets" which consisted of dust only, carefully kept in showcases. To prevent this, tablets must be slowly baked at high temperature and thereafter soaked to remove salts. But only great museums possess the necessary equipment and experienced staffs, not to mention the fact that these methods of conservation were often kept as museum secrets. Many thousands of tablets have been acquired at high cost by big and small collections only to be destroyed without ever being read or recorded in any way.
The publication of tablets is a difficult task in itself. First of all, one must find the texts which concern the specific field in question. This is by no means trivial. Only minute fractions of the holdings of collections are catalogued. And several of the few existing rudimentary catalogues are carefully secluded from any outside use. I would be surprised if a tenth of all tablets in museums have ever been identified in any kind of catalogue. The task of excavating the source material in museums is of much greater urgency than the accumulation of new uncounted thousands of texts on top of the never investigated previous thousands. I have no official records of expenditures for excavations at my disposal, but figures mentioned in the press show that a preliminary excavation in one season costs about as much as the salary of an Assyriologist for 12 or 15 years. And the result of every such dig is frequently many more tablets than can be handled by one scholar in his lifetime.
There exists no simple method of publication. Photographs alone are in the majority of cases not sufficient, even if their cost were not prohibitive. Tablets are often inscribed not only on both sides but also on the edges. Only multiple photographs taken with variable directions of light would suffice. Thus cost and actual need have resulted in the practice of hand copies. Many different styles of copying were developed by individual scholars, varying between an almost schematic reproduction of the signs to a minute reproduction of details. The reader may get an impression of this situation from pls. g and g which show an ephemeris for Saturn (Seleucid period) and an Old Babylonian mathematical text in hand copies and photographs.
The ideal method of publication would be, of course, direct copying from the text. In practice this is often excluded by the scattering of directly related material all over the world. Even with great experience a text cannot be correctly copied without an understanding of its contents. Practically no text falls at the first attempt. Thus repeated collation, joining with other fragments, and comparison with other texts are needed. It requires years of work before a small group of a few hundred tablets is adequately published. And no publication is "final”. Invariably a fresh mind will find the solution of a puzzle which escaped the editor, however obvious it might seem after.
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