Digital Lunch Seminar: Revealing Hidden Cuneiform Writings at the Museum of Anatolian Civilization in Ankara

Beyond the Surface: Revealing Hidden Cuneiform Writings at the Museum of Anatolian Civilization in Ankara

Samaneh Ehteram and Andreas Beckert

Cuneiform is the earliest known system of writing, first developed for the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia in the second half of the 4th millennium BC. Cuneiform is created by imprinting a stylus on fresh clay tablets. From the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, some tablets were enclosed in clay envelopes. This ensured the confidentiality of the message and protected the clay tablets from damage. Many of these clay tablets have never been opened and remain unstudied. The aim of our project is to study enveloped clay tablets non-destructively and to reveal the hidden cuneiform writings.

Our interdisciplinary team has designed and developed a portable X-ray micro-CT scanner (ENCI) to acquire density data of these artefacts at museums and collection sites. In addition, we developed software to process the data obtained by ENCI, to extract and visualize the tablets, and to virtually open the envelopes. 

During our second field mission in September 2024 at the Museum of Anatolian Civilization in Ankara, we scanned and analyzed 40 enclosed cuneiform tablets. For the first time since these tablets were enclosed around 4000 years ago, we successfully revealed and visualized the cuneiform writing without causing any damage to the tablets.