Sumerians Sealed Underground
In November 2021, an Iraqi-Italian restoration team working in the basement storage of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad opened a wooden crate marked Tell al-Hiba, 1968 season, unclassified material. Tell al-Hiba is the modern name for the ancient Sumerian city of Lagash, one of the largest urban centers of the third millennium BCE.
The 1968 excavations were interrupted by political crisis, the materials shipped to Baghdad, the crates sealed and placed in a basement where they survived three wars, the 2003 looting, and the flooding of the lower levels in 2015.
Inside the crate were eleven clay tablets in standard condition — fragmented, salt-crusted, partial cuneiform preservation. Ten turned out to be administrative records. Grain accounting, labor allocation, temple supplies. The eleventh tablet was different. Larger, thicker, dense text in three columns on both sides.
When conservator Marco De Gregorio carefully removed the salt layer from the obverse, the first column was not an economic text. It was a narrative. De Gregorio photographed the tablet and sent the images to Iraqi State Board of Antiquities epigraphist Ali al-Hashimi, who began preliminary transliteration that same evening. Here’s more from Null Source.
