In the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, there’s a small clay tablet copied by a student scribe in the city of Nippur, nearly four thousand years ago.
What’s written on it isn’t a story of heroic deeds or a hymn to the gods. It reads like a checklist. Step by step instructions for one specific journey: the goddess Inanna’s descent into the underworld, to face her older sister, Ereshkigal.
And there’s one detail in this checklist that gets copied identically, exemplar after exemplar, for centuries, without a single variation. To get inside, Inanna has to pass through seven gates. Here’s more from Null Source.
In 1893, a team from the University of Pennsylvania pulled a clay tablet slightly larger than a man’s hand from the excavation trenches at Nippur. It was cataloged as CBS 10673, packed into a crate with several hundred other fragments, and shipped to Philadelphia, where it sat in the basement of the Penn Museum for over sixty years, classified as a cosmogonic fragment, Old Babylonian copy, partial text.
The first partial translation was attempted in 1956 by Samuel Noah Kramer, the same Kramer who spent decades assembling Sumerian myths from shattered pieces scattered across twenty museums worldwide. He translated the upper third, assigned it to the category of creation narratives, and moved on to better-preserved material that he considered more urgent.
The lower two-thirds of CBS 10673, covered in dense cuneiform script arranged in two tight columns with unusually small sign spacing, remained untranslated until 2004. No one prioritized it. No one had reason to. Here’s more from Null Source.
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.
