For more than a century, the National Museum has preserved a remarkable collection of clay tablets from some of the earliest civilizations in the Middle East. Many of these artifacts are over 4,000 years old and written in long-lost languages. For decades, they remained largely untouched, but researchers have now deciphered them, uncovering texts that range from magical rituals to royal records and everyday administrative notes.
About 5,200 years ago, people in what is now Iraq and Syria began pressing symbols into clay to record information. This early writing system, known as cuneiform, helped support the rise of complex cities and organized governments by allowing people to track goods, people, and decisions.
Over the past century, the National Museum has assembled a significant collection of these tablets. Until recently, however, they had not been fully studied. Researchers from the museum and the University of Copenhagen have now completed the first comprehensive effort to analyze, identify, and digitize the entire collection as part of the project ‘Hidden Treasures: The National Museum’s Cuneiform Collection’.
Rare Texts From Ancient Hama
As the team examined the tablets in detail, they found a wide range of content, including letters, accounting records, medical instructions, and magical texts.
A particularly important group comes from the Syrian city of Hama, first explored by a Danish expedition in the 1930s. In 720 BC, Assyrian forces destroyed the city and carried off many of its valuables to their capital, Assur, located in modern-day Iraq. Some tablets were left behind in the ruins and eventually became part of the National Museum’s collection.
“The texts in the collection that originate from Hama are almost 3,000 years old and deal with medical treatments and magical incantations. They had been left behind in the remains of what we believe must have been a large temple library. All other texts were gone,” explains Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll, who has been part of the Hidden Treasures project.
According to Arbøll, these Hama texts are especially rare because very few similar examples have been found from that region and time period. One tablet stood out in particular.
“One of the clay tablets turned out to contain a so-called anti-witchcraft ritual, which was of enormous importance to the royal authority in Assyria because it had the remarkable ability to ward off misfortunes — such as political instability — that might befall a king,” says Troels Pank Arbøll
This ritual lasted an entire night and involved burning small figures made of wax and clay while an exorcist recited specific incantations. Because such rituals were closely tied to the Assyrian center of power, researchers were surprised to find this text so far from the empire’s core regions. Hama lay on the outskirts of these cultural hubs.
Kings, Legends, and Historical Records
Among the discoveries is a copy of a well-known regnal list that records both mythical and historical rulers. This document is significant because it traces kings back to a time before the Noah and the Flood.
The version found in the National Museum appears to have been used for teaching and includes rulers from the late 3rd millennium BC. Other versions of this list also mention the legendary King Gilgamesh, known from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
“That makes this regnal list one of the few relics we have that suggests Gilgamesh may have actually existed. We had no idea we had a copy of that list here in Denmark. It is quite spectacular,” says Troels Pank Arbøll.
Letters, Administration, and Everyday Life
Another set of tablets comes from excavations at Tell Shemshara in 1957, located in what is now northern Iraq. These texts include correspondence between a local leader and an Assyrian king from around 1800 BC, along with administrative records.
Such documents highlight how essential writing was for managing early societies. Many tablets contain practical information, including inventories, personnel lists, and financial accounts.
“A great many of the cuneiform tablets we have today bear witness to a highly developed bureaucracy. There was a need to keep track of the advanced societies that were being built, and we have found a large number of cuneiform tablets containing practical information, such as accounts and lists of goods and personnel. It is therefore not surprising that one of the tablets in the National Museum’s collection contains something as commonplace as a very old receipt for beer,” concludes Troels Pank Arbøll.
Digitizing Ancient Knowledge
The ‘Hidden Treasures: The National Museum’s Cuneiform Collection’ project is led by Nicole Brisch (University of Hamburg) and Anne Haslund Hansen (National Museum). The work is supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation and the Edubba Foundation.