I just listened to the most recent episode of the fascinating Hardcore History podcast (which I highly recommend). It concerned Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, but it touched a lot on the Babylonian and Assyrian empires and dynasties, which preceded him.
Much to my surprise, we apparently relatively unbroken royal chronicles from both Babylonia and Assyria, in which the kings record their doings.
My question is, what form do these records take? When were they discovered? How were they preserved? I mean, I guess to a certain extent it’s remarkable that we still have any writings at all from 2500+ years ago, but I’m at least in outline familiar with how the “classics” of Greek and Roman literature were preserved, recopied, etc. Was there something equivalent going on for records from these more ancient civilizations?
There were a lot of these records reproduced and translated back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but for some reason not so much seems to have been published since. It’s fascinating to go through and read this stuff, much of it pretty dull stuff, astronomical and astrological records, and the like. But we have quite a bit of literature, as well. The most famous is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which you can find plenty of translations of. Most of these are pretty “free”, though, to avoid repetition and lacunae. If you want the real thing, find a copy of Alexander Heidel’s the Epic of Gilgamesh and Old Testament Parallels, which gives it to you, warts and all. Except for the racy parts. Heidel published his book back in 1946, and he didn’t want to corrupt students with descriptions of how Gilgamesh got a temple prostitute to seduce the wild man Enkidu by meeting him at the well and dropping her top, so he translated all the good stuff into Latin.
There are more recent translations of Gilgamesh, not to mention the Atrahasis epic, the Enuma Elish, and other random stuff.
Sure, but I would expect that there would be lots of copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh floating around… presumably people from all around Babylonia would want to read it. What I find more surprising is that close-to-unique royal records would survive. Or is the theory that they were widely copied and distributed?
I’d expect they survived because they were in a durable format (fired clay tables) and protected in a palace or royal library, and also because even in conquest the conqueror had some interest in preserving (and claiming, in propaganda) the historical record of the prior rulers.
Dunno about “copied”. As long as the authoritative copy was in the palace library, that’s all you’d need. Either as a sitting king, a new conqueror, or an archaeologist.
I seem to remember that in a recent interview, Irving Finkel, the British Museum’s Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures, now best-known for his theories about Noah’s Ark, saying that he has read all the cuneiform tablets in the British Museum, but that it has taken him forty years to do so. And that he has now started re-reading them…
I presume like modern government records, the previous decade’s information would be “filed away”. Clay tablets pile up pretty quickly. SO there’s be a warehouse or cellar somewhere filled to the gills with tablets from one hundred years ago that nobody ever disturbed, as the sand flowed I and buried them. In the days before dump trucks, it was easier to build over a pile of rubbish than to haul it all away by hand. IIRC there are stashes all over Mesopotamia from assorted administrative centers and their archives.
presumably these collections are only a sampling, and a huge number of record tablets were recycled as floor tiles, pavement, construction filler, etc. Just, there were so many that a lot survive.