April 29, 2004

BY DAVE NEWBART Staff Reporter

Common workers received rations of a quart and a half of barley per day, plus half a quart of beer or wine. New mothers got more, while members of the royal family got much more than they could possibly devour on their own.

These small details on the daily goings-on in the Persian empire 2,500 years ago are carved on clay tablets that have been at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute since 1937, on loan from Iran.

Though many of the tablets have been studied intensely, the U. of C. hasn't been able to return to Iran to give back the tablets since the Iranian revolution in 1979 essentially shut that nation's borders to Americans.

On Wednesday, however, the university announced it was sending a delegation to Iran next month to return 300 of the tablets. The move comes after Iranian officials invited scholars from all over the world to a conference last August in hopes of reopening the door to such exchange.

"They placed scholarship over politics,'' said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, who said the U. of C. is the first university to respond in kind. "This will be the first return of cultural material since the Iranian revolution.''

It makes sense for Iran to re-establish those contacts, particularly with the U. of C., which has the biggest repository of the tablets from this time period in the world. Between 1933 and 1939, the institute brought back 15,000 to 30,000 tablets and fragments from excavations at the ancient city of Persepolis in central Iran, said Matthew Stolper, a professor of Assyriology.

Oriental Institute scholar Richard Hallock spent 40 years translating the tablets, written in a form of wedge-shaped or cuneiform writing called Elamite. He published in-depth research on 2,100 of them. In 1948 and 1951, the school returned about half of its collection, Stolper said. In all, the institute has analyzed about 15 percent of the tablets, Stolper said.

The U. of C. has two people on staff -- out of a total of a dozen in the world -- who can still read the tablets, including Stolper. In all of Iran, there is only one person fluent in the language used on the tablets, and he is nearing retirement, officials said. (He also studied at the U.ofC. in the 1970s.) There are no official programs to study the language in Iran, Stein said.

As part of a new research agreement with Iran, the U. of C. hopes to bring Iranians to the Oriental Institute to learn the language and study the tablets, Stein said.

Stolper said those tablets contain "frightening detail'' on the inner workings of the Persian empire, which was the largest in the world up until that point and included Ethiopia, Egypt, Greece, Central Asia and India. The tablets are largely administrative records, documenting ration distribution around the region, but also include legal records and notes when major visitors came to the area. They also helped researchers learn names of regional Persian leaders.

But the tablets are hard to read, largely because of the style of writing, Stolper said, and scholars don't agree on exactly what they say.