By William Mullen
Tribune staff reporter
Published April 29, 2004
Sixty-seven years after borrowing important documents from the government of Iran, the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute announced Wednesday that its scholars have read them, digested them and are finally ready to send them back.
The documents are 300 small clay tablets inscribed 2,500 years ago by bureaucrats in the Persian empire. Chicago archeologists discovered tens of thousands of tablets and tablet fragments in the 1930s as they dug through the ruins of the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, now part of Iran.
None of them could read the language on the tablets, Elamite. So they brought everything home in 1937, promising to develop expertise in translating the language--and to return the material once they were finished with it.
Oriental Institute officials said the tablets' arrival in Iran in the next few days will mark the first repatriation of artifacts from American scientists since the 1979 revolution, when diplomatic contact between the two nations ended. They hope the gesture will help to broaden ancient Persian scholarship both here and in Iran.
The saga of the tablets demonstrates the painstaking, almost glacial pace at which scholars sort through the debris of history to construct reliable pictures of the past. Decades of work on the tablets have revolutionized scholarly knowledge of Persian history, researchers say.
Expectations exceeded
"Archeologists were excited when they found the tablets because of their potential, but the information they contain has exceeded all our expectations," said Matthew Stolper, an Oriental Institute professor and expert on ancient Iran.
Before the discovery of the tablets, the only historical information about ancient Persia came from the writings of its enemies: the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Assyrians, most of whom demonized the Persians as ruthless sub-humans.
As linguists slowly mastered the Elamite writings, they discovered that the tablets do not provide flowery historical narratives about kings and their courts. They are more like drab accounting receipts.
"They mostly reflect the disbursement of foodstuffs as rations, which was a form of pay before the development of money," said Charles Jones, a research archivist and translator at the Oriental Institute. "They show so-and-so was given 1 1/2 quarts of barley and a half-quart of beer or wine for his day's work."
Nonetheless, they provide valuable insight into the workings of the empire.
"Singly, these tablets are almost worthless as historical information," Stolper said. "But when you begin to compile the contents of thousands of them, you begin to see this broad picture of how the empire was organized and run."
The tablets, ranging in size from a book of matches to a dish towel, were written between 509 B.C. and 494 B.C. during the reign of Darius I, the greatest king of the Persian empire and founder of Persepolis.
They show how Darius was importing laborers from Babylonia, Syria, Egypt, Thrace, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia to build his cities and palaces, Jones said.
It is unclear from the records if they were contract laborers or slaves, but their daily rations were less than subsistence level.
Other documents were travel vouchers for officials and royal family members or for visiting delegations from surrounding nations that feared the Persians. Persia was the greatest empire in history at that time, stretching from Ethiopia and Egypt to Afghanistan and India.
"If you were an envoy from Greece, you might go to the satrap of Sardis [a provincial governor] and state your business," Stolper said. "He might assign you 13 armed guards to escort you to Persepolis, with official authorization that you and your entourage be fed and looked after wherever you stopped."
Each tablet bears the seal of the official authorizing the transaction, whether a lowly bureaucrat or the king himself. The seal is often a highly artistic pictorial design pressed into the clay tablet like a signature.
"From analyzing thousands of these tablets, you began to see administrative structures and how the Persians organized their economic life, labor and communication through the empire," Stolper said.
Language still fragmented
Working with the tablets continues to be difficult because so much of the Elamite language is still unknown, he said.
The Persian empire was established about 550 B.C. when the king of a group of migrating Iranian-speaking tribes overthrew the rule of the king of Medes. The Iranians had no written language, so they adopted the written language of the local bureaucracies.
Though rarely spoken, Elamite was the official written language of the church, government and scholars--like Latin in the European Middle Ages.
At the Oriental Institute in the 1930s, Richard Hallock became the modern master of Elamite, spending 40 years deciphering the Persepolis tablets. He published a seminal book in 1969 based on his analysis of 2,100 of the tablets, and before he died 10 years later had worked up reports on 2,500 more.
"We're talking about a very small community of people who can read this language," Jones said.
"There might be a dozen around the world, and the joke is that not one of us can agree on the translations that any of the others has done."
In fact, only three people can read the Elamite dialect in which the Persepolis tablets are written, and all of them are at the Oriental Institute: Jones, Stolper and retired director Gene Gragg.
Director Gil Stein said he hopes the return of the tablets will encourage continued scholarship on ancient Persia in both nations.
"We'd like to have Iran send students here to learn Elamite so they can work with this material, too," said Stein, who with two other institute officials will deliver the 300 tablets to Iran's Cultural Heritage Organization.
"It's important to show the Iranian people and government that we are good partners," he said. "We want to continue this process of analyzing, publishing and returning the artifacts."
Several German, Australian and Japanese scientists have been working on new excavations in Iran over the last five years, and an Iranian-born Oriental Institute archeologist, Abbas Alizadeh, has been scouring Iranian sites for ancient irrigation canals. While in Iran, Stein will negotiate for a five-year research agreement for Chicago scientists to do excavations.
"We're trying to lay the groundwork for future research there," Stein said.
The Iranians, he said, are thrilled to be getting back the 300 tablets and understand the time-consuming, laborious process of analyzing such material.
The Oriental Institute sent back 37,000 tablets and fragments in 1950, most of them deemed too damaged or illegible to be useful, Stein said. The institute is holding several thousand more for further study.
"There's another lifetime of work to be done yet," he said. "But eventually it will be done and it will all be returned."
