02 June 2010

A Battle over Ancient Bits of Clay

Persian tablets sit in legal limbo between researchers and terror victims

By Jeff Baron
Staff Writer

Washington — The fate of clay tablets that recorded details of everyday government transactions in the Persian Empire 2,500 years ago might depend on maneuverings in the government of the modern United States.

The tablets — more than 10,000 of them from a long-buried Persian government archive at Persepolis — are at the center of a lobbying effort in the U.S. Congress. They were discovered in 1933 and have been in the United States since 1936, on loan from Iran for study. Scholars, research institutions and Iranian-American groups are trying to protect them from being seized and auctioned off for the benefit of people who have legal claims against the current Iranian government over acts of terrorism.

A proposed amendment to the annual U.S. Defense Department authorization bill would protect cultural artifacts from seizure for a foreign government’s debt if the artifacts are held by institutions such as museums and libraries. Its backers were unable to attach the amendment to the bill in the Senate Armed Services Committee in May, and attaching an amendment while a bill is before the full Senate is typically a greater challenge.

Jamal Abdi, policy director at the National Iranian American Council, said it is difficult at the moment for American politicians to cast what might be interpreted as a vote in favor of the Iranian government, since voting to protect the tablets would hinder people in pursuing their claims against Iran. But he said the Iranian government would trumpet the seizure of the Persepolis tablets as an American outrage, even though its own interest in pre-Islamic Iran is limited.

The threat of court action has created a sense of urgency that’s unusual in a case involving a 75-year-old research project and clay tablets that were buried for millennia.

On the other side of the case are claimants against Iran from two bombings: the 1983 explosion at the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 members of the U.S. armed services, and a 1997 triple suicide bombing by the group Hamas at a pedestrian mall in Jerusalem that killed five people and wounded 181 others. In separate federal lawsuits, groups of the injured and the families of the dead sued Iran, charging the government with supporting the attacks. The Iranian government failed to respond to either lawsuit, and in each case, a default judgment was entered against Iran.

Matthew Stolper, the University of Chicago professor who leads the research on the Persepolis tablets, said the plaintiffs in the court case aren’t being greedy. “The motives of people who have been subjected to life-changing atrocities like these shouldn’t be disparaged,” he said. He understands the need for those victims of terrorism to seek long-delayed justice.

But the seizure and auction of the tablets would cause an array of problems, Stolper said. Such actions would disrupt what has become tremendously fruitful research into the Achaemenid Persian Empire at its height, would cost the Iranian nation an important part of its cultural heritage, and would prompt other countries to reconsider their agreements to send valuable art and artifacts to U.S. museums and universities.

“In 1936, when these things were loaned … it was a really extraordinary act of trust,” Stolper said. “Now we have to redeem that trust.”

Stolper said the tablets come from a single administrative office at Persepolis and cover about a 20-year period in the reign of Darius I. He said it’s only reasonable to assume that similar offices elsewhere in the empire held similar tablets, but this is the only substantial cache that has survived. They are records of such mundane details as the size of the food ration a particular traveler on government business, with his entourage, was allowed to draw on a journey from one place to another.

The official authorizing the ration, in some cases a district governor, would mark the tablet with his seal.

“Why do you care about pieces of dirt that record the barley that was fed to people who themselves were turned into pieces of dirt thousands of years ago?” Stolper asked.

The answer, he said, is that one such tablet might reveal little, but thousands together reveal a great deal about how government functioned when communication was slow and travel uncertain, and when Persia stretched from India to Egypt. “The big problems of large-scale ancient states have to do with communications,” he said.

The tablets also reveal much about social class: Some records involve members of the emperor’s family, and the higher ranking the person, the better the ration. For that matter, the archive shows allotments for animals and for gods as well, “so it goes all the way from subhuman to superhuman,” Stolper said. The record reflects “an amazing social fabric.”

The tablets also offer a wealth of information about languages used in that period. Most are in Elamite, a pre-Iranian language that dates to as far back as 2300 B.C., and rendered in cuneiform figures, Stolper said. Perhaps a thousand are in Aramaic.

“Because it comes from so many hands, you’ll see a lot of variations” in the use of these languages, Stolper said. This might suggest evidence of dialects of languages that were commonly spoken over thousands of kilometers.

Thousands of tablets contain no text, only the imprint of seals for an individual or a government office. Stolper said that he’s happy to speculate on what purpose these tablets served, but that in any case they help provide a record of a type of artwork far more personal than the surviving ruins of statues, palaces and temples built by and for kings. He said the seals follow one tendency in the grander art of the empire: “Achaemenid Persian art, with a couple of very famous exceptions, doesn’t show warfare, doesn’t show people killing each other.” Of the 2,500 or so seals identified in the archive, only three show images of conflict, Stolper said.

And then there are the oddities, including one tablet in Old Persian, a language that Stolper said scholars had thought never was used in everyday life. “At least one Persian in Persia wrote Persian in Persian and expected at least one other person to read it or at least file it,” he said.

In compliance with the 1936 loan agreement, the University of Chicago has returned some of the fragments to Iran after completing work on them: some small ones in the 1940s, more in the 1950s and about 200 in 2004, which Stolper said seems to have prompted the effort to have the remaining pieces seized for Iran’s debts.

Stolper said he and his colleagues are moving as quickly as possible to photograph, translate and interpret the collection — a sort of academic production line — and he is writing proposals for grants to pay for the expensive work. The digital record of about two-thirds to three-quarters of the items is usable “in our current state of knowledge,” Stolper said, and the goal is to have the entire collection available electronically so that scholars everywhere can access it and help analyze it. He noted that the scholars will disagree in their conclusions; for instance, he said, he is one of only 10 to 12 scholars who can read Elamite cuneiform, and his translations are routinely questioned. And one piece of the puzzle leads to another. “Once you’ve started working on this, more of it becomes useful,” he said.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)