The Nimrud Letters, 1952: Part I

Abstract

In 1952 the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, in the course of its excavations at Nimrud, found, in the chamber known as ZT 4, a collection of over three hundred Assyrian clay tablets. Dr. C. J. Gadd at once recognized that the greater part of the collection consisted of letters from a royal archive, and that they were closely similar in nature to those in the British Museum collection published by Harper. The tablets as found were unbaked and heavily impregnated with salts from the soil, and in order to preserve them it was decided to bake them in a furnace made from local materials and designed for the purpose by J. H. Reid, A.R.I.B.A. At that time there existed at Nimrud no apparatus for measuring furnace temperatures (a lack which has since been rectified), so that almost inevitably a few tablets were baked rather more than the ideal demanded. Whilst these few have taken on a coarse bricklike texture, their legibility is not substantially impaired by this, whereas about a dozen tablets which, probably by being placed in the coolest part of the furnace during the shortest firing, received insufficient baking, are now, as a result of the crystallizing-out of salts, crumbling in their boxes and liable to fall to fragments at a touch. The contrast fully vindicates the employment of this emergency treatment in the field.

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