For more than a century, the National Museum has preserved a remarkable collection of clay tablets from some of the earliest civilizations in the Middle East. Many of these artifacts are over 4,000 years old and written in long-lost languages. For decades, they remained largely untouched, but researchers have now deciphered them, uncovering texts that range from magical rituals to royal records and everyday administrative notes.
About 5,200 years ago, people in the region began pressing symbols into clay to record information. This early writing system, known as cuneiform, helped support the rise of complex cities and organized governments by allowing people to track goods, people, and decisions.
Over the past century, the National Museum has assembled a significant collection of these tablets. Until recently, however, they had not been fully studied. Researchers from the museum and the University of Copenhagen have now completed the first comprehensive effort to analyze, identify, and digitize the entire collection as part of the project 'Hidden Treasures: The National Museum's Cuneiform Collection'.
Rare Texts From Ancient Hama
As the team examined the tablets in detail, they found a wide range of content, including letters, accounting records, medical instructions, and magical texts.
A particularly important group comes from the ancient city of Hama, first explored by a Danish expedition in the 1930s. The tablets were later recovered and became part of the National Museum's collection.
"The texts in the collection that originate from Hama are almost 3,000 years old and deal with medical treatments and magical incantations. They had been left behind in the remains of what we believe must have been a large temple library. All other texts were gone," explains Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll, who has been part of the Hidden Treasures project.
According to Arbøll, these Hama texts are especially rare because very few similar examples have been found from that region and time period. One tablet stood out in particular.
"One of the clay tablets turned out to contain a so-called anti-witchcraft ritual, which was of enormous importance to the royal authority because it had the remarkable ability to ward off misfortunes that might befall a king," says Troels Pank Arbøll
This ritual was conducted over an extended period. Because such rituals were closely tied to the center of power, researchers were surprised to find this text so far from the core regions of the culture. Hama lay on the outskirts of these cultural hubs.
Kings, Legends, and Historical Records
Among the discoveries is a copy of a well-known regnal list that records both mythical and historical rulers. This document is significant because it traces kings back to a time before a major ancient event.
The version found in the National Museum appears to have been used for teaching and includes rulers from the late 3rd millennium BC. Other versions of this list also mention a legendary king, known from ancient literature.
"That makes this regnal list one of the few relics we have that suggests this figure may have actually existed. We had no idea we had a copy of that list here in Denmark. It is quite spectacular," says Troels Pank Arbøll.
Letters, Administration, and Everyday Life
Another set of tablets comes from excavations at Tell Shemshara, located in the region. These texts include correspondence between a local leader and a king from around 1800 BC, along with administrative records.
Such documents highlight how essential writing was for managing early societies. Many tablets contain practical information, including inventories, personnel lists, and financial accounts.
"A great many of the cuneiform tablets we have today bear witness to a highly developed bureaucracy. There was a need to keep track of the advanced societies that were being built, and we have found a large number of cuneiform tablets containing practical information, such as accounts and lists of goods and personnel. It is therefore not surprising that one of the tablets in the National Museum's collection contains something as commonplace as a very old receipt for beer," concludes Troels Pank Arbøll.