In the 15th century BCE, an ancient accountant recorded an order for more than 200 wooden tables, chairs, and stools. How do we know this? From a tiny tablet with cuneiform writing discovered in southern Turkey.
Although it was once an ordinary item, the clay tablet offers extraordinary insight into business practices 3.500 years ago in the ancient city of Alalakh, once a bustling capital of the long-forgotten kingdom of Mukish. Alalakh’s location on the Mediterranean coast near the present-day city of Antakya made it a trading and administrative center.
Archaeologists uncovered the object while conducting restoration work in Alalakh after a series of earthquakes devastated southern Turkey and northern Syria in February 2023, leaving tens of thousands dead and injured and causing extensive damage to property, including monuments made of sun-dried mud bricks at Tell Atchana, the site of Alalakh’s excavation. United Kingdom (UK) archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley first began excavations there in the 1930s.
In front of Alalakh’s city gates this summer, archaeologists led by the current director of the Tell Atchana excavation, Murat Akar, a professor of archaeology at Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal University, unearthed the clay tablet. It turned out to be in excellent condition, with only a few surface scratches.
The tablet is an administrative text, an ancient form of bookkeeping that records the raw materials used by palace workers and the finished products they produced and distributed.
“We don’t know yet if the furniture is coming or going. It’s either a work order of furniture to be made or a receipt for furniture to be delivered,” said Jacob Lauinger, a Johns Hopkins University professor of Assyriology who’s working to decipher the signs impressed into the cuneiform tablet.
The tablet is approximately four by four centimeters in size, but it could be of great help in understanding everyday life more than three millennia ago. “We believe that this tablet, weighing 28 grams, will provide a new perspective on understanding the economic structure and state system of the Late Bronze Age,” said Mehmet Ersoy, Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism.
Why so much furniture?
Researchers have a preliminary hypothesis that the discovered object is actually an invoice for a large quantity of furniture made around the same time, rather than a collection of small orders made over time.
“We’re really excited about exploring some of the different historical scenarios that could have resulted in the construction of so much furniture at once,” Lauinger said. “Was it for a special occasion in Alalakh, like a royal wedding? Could it have been for a religious festival? Was Alalakh producing furniture for export?”
Last century, archaeologist Woolley discovered an archive of cuneiform tablets in a fortress near the gate, so the tablet found by Akar’s team in July might originate from that same documentation, Forbes writes.
