Decoded cuneiform tablets reveal early societies’ magic, politics, and bureaucracy, including rare rituals, king lists, and daily records.
For more than a century, the National Museum has preserved a vast collection of inscribed clay tablets from some of the earliest Middle Eastern civilizations. Many of these artifacts are over 4,000 years old and written in languages that are no longer spoken. Long overlooked, the tablets have now been decoded, revealing compelling accounts of magic, royal authority, and everyday administration.
About 5,200 years ago, people in what is now Iraq and Syria began pressing symbols into clay to record information. This innovation gradually supported the rise of complex cities, enabling more advanced systems of governance and recordkeeping.
Over the past century, the National Museum assembled an extensive archive of these early records, written in cuneiform script. Although largely unexamined in recent decades, researchers from the museum and the University of Copenhagen have now completed the first full analysis, identification, and digitization of the texts as part of the project “Hidden Treasures: The National Museum’s Cuneiform Collection.”
Diverse Texts from Early Civilizations
A closer review of the collection revealed a wide range of content, including financial records, personal letters, medical instructions, and ritual texts.
Some of the tablets come from the Syrian city of Hama, which was explored by a Danish expedition in the 1930s. In 720 BC, Assyrian forces destroyed the city and carried off many valuables to their capital, Assur, in present-day Iraq. In their rush, they left behind several clay tablets, which eventually became part of the National Museum of Denmark’s holdings.
“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.
Unique Hama Texts and Anti-Witchcraft Rituals
Arbøll notes that the Hama tablets are especially rare, as few similar texts from this region and time period have been discovered. One tablet in particular stood out:
“One of the clay tablets turned out to contain a so-called anti-witchcraft ritual, which was of enormous importance to the royal authority in Assyria because it had the remarkable ability to ward off misfortunes—such as political instability—that might befall a king,” says Troels Pank Arbøll
This ritual lasted through the night and involved burning small figures made of wax and clay while an exorcist recited set incantations. Because such practices were closely tied to the Assyrian court, researchers were surprised to find this text so far from the empire’s center and from major cultural hubs like Babylonia. Hama was located on the outer edges of these regions.
Kings, Myths, and Administrative Records
The collection also includes a copy of a well-known regnal list that records both legendary and historical rulers.
This document traces kings back to a time before Noah and the Flood. The version found at the National Museum appears to be a training text and references rulers from the late third millennium BC. Other versions include the famed King Gilgamesh, known from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
“That makes this regnal list one of the few relics we have that suggests Gilgamesh 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.
Bureaucracy and Everyday Life in Cuneiform
Another set of tablets comes from Danish excavations at Tell Shemshara in 1957, located in modern northern Iraq. These texts include correspondence between a local leader and an Assyrian king around 1800 BC, along with administrative records. Documents like these played a key role in the original development of cuneiform writing.
“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.
Hidden Treasures: The National Museum’s Cuneiform Collection is led by Nicole Brisch (University of Hamburg) and Anne Haslund Hansen (National Museum), and the project is supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation and the Edubba Foundation.
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