Phillips 13 FAQ
Why is this tablet called Phillips 13?
This tablet is called Phillips 13 because it is housed in a collection owned by Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma. An instructor who taught there years ago purchased a small set of Babylonian tablets from Edgar Banks, an archaeologist and dealer in cuneiform antiquities. The library now owns them, and numbered each item in its collection. This tablet is number 13.
How do you know it is authentic?
While cuneiform tablets are rarely displayed by museums and libraries, there are actually tens of thousands of administrative tablets held in hundreds of collections all over the world. Until recently it was easy to obtain authentic tablets on the market, hence their price was too low to attract many forgers. There are forged tablets though. Phillips 13 is authentic because it can be traced to a dealer in authentic antiquities, the tablet is physically and internally consistent with excavated Ur III tablets, and contains information no forger could know.
How old is it?
Phillips 13 dates to the last years of the reign of Shulgi, the second king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, often abbreviated Ur III. The chronological data currently available do not allow us to accurately connect the internal chronology of the Ur III kings, which is now quite sound, to the Gregorian calendar. However, most authorities believe that Shulgi's reign began about 2100 BCE according to the "Middle Chronology." Oppenheim proposed that Shulgi's reign began in 2094 and ended with his death in 2047. Phillips 13 mentions people who do not otherwise appear in the administrative texts until after Shulgi's 35th regnal year. This means the tablet must have been inscribed sometime between 2060 and 2047 in Oppenheim's chronology. It is safe to claim that the tablet is about four thousand years old.
Where was it found?
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Banks believed that the tablet came from the site of Drehem in modern Iraq. The mound or tel is a few miles south of the ancient city of Nippur, and was situated in ancient times on the banks of the Euphrates river or one of its major channels. The mound housed an administrative site during the Ur III period which was on the estate of an aristocrat named Puzrishdagan. The Ur III kings used this estate to collect animals from the northern cities of Sumer and disburse them to temples sponsored by the king, the army, and the royal bureaucracy (see map). These disbursements grew so large that Shulgi constructed a permanent facility there in his 38th regnal year whose remains you can see in the picture to the right. Thousands of tablets, excavated by local people and sold to dealers, from Drehem are held in Western collections. The mound has never been systematically excavated. |
Drehem from a moving car window, this picture dates from the early 1970's. |
Why was it inscribed?
Administrative tablets were inscribed as an aid to memory, or to provide proof that property had been transferred from one person to another. This tablet may have been a memento of a royal visit, or an inventory of property belonging to the royal household. Such tablets were not baked nor were they considered worth keeping for more than a few years.
Why is this tablet important?
Phillips 13 provides an inventory of property associated with members of the royal household including the king, Shulgi, the queen, Shulgizimti, consorts, children, maids, and messengers. The members of the household seem to be ranked in importance, and each is associated with equipment necessary to conduct their part of a royal drinking party. The tablet gives us a snapshot of the royal household as it was on a state visit. It also gives us a list of the furnishings for a drinking party, including clothing, jewelry, gifts, chairs, beds, and drinking utensils. These items were so important that Sumerian kings were buried with them. The finest examples come from the grave pits at Ur.
Have gold and silver drinking vessels ever been recovered from a Sumerian site?
Yes. While the tombs of the Ur III kings have not yet been discovered, royal tombs at Ur, perhaps three or four hundred years older that Phillips 13, contained many of the items found in our tablet. Some of these pieces are part of a traveling exhibit, and one of the exhibitors, the McClung Museum, has a good web site including many pictures.
What is cuneiform writing?
Cuneiform writing is a set of related scripts used in ancient southwestern Asia from about 3500 BCE until about 100 CE. Cuneiform is characterized by the use of wedges to form characters. Most cuneiform scripts were complex, including hundreds of signs with multiple values for each. Clay was the usual medium for cuneiform writing but scribes also wrote on stone, metal, wax, and ivory. At various times Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Persian, Hittite, and Canaanite were reduced to cuneiform writing. Phillips 13 is a cuneiform tablet written in Sumerian.
What is a transliteration?
For the convenience of scholars, assyriologists reduce cuneiform writing to phonetic values written in the familiar roman script. Because Sumerian cuneiform is very complex, the transliteration is an interpretation of the text showing how the signs which form the text make sense.
Why does the transliteration contain strange characters?
Nineteenth century assyriologists discovered that certain phonetic values were associated with more than one sign. They named the signs by assigning a number to each value, and these names have become standardized. For instance, there are ten signs which can have the value "nu." The first is called "nu," the second is called "nú," the third is called "nù," the fourth is called "nu4," and so on until "nu10."
There are also special characters for sounds which do not correspond to one letter in the roman script. For instance, the final sound in the name Gilgamesh is transliterated with an š symbol. Unfortunately, html is still not fully standardized so that Windows based browsers, using Western European ISO encoded characters, will interpret the transliterations correctly while Macintosh users may see something else. In the future, I intend to use unicode character encoding with xml tags as they become standardized within assyriology.
There are many other issues regarding the transliteration of Sumerian which are beyond the scope of this web page. Interested readers might consult Marie-Louise Thomsen, The Sumerian Language (1984) pp. 15-33, 324.
Where can I find more information about Shulgi and the Sumerians?
There are several very fine books which students can consult. One recommended source is Civilization of the Ancient Near East, J. M. Sasson ed., 1995. The Cambridge Ancient History, available in most good libraries is authoritative though occasionally out of date. Another recent work, The Ancient Near East, Amélie Kuhrt, 1997 contains an excellent bibliography.
There are many internet sources which vary in quality. A good source of web sites concerning the ancient Near East is Abzu maintained by the University of Chicago.