The idea of the archive and... Babylonian archaeologists of the Mesopotamian past

February 26, 2009

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”

Faulkner, Requiem for a nun

How is memory sustained and (re-)configured?

ritual performances, festivals, commemorations(gatherings)

construction activity, building practice(technological knowledge)

oral traditions, oral culture, storytelling, desire

archiving, collecting, hoarding, digital storing, back-up (museums, mementoes, computing)

production of texts, annals, inscriptionswriting of official histories

visual representations, imaging, imagining

mapping the world: located, site-specific practices(topographies of remembrance)also known as “worlding of the world”

What is an archive?

The Cairo Geniza Documents About 200,000 medieval and later manuscripts on vellum and paper that were found in the genizah or store room of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Cairo, the Basatin cemetery east of Old Cairo, and a number of old documents that were bought in Cairo in the later 19th century. Mostly written in Arabic using Hebrew Script and belonging to the Jewish community of Cairo, the date of the documents range from 870 AD to 1880. Includes religious writings, court documents, legal writings and the correspondence of the local Jewish community.

A genizah is a storage room where copies of respected texts with scribal errors or physical damaged, or unusable documents, are kept until they can be ritually buried. The dark, sealed, room in the arid Egyptian climate contributed to the preservation of the documents, the earliest of which may go back to the eighth and ninth centuries.

The Genizah: secret place, archive

Friedberg Genizah Project

Bibliotheca Alexandrina (completed 2002)

Design: Snøhetta, a Norwegian architectural office

Library of Alexandriainitially organized by Demetrius of Phaleron, a student of Aristotle under the reign of Ptolemy Soter.Charged with collecting all the world's knowledge.

Materiality of the text: textual records as objects of memory, texts as artifacts

archival practices/record keepingas a memory practice

as creative rethinking of the past

Records continuum: that enhances unbroken chains ofmaterial-textual documentation of the past

Legal evidence-bearing institution?

Life cyclical model of archival practice:cultural biography of records

from birth, active use, “retirement” and destruction(a wobbly model)

Records may take on new meanings as authentic artifacts of the past

what is an archive?

The authority of the archive

archive, memory, history- an ambivalent relationship

Archives, memory, history: becoming the sucjects of the state

Atlas Group Archive Type A Files Fakhouri Notebook 38

(Walid Ra’ad)

Atlas Group Archive Type A Files Fakhouri Notebook 38 (Walid Ra’ad)

Atlas Group Archive Type A Files Fakhouri Notebook 38 (Walid Ra’ad)

In a nutshellMesopotamian archival tradition

Examples of Uruk IV (above, excavation no. W 7227,a) and Uruk III (below, no. W 14804,a) tablets

uruk/warka: first tablets from the storehouses of Inanna.

Cuneiform writing on clay tablet using a stylus that has a wedge shaped (cuneiform) tip.

Mesopotamian urban institutions:

• Temple, not just a site of veneration, •but more as the “wealthy neighbor”

Palace, not the residence of the king but socio-economic/politcal instutution

Wall plaque- Ur-Nanše and family. Limestone w/ cuneiform inscriptionGirsu (modern Tello), Southern IraqEarly Dynastic IIIA 2550-2400 BC

Tell Asmarancient EshnunnaDiyala River valleycity plan with excavated buildings

The Third Dynasty of Ur

Conventional (high) chronology:2119-2004 BC.

Low Chronology2055-1940 BC

Kings:Utu-hegal 2055-2048 BC (low chr.)Ur-Namma 2047-2030 BCShulgi 2029-1982 BCAmar Sin 1981-1973 BCShu Sin 1972-1964 BCIbbi Sin 1963-1940 BC

The king as builder:Foundation figurine of Ur-Namma

Ebla, North SyriaArchives of the ThirdMillennium Settlement

Mesopotamian practices of rememberingand the building as a repository of history,an archive

Akkadian words of bodily orientation and the sense of time

warku: back, futurepanu: front, past

Mesopotamian archival practices and intellectual history

scribal schoolsexercise tablets

scribal practices:copying, adopting, re-adoptingolder/historical/ancient texts

The scribes [(dub-sar)] of the various institutions —“palace, temple, schools” were apparently quite influential on the survival and the state of preservation of certain literary compositions by means of their “process of sifting through and selecting materials” for their school curriculum, and their editing practices were often driven by ideological motivations of their royal patrons, particularly in the case of the so-called royal hymns and other court literature.

Cuneiform tablet inscribed with omensOld Babylonian, about 1900-1600 BCFrom Sippar, southern Iraq

LettersLiterary texts, epic poetry

lamentationsAdministrative textsLexical listsContracts, land grants,

sale documents,Law codesRoyal annalistic texts

(historical documents)Ritual texts, omen literature,

(divination)

Nabonidus Cylinder from Ur (556-539) describes how he repaired the ziggurat called E-lugal-galga-sisa, which belonged to the temple of Sin in Ur, called Egišnugal.

Clay model of a sheep's liverOld Babylonian, about 1900-1600 BCFrom Sippar, southern Iraq

When the house is on fire and the children are gone

Ur-Utu’s house and archivein Sippar-Amnanum (Tell ed Der)17th c. BC

Ur-Utu was a landholder and the “kalamahhum-priest of Annunitum”(chief lamentation priest)

the house 225 m2

was excavated in mid 1970s by Belgian archaeologists

ca 2000 tablets burnt with the house

In 1975 the house was fully exposed. In four rooms to the northwest tablets were found, many belonging to distinct "archives," which were sealed by the fire that destroyed the building.

Altogether about 2,000 documents were found in the "house of Ur-Utu," mainly dating to the last phase of occupation (IIIb), Ur-Utu's house renovation.

Some tablets were, however, archived in distinct groups for several hundred years. 1283 texts have been dated.

Most of these tablets in this large house were found in room 22 (which could have served as a [sealed] storeroom), to the northwest of the central court, while the rooms 17 and 18 (forming one large residential room in phase IIId, but apparently not communicating with each other in IIIb) contained "archived" material....

Topographies of remembrance

the aesthetics and authority of the archive:Writing Mesopotamian history through archives

historiographical operation thatprioritizes particular kinds of knowledge practices

memory and archive: particular memory-practices of scribes andarchive-keepers of the cuneiform tradition