A Middle-Babylonian Chemical Text

Extract

The strange document here published by permission of the Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum is written with evident care on a perfectly preserved tablet of baked clay measuring in., now numbered 120960. It was acquired from a vendor who seemed to have trustworthy information that it was found at or near Tall ‘Umar, the site of Seleucia on the Tigris, before the beginning of the American excavations there, which is an unexpected provenance in view of the dating by the reign of Gulkishar, who was a king generally supposed to have ruled only over the extreme south of Babylonia, certainly not later than the seventeenth century B.C. This dating is itself not the least interesting feature of the document, for it gives us another text to add to the very few tablets hitherto published of the First Dynasty of the Sea-Land. But what is still more extraordinary about the tablet is that it is unique in the history of chemistry, containing, as it does, the earliest record known of the actual formulae for the making of glazes. Up to the present the earliest extant texts of this kind (also in cuneiform) are from the Royal Library at Nineveh, no older than the seventh century B.C.