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Alas, Babylon: Tracing
the Last
King’s Desert Exile
deities—including Marduk—in the form of carnelian, lapis lazuli, and censers of gold, according to
a translation by Assyriologist Hanspeter Schaudig
of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The
find “is very valuable for our knowledge of history,”
says philologist David Weisberg of Hebrew Union
College in Cincinnati, Ohio. But he adds that the
inscription “is quite damaged, and many lines are
illegible,” so it will require more study.
id—6th century B.C.E. was a dark time for the
empire of Babylonia. Persians and Medes
were threatening in the east, and the king mysteriously abandoned his famed capital of Babylon for a
remote oasis in the western Arabian desert.
Contemporary texts portray King Nabonidus as
mentally unstable and complain that he forsook the
prime Babylonian deity, virile Marduk, for the mystical cult of the moon god Sin, often portrayed as an
old man with a long beard.
M
The find is part of a larger effort to understand
the complex trade routes that linked the ancient
Middle East. Tayma lies at a critical juncture of the
frankincense trade flowing north from Yemen and
other routes to the Yemen and other routes to the
Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia, and for millennia it
offered travelers a respite from the desert. At the
time of Nabonidus, the oasis included a city with a
vast wall some 14 kilometers in circumference and
a well 18 meters across, one of the largest on the
notoriously dry Arabian Peninsula. The team, led by
Ricardo Eichmann of Berlin’s German
Archaeological Institute and Said al-Said, a professor at King Fahd University, has found 13 successive layers of occupation from the mid-3rd millennium to the early centuries of the modern era,
showing a surprising continuity in urban desert life.
Those texts, written by Nabonidus’s clerical
enemies, have been the only evidence of his claimed
exile. Now archaeologists have found the first concrete signs that Nabonidus indeed lived in the oasis
of Tayma, more than 1000 kilometers to the west of
today’s Iraq, and they hope also to uncover why this
obscure oasis played such a pivotal role in history.
Academics familiar with the Middle East say that
the Tayma dig itself, in sparsely settled northwestern Saudi Arabia, is a triumph of science over politics, given the difficulty of winning permits from
the Saudi government for excavations by foreign
teams.
Three years ago, Saudi researchers working
near Tayma found rock inscriptions that mention an
army of Nabonidus that battled local Bedouin. Then
in December, a joint Saudi-German team found a
piece of badly weathered stele, a stone slab
inscribed with writing, which closely resembles
other slabs associated with Nabonidus’s reign.
Although Babylonian texts mention that
Nabonidus built a palace at the site, Eichmann says
none has yet been found, but the team will keep
looking when it returns to Saudi Arabia in
November. Textual evidence found elsewhere indicates that Nabonidus was ill when he left Babylon
and recovered during his decade in the desert. But
German excavation director Arnulf Hausleiter speculates that his real motives could have been economic: By asserting control over an important trade
city, Nabonidus may have been attempting to bol-
The slab originally would have stood for
passersby to read, but the team’s fragment—60 centimeters (cm) wide, 50 cm high, and 11 cm thick—
was later reused in building a wall. Only about a
dozen lines of the stele are legible, but they indicate
that Nabonidus made offerings to Babylonian
“Alas, Babylon: Traxing the Last King's Desert Exile” by Andrew Lawler from SCIENCE, August 2005. Copyright © 2005.
Reprinted by permission of The American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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ster Babylon’s flagging treasury. If so, the gambit
failed. The texts say that the king returned to
Babylon in 542 B.C.E. after a decade in exile, only
to be overthrown by the Persian King Cyrus the
Great 3 years later. Thus Mesopotamians lost control over their own rich territory—a control that was
not fully regained until 2500 years later in the 20th
century.
UR’S XENA: A WARRIOR PRINCESS
FOR SUMERIA?
One of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries in history was Leonard Woolley’s excavation
of the royal tombs of Ur in the late 1920s. The 16
graves included a “death pit” with sacrificed retainers and animals. Woolley believed the tombs were
those of kings and their consorts, including the
famous Queen Puabi, buried with a magnificent
crown and other jewelry.
But one grave, tomb 1054, left Woolley perplexed. In the shaft 4 meters above the stone burial
chamber was a cylinder seal inscribed with the word
“lugal,” Sumerian for “king” or “ruler,” along with
a name read as Meskalamdug and traditionally
translated as “hero of the land.” In the stone chamber itself were a host of weapons, including a dagger at the side of the principal occupant. But there
was one hitch: Woolley determined that the remains
were of a woman. Scholars had long held that
ancient Mesopotamian rulers, unlike their Egyptian
neighbors, were always men. “That seal cannot be
hers,” Woolley concluded in a 1934 publication.
The puzzle has obsessed two generations of
researchers, who have come up with a variety of
theories to explain it. Now Kathleen McCaffrey, a
graduate student at the University of California,
Berkeley, says that the most logical answer is the
simplest: The seal and weapons did indeed belong
to the buried skeleton, which may have been that of
a female Sumerian ruler. That claim has sparked
fierce debate, however, especially because Woolley
disposed of the bones shortly after discovering
them.
Woolley himself suggested that the seal and
weapons were gifts from the woman’s husband.
Another theory is that the true owner of the seal, a
male, was buried in a mud-brick shaft above the
stone tomb. But McCaffrey notes that the materials
in that shaft are low quality and lack weapons, and
that no other royal tomb is constructed of mud
brick. In fact, the remains in the mud- brick shaft,
identified by Woolley as male, were wrapped in
women’s clothing with feminine jewelry.
Unfortunately, those bones also were discarded.
The principal occupant of 1054 herself reveals
some curious gender anomalies, notes McCaffrey.
Her skeleton was found wearing a hair ribbon, two
golden wreaths, and a gold dress pin, all typical for
high- status Sumerian women of the day. But she
was not adorned with the usual earrings or elaborate
choker, and there were no floral combs or cosmetic
containers. And a gold headpiece and a dagger and
whetstone at her waist were typical for Sumerian
men; a gold headdress near the skeleton has a brim,
a style that Woolley believed was worn mostly by
men.
Also in the stone chamber were a bronze ax,
dagger, and hatchet—very atypical for a woman’s
tomb. Other researchers attribute those weapons to
the male attendants in the room, but McCaffrey
notes that the attendants lack rings, weapons on
their bodies, or any other sign of elite materials,
suggesting that they were servants.
McCaffrey maintains that the root of the problem is translation: Sumerian grammar does not
include gender distinctions, but “lugal” has always
been translated as “king” rather than simply “ruler.”
In the case of tomb 1054, she concludes that the
woman was in fact a lugal.
But other scholars hotly disagree. University of
Chicago archaeologist McGuire Gibson argues that
the seal’s location above the stone chamber makes it
difficult to tie it to the elite occupant below. He adds
that most of the bones had deteriorated so much that
identifying gender was difficult. “Woolley couldn’t
tell the difference between a man, a woman, or a
monkey,” he says. McCaffrey counters that Woolley
was competent enough to identify correctly the genders of the dozen skeletons that still exist.
Philologists, meanwhile, note that although “lugal”
is technically a gender-free term, there is the counterpart term “eresh,” which traditionally is translated as female consort to a male ruler.
Without a skeleton, scholars may never definitively sort out the mysteries of tomb 1054. But the
Alas, Babylon: Tracing the Last King’s Desert Exile 3
women of ancient Ur may have more to say in the
near future: Researchers are now examining Queen
Puabi’s remains for clues to her genetic identity.
LOOTED TABLETS POSE SCHOLAR’S
DILEMMA
Few societies before our own were as obsessed with
recording data as ancient Mesopotamia. After
inventing the first script in the 4th millennium
B.C.E., the Sumerian scribes used clay tablets to
keep track of the most minute economic transactions as well as great myths such as The Epic of
Gilgamesh that stir readers even today. The tablets
have proved invaluable in understanding the hearts
and minds of that lost world.
But the artifacts also have attracted collectors
and antiquities dealers. Today, as many as 100,000
tablets a year are being ripped out of archaeological
sites in war-torn Iraq and put on the international
market, according to U.S. government estimates. By
comparison, only some 300,000 to 400,000 likely
existed in libraries and private collections prior to
1990, say scholars. So far, the number of stolen
tablets confiscated or returned is minuscule: An FBI
official said at the conference that fewer than 400
had been recovered recently by U.S. agents.
Should academics publish texts from
cuneiform tablets that may have been looted? This
thorny ethical question sparked the fiercest debate
at the meeting and revealed a bitter split within the
community. Some philologists say that given the
scale of the looting, they are eager to salvage what
data they can by translating and publishing texts.
“You have an obligation to your science, to your
data,” says Jerrold Cooper, a philologist at Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who
says he would work with collectors who own
tablets. “It makes no sense at all to condemn all
publication” of potentially looted items.
But many archaeologists see the widespread
looting in Iraq as an unalloyed nightmare and any
involvement with potentially stolen tablets as aiding
and abetting the destruction. At the meeting, a faction led by Michael Mueller-Karpe, a specialist in
ancient metals at the Roman-German Central
Museum of Mainz, Germany, proposed a resolution
opposing scholarly involvement with tablets that
may have been looted. “Scholars … are urged to
refrain from providing expertise to the antiquities
market and to private collectors, unless the artifacts
in question can be proved to be neither excavated
illegally nor exported without permission,” states
the resolution, which was signed by 130 academics
at a meeting after the conference officially ended. A
number of scholars, primarily philologists like
Cooper, refused to sign.
The different opinions do not always track disciplinary lines. Robert Adams, a retired archaeologist and former head of the Smithsonian Institution,
surprised many participants at the opening session
by allowing that no discipline should be expected to
ignore vast amounts of new data, however it might
have been obtained. (After taking fire from colleagues, Adams later clarified that he did not mean
to condone the publishing of looted material but
wanted to emphasize the complexity of the problem.)
Meanwhile, several philologists draw a distinction between working on existing collections and
trafficking with dealers seeking to boost the value
of tablets. Cooper, for example, says he would “not
be comfortable” examining tablets owned by dealers.
But a few at the meeting do read recently
acquired tablets for dealers, for free or for pay—an
act that archaeologists maintain can boost the
tablets’ value and reinforce the cycle of looting.
Cooper says he hopes participants at the next conference will come up with a common ethical stance
to guide scholarly actions.
—ANDREW LAWLER