The 3-year project, ‘States of Clay: Integrated Scientific Approaches to Clay Bureaucratic Objects from Early Mesopotamia, 3700-2700 BCE’, is a collaboration between the University of Reading and the Vorderasiatisches Museum of the State Museums of Berlin. Led By Roger Matthews, Barbara Helwing, Amy Richardson, Helen Gries, and Heike Dohmann, the project will study c. 6800 clay bureaucratic objects including clay inscribed tablets, clay sealings impressed with stamp and cylinder seals, and clay tokens, all dating to 3700-2700 BCE.
These artefacts of early bureaucracy are stored in museum collections in Berlin, Heidelberg, Leiden, Baghdad, London and Oxford. We will be conducting a range of materials-science based analyses, integrated with study of fingerprints, iconography, textual content and functional analysis, to generate new interpretations of the changing roles of clay bureaucratic objects across time and space over a period of 1000 years, during the earliest development of urban life in Mesopotamia (Iraq and adjacent regions). The project’s results and interpretations will be publicly shared as Open Access academic publications and research resources, and as an online exhibition hosted by the German Digital Library.
This work is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant number AH/X001717/1).