ANCIENT DOCUMENTS

OLIVER STEAD

DESCRIPTION Sumerian clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions, 2250–2100 bce Sizes c. 45 × 35 × 11 mm

MAKER / ARTIST Makers unknown

REFERENCE Donated by Kenneth A. Webster (Curios-007-001)

Made more than 4000 years ago, these three Sumerian clay tablets are by far the oldest artefacts in the Turnbull Library collection. They came to the library in 1956 as part of a collection of samples of different systems of writing from around the world, donated by the New Zealand-born artefact dealer and collector Kenneth Athol Webster (1906–1967). Their presence illustrates the influence of the priorities of New Zealand collectors who followed the library’s founder, Alexander Turnbull.

Born in Wellington and educated at Wellington College, Webster worked as a clerk and a farmer before travelling to Britain in 1936, where he based himself for the rest of his life. After the war, during which he served in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, he began to collect Māori artefacts, New Zealand and Pacific books, manuscripts, paintings, drawings and prints, making many items available through donation and sale to New Zealand museums.

Webster was an early advocate for the repatriation of Māori antiquities in overseas collections. In 1961, he offered his substantial collection to the New Zealand government for purchase, but the government declined to buy it. After his death, the Alexander Turnbull Library purchased Webster’s remaining collection of books, paintings, prints and manuscripts from the rare books dealer Maggs Bros. in London.

The earliest cuneiform tablets were made well over 4000 years ago in the area that is now Iraq. Earlier tablets featured pictograms of animals and other agricultural produce. Gradually, the pictograms were refined into a script for texts, at first in the Sumerian language. Later, the system was adapted for other ancient languages such as Akkadian, Assyrian and, much later, Persian.

Several hundred thousand cuneiform tablets are recorded in the world’s museums, but relatively few have been translated and published. Translation became possible when nineteenth-century scholars discovered that the signs represented syllables and were intended to be read from left to right.

Of the tablets here, one inscription concerns grain, mentioning the field of the shepherds and the temple of the deity Shara and of a certain Shubati. It is dated in the year that Simurrum was laid waste for the third time, during the Third Dynasty of Ur (about 2250BCE). Another records three deliveries of leather bags to a palace, while the third concerns the charge for hiring a boat and its crew to carry reeds upstream from the city of Umma to the city of Nippur.

These 4000-year-old tablets were donated to the Turnbull by Kenneth Webster, one of several important collectors whose gifts and bequests have added to the collection’s range and significance.