For the average museum-goer the romance of archaeology is inextricably bound to extravagant displays of power and riches: Egyptian pharoahs in their gilded sarcophaguses, China’s extraordinary Terracotta Warriors, the gold and jewellery of ancient Rome. In the field, it is the remnants of mighty fortifications and sumptuous palaces, the imprint of catastrophic events, that people cross continents to visit.
Few of the thousands who traipse along Hadrian’s Wall to the Roman fort of Vindolanda each year would go out of their way to see two of the treasures discovered there, both now at the British Museum. One is a birthday invitation from the wife of the fort commander to a friend, including greetings from her husband and “my little son”. The other is a letter to a soldier promising socks, sandals and underpants to protect him from the Northumberland cold. Yet these messages offer sharp and human insight into colonial life in a remote outpost of empire nearly 2,000 years ago. More tablets are still being unearthed by archaeologists racing against the effects of climate change.
As objects, these two scraps of text on wood fall into the area of archaeology defined by the American anthropologist James Deetz in 1977 as “small things forgotten”. Among the examples he cited in his groundbreaking study of early American life were records of estate auctions which showed that many households in colonial America contained only a single chair. What better evidence of a patriarchal system could there be, he argued, than the fact that everyone except the man of the house was expected to sit on stools or the floor.
Prof Deetz was using records to research objects, but his example also highlights one of the great paradoxes of written texts: they often turn out to be banal statements of accounts or legal documents rather than great works of literature. Just look at the Rosetta Stone. In that case, the text’s importance was not so much what it said as what it did: in recording a pretty dull decree of the royal cult of a 13-year-old king, it offered Egyptologists a key to crack the code of hieroglyphics. Yet in many cases, the very mundanity of texts is itself a code waiting to be deciphered: it reveals what societies felt it necessary to set in stone. It is unsurprising and chastening that the instruments of civic control, such as laws and accounts, feature as prominently as religious scriptures. Occasionally – as in the longstanding excavation of Hattusa (now Boğazköy), the ancient capital of the Hittite empire in north-central Turkey – all three come together to revelatory effect.
Last autumn, archaeologists working at the site announced the discovery of a cuneiform tablet in a previously unknown language. It is one of about 30,000 clay documents that have been unearthed over decades. Though mostly written in Hittite script, as many as 5% of the tablets used minority ethnic languages. From these, it appears that, far from suppressing their subject peoples, the Hittites – who ruled the area between 1650 and 1200BC – had a civil service of scribes dedicated to researching and recording their traditions and beliefs.
It will take time for the newly discovered language to be translated – historic texts are only accessible to most of us through the mediation of scholars – but its mere existence, more than 3,000 years after it was written, is evidence of how much we have to learn about civilisation from “small things forgotten”.
