CHICAGO (AFP) — A set of 300 ancient Iranian tablets held by the University of Chicago for more than 70 years was on its way home to Iran yesterday, marking the first exchange of antiques between the two nations since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
The clay tablets record administrative details of the Persian Empire from about 500 B.C. and have been on loan to the university’s Oriental Institute since 1937.
The tablets record the workings of the Persian administration — including details such as the daily food rations given to workers — but perhaps more importantly, they provide one of the few Persian sources of information on the Persian Empire.
Much of what is known about the empire — which sprawled from Ethiopia to Egypt, Greece, modern-day Turkey, Central Asia and India — has been gathered from Greek and Latin texts, according to the specialists at the Oriental Institute.
“These tablets function much like credit card receipts,” said Charles Jones, a researcher with the Oriental Institute. “They provide an incredibly rich amount of information.”
The basic daily ration for an adult male worker was about 11/2 quarts of barley and a half-quart of beer or wine, according to translations of the tablets.
In 1933, University of Chicago archeologists unearthed tens of thousands of tablets and tablet fragments at an excavation site in Persepolis, the capital of the Persian Empire.
“Singly, these tablets are almost worthless as historical information,” Matthew Stolper, an expert on Iran, told the Chicago Tribune.
“But when you begin to compile the contents of thousands of them, you begin to see this broad picture of how the empire was organized and run.”
University of Chicago scholars have published volumes of the translations of the Elamite scripts, which were written in cuneiform on clay tablets.
They have also produced digital images of them and are hoping to create an electronic database of the tablets that can be expanded as scholars complete the task of transcribing the remaining artifacts.
The tablets were sent earlier this week to the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization and were expected to arrive there late yesterday, university spokeswoman Emily Teeter said.
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