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Iraq's economic collapse means the oldest writing in the world can be bought for a song on eBay -- and has scholars racing to digitize Sumerian artifacts before they become paperweights.
May 11, 2002 | The history of writing is for sale on the Internet, and it's cheap.
The opening bid for a cuneiform cone that allegedly hails from 2000 B.C.E. starts at $1. A square tablet recording a sale that took place more than 4,000 years ago of a sheep, or maybe some grain -- it's a little hard to read -- well, that receipt will set you back less than $10.
Every day on auction sites like eBay, the artifacts of the ancient Sumerian world -- some of the earliest examples of human writing -- are being sold off like so many mass-produced Tinkerbell tchotchkes. And these tidbits of the past are shockingly inexpensive: for less than a 1960s Donald Duck pinwheel from the Mickey Mouse Club, history plunderers can purchase their very own treasure.
Are these all patent fakes? Made of clay that hails not from ancient Mesopotamia but from contemporary Albuquerque, chipped and scuffed to look "ancient" to suckers eager to buy a trinket from the past? Or are there so many of these hoary artifacts flooding the antiquities market that authentic cuneiform on clay really has a lower fair market value than plastic Disney Americana?
Robert K. Englund, an Assyriologist and Sumerologist at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA and a principal investigator on the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, says that many of these artifacts are real, but he wouldn't recommend buying them.
Even a cursory look at the images of those artifacts by a scholar of the ancient languages of Sumerian and Akkadian, like Englund, reveals that they are probably authentic. Rogue forgers don't usually bother to spend the years it takes to learn cuneiform before they chisel their fakes, and copying from photographs of an original is harder than it sounds. Glancing at a dozen images of cuneiform objects being auctioned on a recent day on eBay, Englund spots only one likely fake. And these days, there's almost always some cuneiform up for bid.
But while these cuneiform artifacts may be real -- actual writing from millennia past -- that doesn't make them clean. Many of these treasures are cultural fallout from Iraq's geopolitical isolation since the Gulf War brought on U.N. sanctions. Since the early '90s there's been a flood of cuneiform artifacts onto the international antiquities markets, some probably pilfered from archaeological sites, others lifted straight out of regional Iraqi museums.
"Everything is coming out of Iraq these days -- statuary, cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals," laments David I. Owen, a professor at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University.
Bidding at auction for that tantalizing tablet puts you at risk of trafficking in hot antiquities. "Much of it is certainly material that's resulted from illicit excavations since 1990," says Englund. "The government controls all excavation sites, but the war there resulted in the collapse of security." The regulations that do exist against exporting such cultural artifacts simply aren't enforced. And the amount of looting that's taking place makes some scholars suspect official corruption as well as outright theft.
"Given the quantity of material that has come out of the country," says Owen, "it's hard to imagine that this is happening without the cooperation of border guards."
An impoverished and isolated country is selling off its ancient history on the black market. The beginnings of civilization are surfacing only to disappear from view into private collections. But in a truly odd twist of fate, one of humanity's newest forms of communication, the Internet, may be the key to preserving the oldest of written words.
