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# The National Museum of Denmark has held a collection of some five-thousand-year-old clay tablets from Mesopotamia and Syria in storage for about a hundred years
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-natsionalnom-muzee-danii-okolo-sta-let-v-khranenii-nakhoditsia-kollektsiia-glinianykh-tablichek-iz-mesopotamii-i-sirii-vozrastom-poriadka-piati-tysiach-let/
- Published: 2026-05-06T12:30:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:09.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, Archive, The East, Museums, Science

The National Museum of Denmark has held a collection of some five-thousand-year-old clay tablets from Mesopotamia and Syria in storage for about a hundred years. Since the material is cuneiform, nobody took the tablets seriously. Until the Hidden Treasures project of the University of Copenhagen and the museum completed a full cataloguing and decipherment.

The main find is said to be the description of a ritual from the temple library in Hama, Syria, destroyed in 720 BC. When the Assyrians were carrying their valuables off to their capital, Ashur, these tablets were left among the ruins and lay there for almost three thousand years, until the Danes found them in the 1930s. The ritual described lasted an entire night: the exorcist burned wax and clay figurines and recited incantations, and it was believed to protect the king from political instability and misfortune.

For researchers, the discovery of such a text so far from the Assyrian capital means the export of the technologies of royal magic to the provinces, something like the transfer of security protocols.

The second find is a copy of the famous Sumerian King List, enumerating the rulers before and after the Flood. The Copenhagen version contains the names of kings from the end of the 3rd millennium BC. Other versions of the same list mention Gilgamesh, and this is one of the few pieces of evidence for a real historical prototype of the legendary hero. The list was used as a textbook in scribal schools.

The third group consists of correspondence between a local ruler of Tell Shemshara in northern Iraq and the Assyrian king around 1800 BC, as well as inventory registers and personnel lists. Among the purely bureaucratic texts there turned up such a charming testimony to the age as a receipt for beer.