A Clay Tablet Logs 18 Tonnes Of Missing Gold And One Excuse.

ITHACA, N.Y. — Eighteen tonnes of gold did not arrive.

A clay tablet the size of a bar of soap says so. It is broken at the tenth line. Somebody in the twenty-fourth century BCE wrote down the shortfall, and then wrote one line more: the fault was not with the workmen.

That is everything tablet PX-1207 indisputably says. The rest is argument. We are going to set the argument out in the order it happened, rather than the order that reads best.

What is on the clay

The fragment is 9.4 centimetres by 6.1, single-column on the obverse, two columns on the reverse, in a careful administrative hand. It was excavated at Tell al-Muqayyar — Ur — in 1908, catalogued as a duplicate, and deaccessioned by a European museum in 1974 as surplus to a collection it had four of.

The passage everyone argues about is the second column of the obverse, lines 4 to 11. Set out plainly, with the disputed matter in brackets:

Three things in that passage are not in dispute among any of the three scholars who have read it for this newspaper. There is a gold quota. It was missed by seven hundred talents. And the scribe took the trouble, in a document nobody was ever supposed to read twice, to record that the labour was blameless.

Seven hundred talents is roughly eighteen metric tonnes.

What is in dispute

Line 5 contains the sign sequence ni-bi-ru, and line 5 contains the number 3,600.

Dr. Halvard Sørensen-Ruiz, who has read cuneiform for thirty-one years and who agreed to be quoted at any length he liked, says both are ordinary. Nibiru is a common noun meaning a crossing or a ferry-point, he says, and it appears in ledgers about river traffic the way "junction" appears in a British railway timetable. The 3,600 is a šar, the base unit of the Sumerian sexagesimal system, and turns up in accounting the way "gross" turns up in a Victorian invoice.

Dr. Amaia Etxeberria, consulted separately and told nothing of Sørensen-Ruiz's view until after she had given her own, arrived at the same reading by a different route. She points out that the particle in line 5 governs a locative and that a locative is a place, not a body.

Our own correspondent, Dr. Perpetua Nkemelu, reads it differently, and this newspaper is publishing her reading not because she works here but in spite of it. Her argument turns on line 6, where the quota is described as ša a-na KASKAL — "that which is for the road." Administrative gold in the Ur III corpus, she argues, is almost always described by its destination: for the temple, for the palace, for the smith. A quota designated "for the road," delivered at a crossing, in a year counted in units of 3,600, is at minimum an unusual construction, and she can point to no parallel in the published corpus.

Sørensen-Ruiz's answer to that is short: the corpus is a tiny fraction of what was written, and arguing from its silence is arguing from a hole.

He is right that it is arguing from a hole. Nkemelu's answer is that it is the only hole with a shape.

The eleven months

There is a gap in this object's provenance and this newspaper is not going to bury it in a footnote.

The museum deaccessioned the fragment in February 1974. The first private owner's purchase record is dated 8 January 1975. Nobody we have spoken to can say where the object was in between, and we have spoken to the museum's registrar, both surviving collectors, the auction house that handled the second sale, and the daughter of the dealer who handled the first, who has her father's day-books for 1973 and 1976 but not 1974.

Jean-Pierre Ohlsson, who owned the fragment from 1979 to 2004 and who supplied his own purchase record without being asked twice, was direct about it. "I bought it from a man who is dead, in a shop that is closed, in a country that has changed its laws twice since," he said by telephone from Basel. "I can tell you what I paid. I cannot tell you what happened the year before I paid it."

An eleven-month hole in a chain of custody is not evidence of anything. It is an eleven-month hole. We are printing it because a reader who learns about it from somebody else in six months' time is entitled to ask why they did not learn it from us.

The sentence at the bottom

Whatever line 5 means, line 11 says the same thing in every reading anyone has offered: the fault was not with the workmen.

It is the only sentence on the fragment that is not a number, a name, or a unit. An accounting scribe, filling in a schedule that was going to be filed and forgotten, stopped to write down that the people doing the digging had done their part.

Dr. Etxeberria, who thinks the rest of the tablet is completely ordinary, said the same thing about that line that Dr. Nkemelu did, in almost the same words, on a different continent, three weeks apart.

"Somebody was covering for somebody," she said. "That part is not four thousand years old. That part is Tuesday."