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Jessica Zhang ’25

The Mystery

The oldest resource on campus isn’t the library or the farm; it’s a collection of rock-solid clay tablets, each one smaller than a pop-tart. They are nearly 4000-years old, and they have languished in the dust of our archives for a century. Containing messages in the archaic Sumerian language, these clay tablets are impressed with tiny characters called cuneiform, a writing system from the first human civilization. And we have five of them just laying around. This cannot be overstated: the collective excitement in the archive rooms the day Rachel Hyunh ‘25 and I found them could have blown the roof off of the library. How often does a high schooler get to hold an object older than nation-states, older than the first Chinese dynasty, and older, even, than Jesus?

Prior to the discovery, Rachel and I had been working on a passion project: an exhibition of relics in the archives. To us, the archives were severely underappreciated; though its shelves were filled with ephemera and antiquities from another era of NMH, students rarely visited or explored its holdings. Naturally, secrets and mysteries accumulated. With the help of school archivist Peter Weis, we dug around the shelves in hopes of finding something unique to show the community.

Initially, Mr. Weis pushed medieval chainmail, Persian pottery, and items from Constantinople our way. When he brought the tablets to us in a gray case, it was almost like an afterthought. “I just remembered that we had these!” he said as he gently took out the tablets. The origins of the tablets were blurry, even to him. “There was no labeling on the box when I got to the school,” he said, his brow furrowing. “Nobody really knew or cared about them, but I knew that they were there.”

Small and dense, they fit like a pop-tart in my hand. We brushed our fingers over the uneven ridges that we knew were words. What did they say? How did they get to the States? And most importantly, how did they land in NMH possession? Every question Rachel and I asked seemed to go nowhere. There was no ledger. There was no donation card. There was no number, email, or address attached to the tablets that we could contact. All we had were the rocks themselves, Mr. Weis’s memory, and a puzzling, yellowed paper signed by a man named Edgar J. Banks. They looked like translations, but the text was faded and difficult to decipher. The date read 1924.

The intrigue was enticing. Never one to back down from a challenge, Rachel and I began thinking of ways to translate, source, and uncover the mystery of the tablets.

The Decoding

If Dr. Eckart Frahm at Yale University was surprised to get a request for translation, he didn’t show it. After corresponding in early February of this year, he kindly assigned a group of Assyriology students on our case. Soon enough, PhD students Josh Jacobs and Parker Zane were driving up to NMH from New Haven, Connecticut to collect the box and all its precious contents. Mustached and wearing a baseball cap, Jacobs seemed more likely to watch the Red Sox than think about Sargon the Great. We were delighted, however, to hand off our tablets to expert care. For the entirety of the summer, Rachel and I impatiently checked our emails for an update.

In late August, it came. Free of charge, the Yale students provided a complete set of translations and transliterations for all five tablets. The folks at the Babylonian Collection also threw in a provenance document (basically a biography for an object). They generously cleaned up the tablets and removed calcification that had obscured some of the markings. In other words, it was pure academic gold.

So what did the tablets actually say? Pretty mundane things, as it turns out. “They’re basically receipts,” said Jacobs. 3 lambs for religious offerings. 34 mana of fleece. Records of a man named Šeš -kal-la (pronounced shesh-kalla) buying 114,774 liters of barley. They were activities quite normal for the 2nd and third millennium, when people regularly donated to temples. A few tablets could be identified down to the exact day of the exact year in a dynasty.

I asked Jacobs about the accuracy of Banks' translation – the paper we found. “He was pretty much wrong on everything,” replied Jacobs with a straight face. For one, Banks had dated everything much older than it actually was. But apart from being a poor translator, the provenance document also revealed that he was a notorious figure from the world of the antiquities trade. As a U.S. diplomat, Banks was stationed in the Ottoman Empire, but his side gig was roaming the local black market for artifacts. And roam he did. His own biographer estimated that he imported as many as 175,000 artifacts to the United States.

These lost stones – taken from their homelands – were dispersed all over museums, institutions, private collections, and schools like NMH, which partially explains how they ended up in our archives. Someone (likely an alum) must have bought them in the 1920’s and donated them. In an interview over the dim-lit archives table, Mr. Weis recounted the dizzying array of objects NMH owned from its alumni donations: crafts from South America, dolls from Korea, shoes for bound feet from China. “We have this alumni body that went out and did missionary work all over the world,” he said, acknowledging NMH’s evangelical past. “And so we have all of these artifacts from all over the world.”

Cool, I thought. We’ve got so much history in our basement. But as I walked past row after row of dusty shelves, seeing another nation’s heritage be forgotten in our archives, I heard Mr. Wei’s voice in my head. “The question is: when you have a thing, what kind of work is it doing to improve your institution, and in what way?”

The Archives

Many would call this project finished. We got the translations, learned about its source, and set up a little exhibition by the reading corner in the library lobby. Right now, visitors can gaze at the tablets through glass and read both the translation and the provenance document. If by chance I am there, I pull open the case and let curious students gently cup them in their hands. I hold back the urge to tell them that there is so much more downstairs, so much undiscovered and untranslated stuff covered in dust. And if we don’t start making use of those artifacts, they might as well be in Iraq, Iran, or India. The true endeavor of this project is one that will span the remainder of NMH history.

By neglecting our holdings, we are neither confronting its history nor engaging with it in the present. As an institution, there are so many creative ways to let students take advantage of the archives. Picture an Ancient Mediterranean class passing around a remnant from the civilizations they learn about. Or a world history lecture that takes place right in the archive shelves, where students can reach over and see a Mughal painting from the 16th century. I don’t think it’s just a possibility – it’s a necessity. The tablets are a starting point for a re-arrangement of the archives.

“I think that [this project] has prompted us to do a tremendously responsible thing, which is to translate [the tablets], transliterate them, and conserve them,” said Mr. Weis as we reflected on this wild journey together. “The archives are a way for the school to remember itself.”

The tablets have already lasted 4,000 years, and they could last 4,000 more without ever being disturbed from their resting place. But that’s not what institutional stewardship is about: somebody gave them to us for a reason, and it’s up to us to make it worthwhile. With apathy, the tablets are just rocks in our basement. With engagement, they become treasured artifacts.

Treasures in the Basement

The Overload

The Silent Dance Against Perfection