ANCIENT MSS.

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 April 1932, Page 12

ANCIENT MSS.

4,000 YEARS OLD The “Spectator” contains an interesting article by “8.D.” on the discovery of some ancient manuscripts. “Little has been heard of the find not long ago of a cache of more than 1,000 4,000-year-old manuscripts in an excavation undei* a modern city in Asia Alinor, Kultepe,” states the ■writer. “It was made by an eminent Czech archaeologist, Professor Hrozny, of the University of Prague, in the country of the Biblical Hittites. Some time must elapse before the letters and accounts, which apparently compose most of them, can be deciphered; they will reveal, by heterogenous details, what manner of men dwelt and traded in that important commercial mart in those long-distant days. Business men in old Kanes, as in modern Mincing Lane, found it indispensable to keep written records of their affairs. They stored the hieroglyphed clay tablets in clay envelopes which had to be broken before the contents could be revealed.

“Five thousand years ago. in Central Babylonia, tradesmen sent in their bills just.as they do now; and they were not always paid, as is shown by an unreceipted butcher’s bill, presented to a customer at Umma about 2,350 years ago, and now in the library of the University of Pennsylvania. The Smithsonian Institution has unpaid Babylonian bills for goats. “Quite a number of what appear to have been schoolboys’ exercises or impositions have been excavated here and there in Babylon and Assyria, dating to as far back as some 4,000 years ago. Professor Leonard Woolley says that impositions were harder then owing to their having so laboriously to be incised in clay, and that the writing grew worse as the boy approached the end. “It is noteworthy that complaints compose the subject matter of many of the letters that men and women wrote thousands of years ago. High potentates of ancient Egypt used to

write complaining of the way in which streams and canals had become almost unnavigable for their barges on account of becoming choked with weed because the riparian residents neglected their duty. Two poignant letters of Dahamunpatun, Queen of Egypt and widow of the famous Tutankhamen, written in Hittite, have been spared by the ravages of time. Their recipient was the King of the Hittites, one of whose sons, Dahamunpatun wished to marry. As translated by Dr. Ephrain Speicer one reads: ‘My husband is dead. There is no son unto me. To thee are many sons. They say that if unto me thou wouldst give one of thy sons he could become my husband. I cannot take a slave of mine and make him my husband.’ The second is a plaintive remonstrance, blended with an upbraiding of the King for not having regarded her letter as strictly confidential. SAME OLD STORY “Another very old complaint of a sort that is familiar to-daj T as it was in ancient Egypt was written in a papyrus letter that was dropped on the floor of a room in a recently-exca-vated building of the third dynasty near Sakkara, about fifteen miles from Cairo. There it had lain for fortyfive centuries. It is a protest to the Wazir’s department from the officer in charge of troops at Tura that some of his men had been sent for to have new uniforms served out to them, but through Wai’ Office ineptitude had been kept waiting six days before the garments arrived. “The earliest letter on paper to have been found in Asia appears to have been written by an angry woman about her husband’s behaviour some 1,500 years ago. It was found at Lop Nor, on the fringe of Chinese Turkestan. It is not a complete letter, but the decipherable sentences on the fragment run: “ ‘He does not behave as a man should, and has wrecked his official career . . he yields to passion 1 and commits acts . of violence . . . with blind eyes and deaf ears, his clothes torn, he forgets his duty, and gives

himself up to debauchery ... he is ruining his family and wasting, his substance; he rushes off in the middle of the night ....”’ Few of the existing records of our civilisation to-day, in the form of books and newspapers, will last, despite the efforts’, made to preserve some of them. They are printed on paper made from wood pulp, which has not the quality of permanence. “It is pretty safe to predict,” states “8.D.,” in concluding the article, “that almost all our books and practically all our bound files of newspapers and magazines will have crumpled to dust long before the lapse of another thousand years, for wood pulp paper is short-lived. Even by going to the trouble of interleaving all its newspaper files with sheets of tissue paper, the New York Public Library has no expectation that they will be handable for more than about a hundred years. In puTsuit of immortality, the New York “Times” now prints a limited number of copies every day on absolutely pure rag paper for preservation in libraries. The Louden “Times” has been doing the same thing for years. Odd though it seems, it is certain that the student of a century *or two hence will be able to consult plenty of legible newspapers dating up to about 1850, for they are on rag paper. The papers, however, chronicling man’s subsequent conquest of time and space, the dawn of the eras of flight, wireless, electrification, and television will crumble like ashes at his touch.. Already the file of a weekly London journal of only fifty years ago, preserved in the British Museum Library, has met with that fate.”