From the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of kilometres away from ancient Mesopotamia Sue McGovern-Huffman (Sands of Time/ ADCCAEA - Association of Dealers and Collectors of Ancient and Ethnographic Art) a dealer from Washington DC is flogging off a decontextualised bit of archaeological site ('
A large Babylonian cuneiform tablet, time of Hammurabi, ca. 1810 – 1750 BCE') with a Buy it Now price of US $12,000.00. At once we get the sledge-hammer narrativisation in the very name '
TIME OF HAMMURABI', but the actual evidence for that dating is not anywhere apparent in the seller's description. I guess the names of other rulers of the Amorite dynasty of Babylon (such as Sin-Muballit or Samsu-iluna) don't really convey the same trophy status. But there are problems with this (see below). Here is the seller's description:
From the collection of Edgar J. Banks [...] Condition: Minor chip on one corner and some lower corner erosion, otherwise intact, and in excellent condition overall. The collection number "7" painted on one side. A beautiful example. Presented on a museum quality custom mount.
Dimensions: Length: 2 1/2 inch (6.35 cm), Width: 2 inches (5 cm)
Provenance: Collection of Edger J. Banks, acquired by Mr. and Mrs. John E. Snyder in 1925. Donated to the Hershey Public Library and deaccessioned in 2018. This object is accompanied by a copy of the sales receipt and translations from Edgar J. Banks, dated June 2, 1925.
Edgar J. Banks was born May 23, 1866, in Sunderland, Massachusetts. He began his career as an American consul in Bagdad, Turkey, in 1897 and bought hundreds of cuneiform tablets on the market in the closing days of the Ottoman Empire, reselling them in small batches to museums, libraries, universities, and theological seminaries, several in Utah and the American Southwest and across the United States.
[...] [some biographical details of Banks to pad out the entry] Mr. Banks died on May 5, 1945.
Ms McGover-Huffmann has a sales receipt (from the sale of Banks to the Snyders, or the Library to her?) The
Hershey Public Library is in Hershey Pennsylvania (of chocolate fame) and the Snyder family seems in some way connected with the firm too. Ms Huffmann reproduces the sales spiel that Banks concocted to sell the item (presumably received by Mr. and Mrs. John E. Snyder in 1925). This reads:
"Large pottery cuneiform tablet, found at Senkereh, the ruin of the Biblical city of Ellasar mentioned in Genesis 14:1. This is a crude written document consisting chiefly of numerals and appears to be a memorandum of some merchant. It is of sun-dried clay and it comes from the time of Hammurabi, King of Babylon shortly before 2000 B.C. This king is called Amraphel in the Old Testament, and a contemporary for the Biblical Abraham. It is of special interest, for it comes from the exact time when Abraham is supposed to have lived and shows the nature of the business documents at that time. Extensive cuneiform writing on all sides."
In order to establish her own 'credentials', Ms McGovern-Huffman adds some details of her own, but compiled
directly from Wikipedia, about the Biblical Amraphel king of Shinar. Its a shame she did not read to the end of that text where she;'d see that there is little evidence for the association, or whether Amraphel was an historical figure at all. But handling antiquities breeds superficiality. In addition, there is really no evidence at all that is accepted nowadays that would place Abraham and other Patriarchs in the beginning of the second millennium BC (the evidence rather suggests the setting of the stories would be in the first millennium BC, but that is by-the-by), so '
the exact time when Abraham is supposed to have lived " is merely 1920s' dealer's cant. Likewise Banks is unclear (and Ms McGovern-Huffmann does not elucidate) whether the state of the object today is 'pottery' or merely sun-dried clay.
None of the various chronologies accepted today would place Hammurabi '
shortly before 2000 B.C.' (see
here). So how is this item ("
crude written document consisting chiefly of numerals") dated at all to
ca. 1810 – 1750 by McGovern-Huffman? These are Hammurabi's middle chronology dates (birth, not beginning of rule, to death).
But then, Banks (if the unsigned typecscript was created by him) says the object was found 'at Senkereh, the ruin of the Biblical city of Ellasar'. Interestingl,y Ms McGovern-Huffmann does not hasten to tell the reader that this tell is better known today as
Larsa. Of course Larsa has some rather unfortunate connotations on today's antiquities market, but this one has paperwork (and price to reflect that). Larsa was excavated by William Loftus in 1850 also briefly examined by Walter Andrae in 1903. The site was inspected by Edgar Banks in 1905 (Banks, E.J. "Senkereh, the Ruins of Ancient Larsa",
The Biblical World, 25 (1905), no. 5, pp. 389-392). He found that widespread looting by the local population was occurring there.
The problem is that if Larsa was a minor site after the defeat of Rim-Sin I (1822 BC to 1763 BC - middle chronology) why is this tablet dated to precisely that period?
Update 9th Sept 2020
This tablet is still on sale, and has recently been discussed on Twitter by those who know more about cunies than I and it has unanimously been stated that this is a Neo-Babylonian tablet, which would make it around about 626 BC–539 BC (ish). So that means some 1400 years or so later than the date the sales spiel gives it. It is also the period when Larsa fell to Nebuchadnezzar II (the Biblical one). Banks sold this sixteen years after he'd been appointed a professor of Oriental languages and archaeology at the University of Toledo. So one would expect him to know the difference. Did the Snyders buy more than one tablet in the 1920s, including from Banks, among them one "from the time of Abraham" and one "from the time of Nebachudnezzar II" and the papers became muddled up through poor custodianship? In which case, these papers are not in any secure way associated with the item Ms McGovern-Huffmann is trying to sell, but another item entirely. Which is a shame as the rather high price she places on this lump of clay is predicated on the assumption that these papers belong to this object.
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