History Written on Clay

I went to listen to Professor Matthew Stolper's very engaging lecture about the Persepolis tablets at UC Berkeley this afternoon. What a nice and funny man this very distinguished scholar is!

Since I posted my earlier blog about the lecture, I have heard from a very interesting man by the name of Mr. Charles Ellwood Jones. It is an honor to find out about people who have so much interest in Iranian heritage which is now really world heritage. In his profile, Mr. Jones says: "I am the Librarian at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. From July 2005 to February 2008 I was the Head Librarian at the Blegen Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Before moving to Athens I spent twenty-two years as the Librarian at the Oriental Institute, The University of Chicago."

You can follow news about the Persepolis tablets and developments in the case through Persepolis Fortification Archive Project's blogs here. Before I left I told Professor Stolper how proud I was of his life's work, dedicated to research about Iran, thanking him for all his hard work.

UC Berkeley Lecture: Embattled Tablets

You can't love Iran and not care about what has been happening over the past few years with respect to the priceless Persepolis tablets in custoday of University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. A lawsuit threatens to claim the priceless collection which has been kept on loan from the Iranian government since 1933. Those tablets belong to Iran and to humanity. They should never be considered the appropriate medium of severance pay to anyone. If the Iranian government is found guilty of any crime in a court of law, they should be responsible for monetary payment of damages. These tablets or any Iranian heritage artifacts are not suitable choices for settling such liabilities.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 4:00 p.m. Professor Matthew Stolper from University of Chicago's Oriental Institute will give a lecture entitled "Embattled Tablets: News from the Persepolis Fortification Archive Front" at UC Berkeley's Department of Near Eastern Studies, 254 Barrows Hall. I am going to attend this lecture. If you live in these parts and you can, please come and join me.

Photo shows Professor Matthew Stolper examining one of the Persepolis tablets.

Here's an excerpt from a 2006 article about the collection and the impending case. You can read the full article here.

"In a small, dark room on the Oriental Institute’s third floor, Matthew Stolper puts thousands of ancient Iranian tablets under the microscope. Studying the unbaked clay artifacts over the course of 25 years, Stolper, the John A. Wilson professor of Near Eastern languages & civilizations, has translated many of the tablets—their slanted lines are mostly Elamite cuneiform. Taken together, the circa-500 bc documents from the ancient capital Persepolis—excavated by OI archaeologist Ernest Herzfeld in 1933—form the “records of one office palace bureaucracy handing out basic foodstuffs,” Stolper says. “Food, wine, grain.” The records follow “people traveling through the region on business from the Mediterranean coast to India: ‘So-and-so gets so much barley and so much beer.’ When you connect them all, you get a complicated network.”

"If a group of litigants gets its way, the tablets may be split up and sold at auction, the proceeds compensating survivors of a 1997 Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Five American survivors and four family members won a 2001 U.S. court case against Iran, which trained and supported the terrorists, and were awarded more than $400 million in damages. Because Iran doesn’t accept U.S. court jurisdiction, the plaintiffs’ lawyer looked elsewhere for assets: American museums holding Iranian artifacts." (Read the rest here.)

In A University Town

Tea Harvest, Gilan, Iran, May 13, 2008. Flavorful, red, and a little bitter, Lahijan tea is the most delicious tea in the world. Too bad the Iranian tea industry is now an endangered species. I wrote of a memory about this last year.

Berkeley is going through the annual tradition of graduations this week. Everywhere I go, I run into happy young people, clad in their caps and gowns, courted by family and friends, with armloads of flowers and gifts. It is really a moving and energizing sight. All their hard work, their ambitions, and their hopes are evident in that scene. I am reminded yet again of why I love working for a university and spending most of my waking hours in a university town.

In our office we bid farewell to our three student employees this week. They have each worked for close to two years in our office, giving us the benefit of Berkeley students' intelligence, while costing our budget close to nothing. They are off to making real money now! By popular demand, I made a huge pot of Baghali Polo Ba Morgh for the potluck event very early yesterday morning and took it to work. My co-workers can't get enough of this dish, it seems, so they had kindly "volunteered" me for brining it! They ate most of it and took the rest home for dinner, each of them thanking me again today! Ha Ha, if only another Iranian was around, they would be told that my rice was overcooked, shefteh, and that the tahdig was missing, too! I had left the tahdig for my kids and myself at home--I think we deserved it infinitely more!

I love Berkeley.