For more than a century, a collection of inscribed clay tablets sat quietly in the vaults of the National Museum of Denmark, largely unstudied, written in languages that have not been spoken for thousands of years. Nobody knew exactly what they contained. Nobody had found the time to look. Now, researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the National Museum have spent years doing exactly that, and what they found inside these ancient tablets is far stranger, far more dramatic, and far more historically significant than anyone had anticipated.
The project, called Hidden Treasures: The National Museum’s Cuneiform Collection, has decoded a collection of texts ranging from anti-witchcraft rituals and medical incantations to royal correspondence and mundane bureaucratic records. Among the most remarkable findings is a king list that provides some of the strongest archaeological evidence yet that Gilgamesh, the hero of one of humanity’s oldest works of literature, may have been a real historical figure rather than a purely mythological creation.
What Cuneiform Is and Why It Matters
To appreciate the significance of what has been decoded, it helps to understand what cuneiform actually is and how extraordinary its survival has been.
Around 5,200 years ago, people in what is now Iraq and Syria began pressing wedge-shaped marks into clay tablets using a reed stylus. The resulting system, called cuneiform, from the Latin for wedge-shaped, became one of the world’s first writing systems and remained in use for more than three thousand years across dozens of languages and cultures. Cuneiform enabled the rise of complex urban civilisations by making it possible to record laws, conduct trade, manage agriculture, and transmit knowledge across time and distance.
The tablets decoded in the Hidden Treasures project were written in Sumerian and Akkadian, languages that have been extinct for millennia. The collection spans a remarkable range of text types, from the explicitly supernatural to the entirely mundane, and together they offer a window into the daily reality of some of the earliest complex societies on earth. Cuneiform writing began approximately 5,200 years ago and represents one of the foundational technologies of human civilisation, comparable in its cultural impact to the invention of the printing press nearly five thousand years later.
The Magic Spells That Kept Kings Safe
Among the most striking finds in the collection are anti-witchcraft rituals from the ancient Syrian city of Hama, sometimes known by its ancient name Hamath. These tablets are particularly unusual because virtually no other cuneiform texts on these subjects have been found from the same region during the same period, making them effectively unique in the global archaeological record.
One tablet in particular drew the attention of Troels Pank Arbøll, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen who specialises in ancient Mesopotamian religion and medicine. The tablet describes what scholars call an anti-witchcraft ritual, a ceremony of profound political and religious importance in ancient Assyria. “One of the clay tablets turned out to contain a so-called anti-witchcraft ritual, which was of enormous importance to the royal authority in Assyria because it had the remarkable ability to ward off misfortunes such as political instability that might befall a king,” said Arbøll.
The ritual was not a simple charm or prayer. It was an elaborate all-night ceremony in which a trained exorcist burned small figures made of wax and clay while reciting a precisely fixed series of incantations. The specificity and complexity of the ritual reflect the degree to which ancient Assyrian power was understood to be under constant supernatural threat, and the degree to which managing that threat was considered a matter of state security rather than personal superstition.
What makes this tablet’s discovery in Hama particularly significant is geography. Hama was not a centre of Assyrian religious or literary culture. The city was conquered and destroyed by Assyrian warriors in 720 BC, and the tablets were apparently left behind in the chaos of the sack. They were later recovered by a Danish archaeological expedition in the 1930s and have been preserved in Copenhagen ever since. The fact that anti-witchcraft rituals of this kind appear so far from the Assyrian capital suggests that the practice was far more widespread than previously understood.
The full research announcement from the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for the Studies of the Culture and Society of the Ancient Near East is available in detail through the university’s official news portal and includes extensive commentary from the researchers involved.
The King List That Changes What We Know About Gilgamesh
If the anti-witchcraft tablets are the most dramatically compelling finding in the collection, the king list is arguably the most historically significant.
Among the decoded tablets is a copy of what scholars call a Sumerian King List, an ancient document that records the rulers of early Mesopotamian city-states in sequence, mixing what appear to be historical figures with clearly mythological ones. These lists typically begin with kings who are said to have ruled for impossibly long periods before the biblical-style flood, and then transition to rulers with more plausible reigns after it.
Gilgamesh appears in such lists as the king of Uruk. He is best known as the hero of the Epic of Gilgamesh, widely considered the world’s oldest major work of literature, composed in Sumerian and later Akkadian over a period of centuries. In the epic, Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third mortal, a king of superhuman strength and ambition who seeks immortality after the death of his companion Enkidu. The story predates the Iliad by more than a thousand years and contains narrative elements that appear in later religious traditions, including a flood story strikingly similar to the biblical account of Noah.
Whether Gilgamesh was a real historical king has been debated by scholars for generations. The newly decoded tablet appears to be a school copy of a king list, likely used in scribal training, confirming that such lists were actively copied and studied in ancient educational settings. The list it records appears to be one of the versions that includes Gilgamesh.
“That makes this regnal list one of the few relics we have that suggests Gilgamesh may have actually existed. We had no idea we had a copy of that list here in Denmark. It is quite spectacular,” said Arbøll. The word spectacular is not hyperbole. The discovery of a previously unrecognised copy of a document linking Gilgamesh to a historical record in a European museum collection is precisely the kind of find that reshapes scholarly understanding without requiring a new excavation.
The broader significance of these findings for our understanding of ancient Mesopotamian civilisation is analysed in detail through Arkeonews, a specialist archaeology publication, which covers the Hidden Treasures project alongside other recent discoveries from the ancient Near East.
Royal Correspondence and the Birth of Bureaucracy
Beyond the magic and the mythology, the collection contains something equally revealing about early civilisation: evidence of how ancient societies actually functioned on a day-to-day basis.
A separate group of tablets in the collection comes from Tell Shemshara in what is now northern Iraq, excavated by a Danish expedition in 1957. These texts consist primarily of correspondence between a local leader and an Assyrian king from around 1800 BC, alongside administrative records that document inventories, personnel lists, and financial accounts. One tablet records what appears to be a receipt for beer, perhaps the most relatable document in the entire collection, and a reminder that the administrative instincts driving ancient bureaucracies were not entirely unlike those driving modern ones.
The presence of administrative tablets alongside magical and literary texts is itself historically informative. Cuneiform was not invented for literature or religion. It was invented for accounting. The earliest known cuneiform tablets, dating to around 3100 BC, record grain rations and livestock counts, not hymns or stories. The writing system that eventually preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh began as a tool for managing commodity flows in early urban economies.
“A great many of the cuneiform tablets we have today bear witness to a highly developed bureaucracy. There was a need to keep track of the advanced societies that were being built,” said Arbøll. The practical and the extraordinary coexist in this collection as they coexisted in the civilisations that produced them: a receipt for beer, pressed into the same clay, using the same script, as a ritual designed to protect a king from supernatural enemies.
This pattern of everyday records sitting alongside extraordinary documents connects to broader themes in how ancient societies managed knowledge and power, a dynamic explored in how our understanding of early human civilisation is being continuously revised by new fossil and documentary discoveries.
What AI Is Doing to Ancient Language Research
The Hidden Treasures project is part of a broader acceleration in the study of ancient texts driven by digitisation and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
Cuneiform is one of the most challenging ancient scripts to read and interpret. It was used to write more than a dozen different languages over three millennia, and its forms evolved significantly across time and geography. For most of the twentieth century, the number of scholars capable of reading cuneiform fluently was small, and the backlog of unstudied tablets in museum collections around the world was enormous. The British Museum alone holds more than 130,000 cuneiform tablets, many of which remain unpublished.
Machine learning tools trained on digitised cuneiform corpora are beginning to change the economics of this problem. Systems developed by researchers at universities including MIT, Cambridge, and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich can now assist with the identification of signs and the translation of standardised administrative texts, significantly reducing the time required to process large collections. The Hidden Treasures project itself relied on a combination of expert scholarship and digital tools to complete its comprehensive analysis of the Copenhagen collection.
The result is a research landscape in which museum collections that sat unstudied for decades are beginning to yield their secrets at a pace that was not previously possible. The Copenhagen collection is not unusual in having been overlooked. Dozens of comparable collections exist in museums across Europe, North America, and the Middle East, each containing tablets that may hold information of comparable historical significance. The question is no longer whether the tools exist to study them, but whether the scholarly resources can be allocated to do so.
What the Tablets Tell Us About Myth and History
One of the most intellectually interesting aspects of the Gilgamesh finding is what it reveals about the relationship between myth and history in ancient Mesopotamia, and about how that relationship differs from modern assumptions.
Modern readers tend to treat myth and history as distinct categories. A story either happened, or it did not. A figure either existed or was invented. Ancient Mesopotamian scholars appear to have held a more fluid view. The king lists that include Gilgamesh also include rulers who reportedly reigned for tens of thousands of years before the flood, figures that no serious historian treats as historical. Yet Gilgamesh appears in the same lists, and the ancient compilers of those lists treated all their entries as part of a single continuous historical narrative.
This does not prove that Gilgamesh existed in the way modern historians mean when they describe a figure as historical. It suggests something more nuanced: that the ancient scholars who composed and copied king lists understood certain legendary figures to occupy a space between myth and history that their own literary tradition took seriously, even if it did not insist on factual precision in the modern sense.
The newly decoded tablet from the Copenhagen collection confirms that this king list tradition was actively maintained and transmitted through scribal education, centuries after the events it purported to record. The students who copied these lists were not writing history in any sense we would recognise. They were preserving a shared cultural framework for understanding the past, one in which Gilgamesh occupied a place alongside rulers whose existence is less ambiguous.
That tension between mythological and historical understanding connects to how modern researchers are using new analytical tools to trace the long interplay between cultural memory and factual record across deep time.
Looking Ahead
The Hidden Treasures project is complete, but its implications will continue to unfold as the findings are absorbed into the broader scholarly literature on ancient Mesopotamia.
The anti-witchcraft tablets from Hama are already prompting new questions about the geographic spread of Assyrian religious practice and the role of ritual in maintaining royal authority at the margins of the empire. The king list copy will be scrutinised by scholars who specialise in the Gilgamesh tradition, adding one more data point to a long-running debate about the historical basis of the world’s oldest epic. The administrative records will contribute to ongoing work on the economic and social history of early Iraq.
For the general reader, the collection offers something more immediate: a reminder that the people who built the first cities, invented writing, and laid the foundations of complex civilisation were recognisably human in ways that transcend the distance of four thousand years. They worried about the political stability of their kings. They recorded their beer transactions. They copied stories about legendary rulers whose existence they could not entirely confirm but were unwilling to dismiss.
The full coverage of the Hidden Treasures project findings, as reported by ScienceDaily, provides a comprehensive overview of the collection and the research team’s methodology, and is available for readers who want to explore the discoveries in greater depth.
The clay is old. The writing is extinct. But the impulse behind it to record, to remember, to make sense of power and fate through language is as current as anything being written today.
