A 3,800-year-old woman once wrote a frustrated letter to her husband complaining about a debtor who refused to repay him; archaeologists have now read the ancient message without breaking its clay envelope

(Image credit: UHH/K.Helmholz)

The struggle to recover money someone owes you is familiar, even if the person on the other end of the transaction lived thousands of years ago. Imagine the disappointment of a woman instructed by her husband to retrieve silver he was owed, who, upon failure, penned her frustration in a letter addressed to him.For Anna-anna, who lived nearly 4,000 years ago in ancient Anatolia, this was precisely what happened. She wrote to her husband, Ennum-Aššur, a merchant who travelled across cities for business in central Anatolia. The message, etched on a cuneiform tablet, was brought to light by researchers at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg. But perhaps an even more intriguing detail is that the researchers managed to discover the contents of the letter without ever opening the clay envelope that had protected it for millennia.In an article on the technology used to access the letter, the CSMC reported that, while Ennum-Aššur was conducting business in central Anatolia, he had asked his wife to recover silver he was owed by a fellow merchant, Laqēpum. However, when Anna-anna approached the debtor, he refused to hand over the silver to her, claiming that he would repay her husband personally upon his return. He also claimed to have paid the silver to another individual, Kudātum. Anna-anna then wrote a letter to Ennum-Aššur to inform him of what had happened, leaving behind a glimpse of an everyday disagreement and offering a look into how similar problems existed even thousands of years ago.

A representative image (credit: Canva)

The tablet containing the letter was discovered during excavations at Kültepe, the ancient settlement of Kanesh in present-day Türkiye, and is now preserved at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara. Although the names of the sender and intended recipient, Anna-anna and Ennum-Aššur, could be read on the envelope, the message itself remained inaccessible, enclosed within its original clay covering. The letter had remained unread for nearly 4,000 years, including possibly by Ennum-Aššur, to whom it was addressed. It is possible that the letter never reached her husband at all. While we do not know how the conversation would have unfolded had he received it, the fact that the letter has now been read while preserving the artefact itself is a remarkable achievement.

Ancient writing system and how letters were protected

Clay envelopes were used in ancient Mesopotamia to protect written messages from damage and keep their contents private while they travelled between the sender and recipient. The letters themselves were inscribed on clay tablets using cuneiform, an indispensable writing system used across ancient Mesopotamia and other regions. Using wedge-shaped impressions, scribes inscribed their messages into the clay. The tablets could then be enclosed within another layer of clay bearing the names of the sender and recipient, along with impressions of their seals.

cuneiform tablets preserved at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara. (Image credit: (University of Hamburg/ Andreas Schropp)

For archaeologists, however, the task at hand was not simple. They could not read the letter without risking damage to its envelope, which was itself a valuable historical artefact. Although archaeological science has witnessed remarkable advances in examining ancient objects, the ideal technology for this task was X-ray microtomography, which produces detailed three-dimensional images of an artifact’s internal structure. Conventional tomographic scanners, however, can be extremely large and heavy, making them difficult to transport. Since the letter was housed in a museum, moving it to a specialised laboratory for scanning was not an ideal solution.

A unique way of accessing history

This is where ENCI, short for Extracting Non-destructively Cuneiform Inscriptions, entered the picture. According to an article in npj Heritage Science, ENCI was developed by an interdisciplinary team involving researchers from the University of Hamburg and the German research institution DESY. This mobile computed tomography scanner uses X-rays to examine sealed clay objects without opening them.The team brought together specialists from different fields, including Assyriologist Cécile Michel, X-ray physicist Christian Schroer and computer scientist Stephan Olbrich. Through this multidisciplinary approach, the researchers were able to collect and process tomographic data, reconstruct the tablet’s internal structure and visualise its inscriptions. This allowed them to access the contents of the letter without physically opening the envelope.However, ENCI is not limited to only clay tablets; the researchers have also demonstrated its use on other cultural heritage objects, including a ninth-century Georgian codex, Egyptian statuettes and Mesopotamian cylinder seals.This portable invention simplifies a fairly arduous task for experts, making the science of decoding easier. An ordinary conversation, a simple negotiation, gave light to a familial life. While both the wife and husband are known only through this letter, the move towards a mobile CT scanner has wonderfully tapped into the history preserved within material cultures, although only figuratively.