Pottery, Paper, and Post--letters from the past and present

Recently, I’ve been watching some video lecture series from Great Courses—one on ancient Mesopotamia (“Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization”) and one on ancient North America (“Ancient Civilizations of North America.”) Between the two of them, I’ve been wondering: if our current civilization were completely wiped out (without wiping out humanity), what would remain for future archaeologists to interpret?

You see, I am struck by the importance of pottery in these archaeological finds. In the North American case, pottery was something that endured (along with stone tools) and which could depict activities and important symbols of the time, in the absence of the written word. In the case of Mesopotamia, pottery was also the medium for the written word itself—cuneiform on clay tablets.

The interesting result of this is that quite a lot of very ordinary writing done in ancient Mesopotamia got preserved when clay tablets and clay seals on items got caught in fires and were… fired. A lot of these tablets recorded inventories, transactions, and contracts, but sometimes letters were also preserved. A particularly interesting lecture discussed king Zimri-lim of Mari, his queen Shiptu, and his various daughters, some of whose correspondence was preserved when the palace at Mari was burned down.

As I understand it, the letters between Zimri-lim and Shiptu concerned the management of the kingdom while he was away fighting, and requests that she consult the gods (via the priests) on various questions. Letters from his daughters, whose marriages were arranged for political reasons, included news from their region and sometimes requests. Two daughters told him how unhappy they were, how badly treated, and pleaded for help. Apparently at least one attempt to help was made and failed.

Nearly four thousand years later, I’m feeling sorry for the two daughters. I only know of them because their letters happened to be preserved.

More recent “old” correspondence is preserved on paper. Paper is a lot more perishable than baked clay, but much lighter and more space-efficient, not to mention easy to write on. From letters, we get a window into the lives of many famous people of the less-distant past--those who wrote the letters, and those mentioned in the letters. A nice book about this is For the Love of Letters,by John O’Connell.

A lot of today’s correspondence is via email, which is much easier to “send”, takes up almost no space, and is simultaneously potentially eternal and yet entirely perishable. It is potentially eternal in that it lasts so long as the encoded information remains encoded in some medium somewhere. There is no original to be preserved. Yet it is entirely perishable in that the data must be stored somewhere, and machines and media can degrade. Also, formats for files keep changing, so either the format must be updated as necessary or the old software must be maintained.

So if civilization as we currently know it were destroyed? The computers would no longer have power. Eventually, their parts would corrode. Even if future archaeologists could build a suitable device to read the old hard drives, the data would probably no longer be readable.

Some paper correspondence might last longer, if protected from moisture and pests in a vault. I assume paper would become exceedingly delicate over time, just as textiles in well-preserved ancient sites are delicate, and most of it would eventually decay.

And then there’s pottery. We think of pottery as fragile, so we make more use of other materials. Wood, metal, and plastic tend to be less breakable, and are usually lighter in weight as well. And yet… pottery endures. It doesn’t rot, it doesn’t rust, and it doesn’t degrade in strange and somewhat unpredictable ways as old plastics (which are less than a century old!) are now doing.

We don’t use pottery for many purposes, outside of the kitchen and the garden. So maybe those future archaeologists would conclude that our most important everyday thoughts were of  “Home Sweet Home”, “World’s Best Dad”, and “Flour,” “Sugar,” and “Tea.”

Till next post.