ARTIFACT

housands of tablets in multiple languages spanning millennia confirm that ancient Near Eastern scribes were tireless record keepers. But errors were bound to happen. Scholars have recently in texts from central Turkey dating to the nineteenth century B.C. More than 200 years later, inscribed tablets from cities far to the south near Babylon refer to a type of vessel called an “” pot, which was thought by modern scholars to hold a white dye known by that name. But according to historian Seth Richardson of the University of Chicago, the Babylonian scribes were actually misspelling aluārum, the name of the flasks, which sounded similar to their word for dye. “It evokes a picture of Babylonian scribes sitting on the docks with boatmen coming down the Euphrates River transporting hundreds of these jars,” says Richardson. “The scribes don’t know how to spell the word they’re saying, so they just use the spelling for a word they know.” The Babylonian vessels mistakenly thought by scholars to hold dye were in fact full of wine.