Archive and Memory: Exploring the Past Through Rituals, Oral Traditions, and Visual Representations

1. The idea of the archive and... Babylonian archaeologists of the Mesopotamian past February 26, 2009

2. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” Faulkner, Requiem for a nun

3. How is memory sustained and (re-)configured? • ritual performances, festivals, commemorations • (gatherings) • construction activity, building practice • (technological knowledge) • oral traditions, oral culture, storytelling, desire • archiving, collecting, hoarding, digital storing, • back-up (museums, mementoes, computing) • production of texts, annals, inscriptions • writing of official histories • visual representations, imaging, imagining • mapping the world: located, site-specific practices • (topographies of remembrance) • also known as “worlding of the world”

4. What is an archive?

5. The Cairo Geniza Documents About 200,000 medieval and later manuscripts on vellum and paper that were found in the genizah or store room of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Cairo, the Basatin cemetery east of Old Cairo, and a number of old documents that were bought in Cairo in the later 19th century. Mostly written in Arabic using Hebrew Script and belonging to the Jewish community of Cairo, the date of the documents range from 870 AD to 1880. Includes religious writings, court documents, legal writings and the correspondence of the local Jewish community.

6. The Genizah: secret place, archive A genizah is a storage room where copies of respected texts with scribal errors or physical damaged, or unusable documents, are kept until they can be ritually buried. The dark, sealed, room in the arid Egyptian climate contributed to the preservation of the documents, the earliest of which may go back to the eighth and ninth centuries. Friedberg Genizah Project

7. Bibliotheca Alexandrina (completed 2002) Design: Snøhetta, a Norwegian architectural office

8. Library of Alexandria initially organized by Demetrius of Phaleron, a student of Aristotle under the reign of Ptolemy Soter. Charged with collecting all the world's knowledge.

9. Materiality of the text: textual records as objects of memory, texts as artifacts

10. what is an archive? archival practices/record keeping as a memory practice as creative rethinking of the past Records continuum: that enhances unbroken chains of material-textual documentation of the past Legal evidence-bearing institution? Life cyclical model of archival practice: cultural biography of records from birth, active use, “retirement” and destruction (a wobbly model) Records may take on new meanings as authentic artifacts of the past

11. The authority of the archive archive, memory, history- an ambivalent relationship

12. Archives, memory, history: becoming the sucjects of the state

13. Atlas Group Archive Type A Files Fakhouri Notebook 38 (Walid Ra’ad)

14. Atlas Group Archive Type A Files Fakhouri Notebook 38 (Walid Ra’ad)

15. Atlas Group Archive Type A Files Fakhouri Notebook 38 (Walid Ra’ad)

16. In a nutshell Mesopotamian archival tradition

17. uruk/warka: first tablets from the storehouses of Inanna. Examples of Uruk IV (above, excavation no. W 7227,a) and Uruk III (below, no. W 14804,a) tablets

18. Cuneiform writing on clay tablet using a stylus that has a wedge shaped (cuneiform) tip.

20. Mesopotamian urban institutions: • Temple, not just a site of veneration, • but more as the “wealthy neighbor” • Palace, not the residence of the king but • socio-economic/politcal instutution

21. Wall plaque- Ur-Nanše and family. Limestone w/ cuneiform inscription Girsu (modern Tello), Southern Iraq Early Dynastic IIIA 2550-2400 BC

23. Tell Asmar ancient Eshnunna Diyala River valley city plan with excavated buildings

25. The Third Dynasty of Ur Conventional (high) chronology: 2119-2004 BC. Low Chronology 2055-1940 BC Kings: Utu-hegal 2055-2048 BC (low chr.) Ur-Namma 2047-2030 BC Shulgi 2029-1982 BC Amar Sin 1981-1973 BC Shu Sin 1972-1964 BC Ibbi Sin 1963-1940 BC The king as builder: Foundation figurine of Ur-Namma

28. Ebla, North Syria Archives of the Third Millennium Settlement

29. Mesopotamian practices of remembering and the building as a repository of history, an archive Akkadian words of bodily orientation and the sense of time warku: back, future panu: front, past

30. Mesopotamian archival practices and intellectual history scribal schools exercise tablets scribal practices: copying, adopting, re-adopting older/historical/ancient texts The scribes [(dub-sar)] of the various institutions —“palace, temple, schools” were apparently quite influential on the survival and the state of preservation of certain literary compositions by means of their “process of sifting through and selecting materials” for their school curriculum, and their editing practices were often driven by ideological motivations of their royal patrons, particularly in the case of the so-called royal hymns and other court literature.

31. Letters Literary texts, epic poetry lamentations Administrative texts Lexical lists Contracts, land grants, sale documents, Law codes Royal annalistic texts (historical documents) Ritual texts, omen literature, (divination) Cuneiform tablet inscribed with omens Old Babylonian, about 1900-1600 BCFrom Sippar, southern Iraq

32. Nabonidus Cylinder from Ur (556-539) describes how he repaired the ziggurat called E-lugal-galga-sisa, which belonged to the temple of Sin in Ur, called Egišnugal.

33. Clay model of a sheep's liver Old Babylonian, about 1900-1600 BCFrom Sippar, southern Iraq

34. When the house is on fire and the children are gone Ur-Utu’s house and archive in Sippar-Amnanum (Tell ed Der) 17th c. BC Ur-Utu was a landholder and the “kalamahhum-priest of Annunitum” (chief lamentation priest) the house 225 m2 was excavated in mid 1970s by Belgian archaeologists ca 2000 tablets burnt with the house

35. In 1975 the house was fully exposed. In four rooms to the northwest tablets were found, many belonging to distinct "archives," which were sealed by the fire that destroyed the building. Altogether about 2,000 documents were found in the "house of Ur-Utu," mainly dating to the last phase of occupation (IIIb), Ur-Utu's house renovation. Some tablets were, however, archived in distinct groups for several hundred years. 1283 texts have been dated. Most of these tablets in this large house were found in room 22 (which could have served as a [sealed] storeroom), to the northwest of the central court, while the rooms 17 and 18 (forming one large residential room in phase IIId, but apparently not communicating with each other in IIIb) contained "archived" material....

36. Topographies of remembrance

37. the aesthetics and authority of the archive: Writing Mesopotamian history through archives historiographical operation that prioritizes particular kinds of knowledge practices memory and archive: particular memory-practices of scribes and archive-keepers of the cuneiform tradition