They Did Not Write on Clay: Non-Cuneiform Documents and Archives in Seleucid Mesopotamia

Abstract

Abstract When scripts other than cuneiform, such as Aramaic or Greek, and writing media other than clay, such as papyrus, leather, or parchment, became widespread in the Near East, new practical conditions came into being which had important consequences for documentary archaeological evidence, and which directly affect our knowledge based on this type of evidence. For the climate of Mesopotamia preserved perishable materials only in extremely rare cases. It is only as a result of exceptional circumstances that the Parthian parchments of Avroman (Minns 1915) and the Parthian and Roman documents of Dura Europos(Welles, Fink, and Gilliam 1959) have been preserved. In the Seleucid period, in particular, cuneiform tablets are still the basis of our knowledge (Oelsner 1986), and when later, in the course of the Parthian period, the cuneiform script and the clay tablet were finally abandoned, textual evidence was virtually extinguished.