Ancient Ramblings, Laws, and a Bar Tab

They're so old, yet we could learn so much.

That's the story with a collection of more than 100 cuneiform texts made available to the public by a Norway businessman who has owned them for many years but has not published them until now. Among the translations, which will soon appear in a book, are royal boastings, an ancient bar tab, and a discovery that should make legal scholars very happy.

Among the revelations discovered by the team of translators is an inscription in the words of the famous Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II, whose "instructions" resulted in the construction of a massive ziggurat dedicated to the god Marduk more than 2,500 years ago.

The inscription was on a stele, or stone slab, and included a drawing of the pyramid and of the king himself, wearing a cone-shaped crown, royal bracelet, and royal robe. Among the writings on the stele are also a description of a second ziggurat, at the city of Borsippa.

Among the boasts of Nebuchadnezzar, known for having a high opinion of himself and his accomplishments, is this one: "I completed them [the ziggurats], making them bright as the sun." This boast validated an earlier claim found on a similar tablet.

It's not just Nebuchadnezzar who is doing the boasting, though. The translations also reveal the self-important claims of another king, Tiglath-pileser I of Assyria, whose literary swagger also includes accounts of conquest and monument-building.

The item that should make legal scholars have a gleam in their eye is the oldest known copy of the laws of Ur-Nammu, a king who ruled Ur nearly 4,000 years ago, long before the more famous Hammurabi. Ur-Nammu's laws, for instance, prescribe a fine as punishment for taking out another person's eye, rather than the more barbaric "eye for an eye" that Hammurabi's code prescribed. Other parts of the Ur-Nammu code are more well-known from later versions.

Then there's the bar tab. The code of Ur-Nammu includes instructions for female tavern-keepers to collect taxes in winter on a jar of beer given on credit in summer.