Ancient Documents That Let Us Read the Past

The Amarna Letters, made around 1350 BC, open the path with roughly 380 clay tablets of diplomatic correspondence in Akkadian cuneiform, the international language of the Late Bronze Age. Vassal princes plead for gold and troops, and Egypt exchanges marriage diplomacy with Babylon and Mitanni, so the archive shows how the great powers actually talked to one another.

The Treaty of Kadesh, concluded around 1259 BC between Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III, is the oldest surviving peace treaty whose full text is known. It survives in an Egyptian hieroglyphic version at Karnak and the Ramesseum and an Akkadian tablet version from Hattusa, and the two differ enough that each side seems to present itself as the one who asked for peace.

The Mesha Stele, a basalt inscription commissioned around 840 BC by King Mesha of Moab, records his victory over Israelite domination in Moabite, a language close to biblical Hebrew. It was found at Dhiban in 1868 and shattered in a dispute, yet an earlier paper squeeze let most of the text be reconstructed, and it is now in the Louvre.

The Cyrus Cylinder, written in Akkadian cuneiform after Cyrus the Great took Babylon around 539 to 538 BC, follows the familiar form of a Mesopotamian royal inscription and describes the return of displaced peoples and cult statues. Popular claims that it is an early human rights charter are read by most Assyriologists as anachronistic, so this stop is a lesson in separating a text from its modern reputation.

The Behistun Inscription, carved by order of Darius the Great after he took the Persian throne around 522 BC, repeats one proclamation in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian cuneiform. Henry Rawlinson copied it from the cliff face in the 1830s and 1840s, and his decipherment did for cuneiform what the next stop did for hieroglyphs.

The Rosetta Stone carries a decree of 196 BC in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic and Ancient Greek, so the known Greek could unlock the lost hieroglyphic system. Found by French soldiers in 1799 and held by the British Museum since 1802, it led to Champollion's decipherment of 1822, building on earlier work by Thomas Young.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are roughly 900 manuscripts found between 1946 and 1956 in eleven caves near Qumran, composed over about four centuries from the third century BC to the first century AD. They include the oldest known copies of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible, predating the oldest complete manuscripts previously known by about a thousand years.

The Res Gestae Divi Augusti closes the path with a first-person account composed by Augustus himself and completed shortly before his death in AD 14, meant to be inscribed publicly. The fullest surviving text is the bilingual Latin and Greek Monumentum Ancyranum at Ancyra, modern Ankara, and it is the only extended political testament left by a Roman emperor.