Il ruolo dell’archeologia tra USA e Iran
Il ruolo dell’archeologia tra USA e Iran
Should Iran treasure be held for ransom?
martedì 19 agosto 2008
È il titolo di un articolo uscito sul sito del National Geographic:
Until now, scholars thought that Old Persian, the spoken language of the Achaemenid Persian kings, such as Darius and Xerxes, was written down only to commemorate the kings in royal statements on monuments. Last year grantee Matthew Stolper of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and colleagues discovered a clay tablet that tells a different story. The tablet is one of 25,000 clay records in a collection known as the Persepolis Fortification Archive.
Più avanti:
In February of 2007, National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration, with strong support from committee member and prominent Near Eastern archaeologist Melinda Zeder, supported a request from Stolper to contribute toward an emergency effort to document the remaining one-third of the archive of clay tablets and fragments in preparation for their return to Iran.
Politics unfortunately overshadow the important information inscribed in one of cilvilization's most important historical archives. The inscription in Old Persian comes as a complete surprise to scholars who have studied thousands of similar tablets in an archive excavated from the ruins of Persepolis.