Archaeologists keep re-excavating this 4000-year-old brick | Curator's Corner S9 Ep6

So what's fascinating is that this brick was excavated twice. By us in 2016, from the huge spore heap behind us, and by Ernest de Sarzac in the late 19th century. And what's crazy is that this brick was excavated three times. By us in 2016, by Ernest de Sarzac in the late 19th century, but also by the workers of Alexander the Great at the end of the 4th century BC. And that is the magic of archaeology. Hello, my name is Sébastien Rey. I'm the curator for ancient Mesopotamia at the British Museum. Welcome to my corner. So welcome to Talo, the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu in southern Iraq. Now, Girsu is one of the great treasures of Iraq and world heritage. Now, this is the site which revealed to the world more than 140 years ago, the existence of the Sumerian civilization. I'm standing in front of one of the greatest temples of ancient Mesopotamia. And you can see the remains of this temple, but you see also remnants of a series of excavations. Now, the story that I'm going to tell you is fascinating, but extremely complicated because it involves a number of actors and heroes and gods and kings and archaeologists. So the fascinating sequence we have here starts 4,000 years ago with the building of the temple of the god in Girsu, the hero god, the defender of the cosmos. The man, the king, who built the temple, who ruled the city of Girsu, was named King Gudea. Now, he was one of the great heralds of the Mesopotamian culture. And he built this temple at the end of the third millennium B.C. The whole city of Girsu was abandoned at the very beginning of the second millennium. And for about a thousand and two hundred years, the site of Tello was completely abandoned until 1877. A French diplomat, Ernest de Sarzac, who is posted as the vice consul of France in Bassouras, hears the story of someone discovering an important statue at a site called Tello. He decides to travel to the site of Tello and Sarzac starts excavating in 1877. And through the course of his excavations, he finds many other statues belonging to Gudea, but also inscriptions, clay nails, bricks, a wealth of important objects from the Sumerian times. And then very quickly he finds this building, a building that was made with fire bricks. Most of the bricks had an inscription which commemorates the building of the shrine for the god in Girsu. But some of the bricks in the same walls of this shrine had an inscription which was in Aramaic and Greek. So written about a thousand and five hundred years after the reign of Gudea, how on earth was it possible that these two bricks ended up in the same building? So this became one of the greatest headaches in Sumerian archaeology until in 2016, the British Museum decides to reopen excavations at the site of Tello, ancient Girsu. So when we arrived at Girsu, no one had excavated there since the French archaeologists left the site in 1933. And after 83 years, the archaeology that had been left exposed by them had suffered major damage due to erosion. So our first step was to stabilize and save as much of the site as possible from further damage. Now, this was critical for the bridge of Girsu, the oldest bridge in the world, which had lost much of its foundations and was at risk of collapsing. So together with our Iraqi colleagues, we started a program of building new bricks and rebuilding those foundations to stabilize the bridge. And we also started excavating through the many spoil heaps, the large mounds of dirt left behind by Sarzak's team, rescuing objects which had been discarded during their excavations. And this is how we ended up excavating those two bricks that had already been excavated by Sarzak in the late 1800s. But on top of that, we wanted to excavate new areas of the site to make new discoveries and to hopefully answer some of the questions Sarzak and his colleagues were never able to. And in 2016, on the first year of excavations, we found the Temple of Ninguus built by Gudea in the late 3rd millennium BC. Now, the reason Sarzak had never found the temple was that it was deeper underground than he had ever dug. And ironically, he had actually buried much of the temple under his own spoil heaps. So we had proof that Sarzak had never found the Sumerian temple, which left us with new questions. What was the building Sarzak had excavated? Why was it filled with Sumerian objects, including the statue of Gudea? And why was it built with bricks made 1500 years apart from each other? So we continued to excavate Sarzak's building. And in 2022, we found what we believe was the true meaning and function of that building. So I know this story is extremely complicated, but I can help you understand it with only two bricks. As you can see, the two bricks are very similar in shape, in size, in texture. But they have two different inscriptions. Now, this is the standard inscription that Gudea, the king, uses time and time again on thousands of bricks, votive artifacts that he dedicated to the god Nengirsu. So I'll read out the inscription for you. It always starts by the name of the god, because, of course, the king Gudea builds the temple for his god Nengirsu. And the very first sign is a star. Now, this is the emblem of divinity, a Sumerian sign called Dingi. Literally, it means god. And you know, if you see a star, that the name that follows will be a divine name. So Dingi, the god Nengirsu, that's his name in Sumerian script. The second line is his function, the title of the god Nengirsu. And he is the hero, the warrior god. The third line is the name of another god. This is Enli, the king of the gods. And he's also Nengirsu's father. The fourth line is the name of the king, Gudea. Gudea doesn't use the title king. He's not the king of Girsu. He is the Ensi. This means he is the envoy, the representative of the gods, Nengirsu. Follows the name of the city state that Gudea rules, Lagash. Girsu was the sacred city of the city state of Lagash. Now, then there's another part of the inscription, which is very important, and I'll come back to this. Follows the name of the temple itself. E-Ninu, the white thunderbird. Now, this is the name of the sanctuary that Gudea builds for his god Nengirsu. E in Sumerian means house. And it's important to know that for the Sumerians, there are no distinctions between a house and a temple, because, of course, the temple was considered the house of the gods. Fifty is a sacred symbolic number for the Sumerians. Now, this number 50 belonged to Enlil, the father of Nengirsu, the supreme god of the Sumerian pantheon. And so his father, the father of Nengirsu, Enlil, gives his son his 50 powers. This is why the name of the temple means house 50. You can translate this as the house of the 50 powers or the house of the ultimate powers. And the thunderbird is the line headed eagle that you see on a lot of iconographic representations of the Sumerian time. And it's the avatar of the gods Nengirsu. At the end of the inscription is, of course, the wording I have built. So Gudea saying that I have built and restored the temple to its proper place. Now, I'll come back to this part of the inscription, because this is really important. And it's one of the most powerful statements ever written anywhere in the world. And it's short. And it means literally to make things function as they should, meaning to maintain the cosmic order that was determined by the gods at the very origins of time. So this is why Gudea is building this temple for the gods Nengirsu to maintain the cosmic order. So I'll read the inscription in full. For the gods Nengirsu, the warrior of Enlil, Gudea, ruler of Lagash, made things function as they should and built and restored the temple house 50, the white thunderbird. So next to this brick, the Sumerian brick, is another brick. It's very similar in size, in texture, in color. And it was found on top of this brick in this wall. Now, on the inscription, you have the name of the priest, Adad-Nadinahe, written in two languages, in Aramaic first, from right to left, and in ancient Greek from left to right. And you can see the name Adad-Nadinahe written here in ancient Greek. Now, these bricks were found in this wall that Ernest de Sarzac excavated at the end of the 19th century. When he was excavating this building, he thought he had discovered the palace of this king, the Sumerian ruler, Gudea. But when his colleagues at the Louvre Museum were looking at the inscriptions, they realized that, indeed, how was it possible that a brick with an inscription in ancient Greek and Aramaic, so written about 1,500 years after the reign of Gudea, how was it possible that these two bricks ended up in a wall of the same building? Now, this goes back to the story of the sequence that I'm trying to explain. This man, a priest called Adad-Nadinahe, he lives at the very end of the fourth century, at the time of the conquest of Alexander. Now, Alexander is a key player here because he believed he was the son of Zeus and the brother of Heracles, the hero god. And of course, there was an attempt by the Greco-Macedonians to associate their own gods with the ancestral gods of the Mesopotamian culture. And it's not impossible to imagine one of the first things he did when he arrived in Babylon was to ask the priest of Babylon, which is the most important hero god of your pantheon. And they would have said the god named Girsu. Following that, Alexander must have asked, where was he worshipped? And they must have said the priest in Babylon. Well, in an old ancient site called Girsu. And I think it's very likely that Alexander sent a man, this man called Adad-Nadinahe, to the site of Girsu to re-excavate the buried temple, the temple dedicated to Nin-Girsu. Adad-Nadinahe was perhaps one of the earliest excavators of ancient Iraq. He excavated the temple, decided to reuse bricks from the original Sumerian temple, copies the Sumerian King Gudea by stamping his brick with his name, Adad-Nadinahe, on bricks that are of the same size and shape as the original Sumerian bricks and built a shrine dedicated to Heracles and Nin-Girsu. What's remarkable is that he also re-displays the statue of the King Gudea within his shrine. And this is the context that Ernest de Sarzac rediscovers the statue of Gudea, so not within the Sumerian temple, but within a Hellenistic shrine dedicated to Heracles. The clue of this is within the name Adad-Nadinahe. Now, this is a very strange, enigmatic name. It's clearly not the real name of this priest. It's, in fact, Babylonian. And it means the storm or thunder god Adad, the giver of the two brothers. Now, who are the brothers? The key to understand the whole function and the meaning of this name was unlocked when we discovered a coin which was buried at the entrance of this shrine under a religious podium. Now, the coin is a coin of Alexander that was minted in Babylon just after the conquest. The coin has on one side the face of the hero and on the other side, the storm god Zeus. So in a way, Adad-Nadinahe, the name means Zeus, the storm god, the giver of brothers. Who are the two brothers? Well, both Heracles, his ancestral counterparts, the Ngersu and Alexander. So the discovery of this coin at the entrance of this shrine during our excavations unlocked the whole meaning and function of the building built in the Hellenistic period by Adad-Nadinahe. This was, in a way, to honor the ancestral past of the Sumerian times. But more importantly, it was to link Alexander to the ancient Sumerians. Now, as you can see behind me is a giant spoil heap. Now, this is the remnants of the old digs carried out by the French. When the French were digging, they had to move the earth from their excavations to a dump, to a spoil heap. That's what we call a spoil heap. And you can see behind me poking out of the section are numerous bricks. The two bricks you have in front of me came from this enormous spoil heap, the discarded objects of the French excavations. So we re-excavated these objects that Sardic had excavated in the late 19th century. But he, remember, was excavating the Hellenistic shrine of Adad-Nadinahe. So Adad-Nadinahe, already in the late 4th century, had excavated part of the Sumerian temple and must have also discovered these bricks, which he used to build the shrine for Mungesu Heracles. And that is the magic of archaeology. Want to find out more about our excavations at Giesu? Of course you do. There's a playlist in the top right of your screen with all the videos we've made in Iraq. And before you ask, no, it doesn't have a video about that 90-year-old pair of French undies we excavated. But if you ask nicely enough in the comments, we'll see what we can do. Next episode of Curator's Corner is all about the history of a Roman sculpture, specifically the history of that sculpture, since it arrived at the museum over 200 years ago.