A journey through several centuries
Assyriologist Maul links Mesopotamia, modern cultures

BY DIANE MANUEL

As he read aloud from the journal of a German archaeologist who excavated the Assyrian city of Assur in the early 1900s, Stefan Maul could have been auditioning for the big-screen role of Indiana Jones:

"There were blue and multi-colored glass beads and stone splinters, mostly agate and other pieces of silex, as well as thin twigs and pieces of wood. On the central lead tablet they formed a type of cushion for two little tablets, one gold and one silver, which also both bore Tukulti-Ninurta's inscription."

Maul, a world-renowned Assyriologist at the University of Heidelberg's Seminar for Languages and Cultures of the Middle East, held the audience at the Cantor Arts Center auditorium in an intense, captivated grip on Monday evening. The final speaker in this year's Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts, he talked about "Constructions of Divinity: The Idea of God in Ancient Near East."

Maul led his listeners through several centuries of research in Mesopotamian civilizations, illustrating his carefully phrased remarks with slides of bas reliefs, temple ruins, stone tablets in situ and diagrams of reconstructed temples and city plans. But after he'd read the inscription cited above, he broke from his prepared remarks.

"This is the point where my archaeological colleagues stop," Maul said, looking up from his precise text. "So I could stop the lecture at this point.

"But I don't. I try to find out what it means. It is a very strange situation because you have all these little materials, you have the same inscription seven times, and one has to ask oneself what this means. What is the significance of such a curious installation?"

Asking the big "why" questions has propelled the 44-year-old Maul into the stratosphere of what Paul Kiparsky calls a "spectacularly romantic field."

Kiparsky, a professor of linguistics and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, noted in his introduction that while "Maul's acumen is legendary, he's even more famous for being able to fit his discoveries into a convincing pattern of Assyrian society and culture."

Maul describes the field of Assyriology, which focuses on the language, literature, society and history of the ancient peoples of Assyria and Babylonia ­ or Mesopotamia ­ as a "young discipline." Like fellow specialists in Germany, the United States, Britain, France and Iraq, Maul studies the oldest written human documents ­ 5,000-year-old cuneiform (literally "wedged-shaped") inscriptions etched onto metal tablets, stone steles, and air-dried or fired clay cones, cylinders and prisms.

While most Assyriologists concentrate on particular kinds of texts ­ business contracts, wills, lists of rations, grammatical tables, dedications, hymns or prayers ­ and focus on specific time periods, Maul links the specialized subfields and draws the overarching conclusions.

"He has an extraordinary ability to use texts from Assur, along with archaeological records, to compose a picture of life, particularly religious and intellectual life, in the capital city of the Assyrian empire," says Laurie Pearce, a research affiliate in the Near Eastern Studies department at the University of California-Berkeley. Pearce participated in a conference with Maul at the University of Heidelberg last fall and turned out for his talk Monday evening.

Many of the cuneiform inscriptions that survive today were hidden underground in the foundations of buildings, and thus protected from destructive natural elements and pillaging. But Maul still must decipher and interpret the writings, which requires the combined skills of specialists in archaeology, history, sociology, geography, anthropology and philology.

As he talked about an enormous stone foundation deed that had been discovered in the excavation of the 13th-century B.C. temple of Ishtar Ashshuritu, the goddess of love and desire, Maul paid homage to contemporary scholars and to the unsung artisans of several millennia.

"Is it not time for us to start taking [ancient writings about divine forces] seriously?" he asked. "After all, they represent Mesopotamian perceptions of the world order, and we should realize that they are not just the insignificant and confused speculations of a few bored scribes, but actually provide us with substantial model explanations for finds such as those under discussion here."

In fact, Maul said, reading the foundation text, in combination with a hymal prayer that had been sung in Sumerian with harp accompaniment, had pointed him down a new path of possibilities.

He paused, then slipped into the first-person narrative of the hymn of self-praise by the goddess Ishtar:

I appoint the prince, I appoint the king. I allow the king to wear the crown.

A flying flame raining down in the land of the enemy, that is I.

The one, who keeps on earth the steps of those who want to reach up to heaven, that is I.

I am the mistress, I am the lead. The lead for the alloy, that is I.
I go in front. I am sublime. I go behind. I am sublime.
I make the right into the left. I make the left into the right.

The line that reads "I am the lead. The lead for the alloy," Maul said, would have been totally obscure without an understanding of the Assyrians' concepts of materials. Metals, he noted, were seen as divine forces, "or even as deities themselves," in ancient Mesopotamia.

As a result, Maul suggested, the glass beads, stone splinters, stone, twigs and tablets of gold, silver and lead that were discovered in a temple foundation could be seen to have a fundamental significance.

"They are known to be substances whose energy was supposed to enhance the magic cleansing power of holy water and washing water," he said.

"It strikes one immediately that these substances are representatives of both animate and inanimate, of vegetable and animal stuff," Maul added. "The substances added to the holy water appear to be elements in the true sense of the word; they are indeed the components of which the world is made.

"This brings us very close to concepts that are evocative of medieval alchemy, and I am sure that alchemy has its roots here."

Maul noted that Assyriologists are "a long way from even starting to be able to understand the complex system of correlations which are inherent in the countless cuneiform texts of all genres."

But he also argued that while "Babylonian and Assyrian notions of material[s] and their effective powers differ greatly from our own," study of esoteric texts "is not only desirable, but absolutely essential if we are to gain a deeper understanding of the material culture, the archaeology, of the ancient Near East."

Maul's pioneering research was recognized in 1997 when he received one of Germany's most prestigious scientific awards, the $1 million G. W. Leibniz Prize. With that funding, he has launched a five-year project to document the capital of the Assyrian empire, using a combination of philological and archaeological techniques.

Maul also is reconstructing the clay-tablet library of Kisir-Assur, a 7th-century B.C. diviniation priest who served the last of the great Assyrian rulers. That project was the focus of a discussion he hosted on Tuesday afternoon, "The Magician's Archive."

Approximately 16,000 clay tablets from the conjuror's library have been unearthed but many remain unread.

"If one were to attempt to piece together the 1,100 tablet fragments by simply holding one fragment up to another, there would be 604,450 different possibilities," Maul has written of the challenges of his project.

"In searching for textual connections, the appearance of the tablet fragments can be misleading. Although two pieces belong to the same tablet, they can have a completely different coloring. One fragment might be well-preserved but blackened with ash, while the other is greatly eroded and colored brown."

The tablets that have been deciphered include medical texts that describe the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, including toothache, leprosy, epilepsy, jaundice, tumors, skin disease, fever, dropsy and gynecological disorders.

"Even if the attempt to maintain order in the world through magic and ritual remains alien to the modern reader, one should not underestimate the psychological effect of conjurers' rituals," Maul writes. "In every case, Kisir-Assur's meticulous search for knowledge connects the modern scientist to the ancient Assyrian researcher."

For his talk in the intimate setting of the Cantor Arts Center auditorium, Maul linked his research aims to broader humanistic concerns.

"We should not allow our understanding of the ancient Mesopotamian gods to be clouded any longer by the shallow and prejudiced polemics surrounding idolatry in the Bible," he argued. "For the Mesopotamians, divine power [was] inherent in the material world and its existence and predominance accordingly has never been doubted."

Maul's talk also took frequent lyrical turns, as when he characterized the "beauty of the different" as being "far away from easy to discover."

"It only becomes visible when the one who looks at it humbly admits that his own system of values is merely one of many in space in time," he said.

On the eve of a new millennium, Maul argued that the 21st century will "bring us a world culture dominated by the West, which considers itself, probably wrongly, as being at the absolute top of human cultural development."

"In such a time," he concluded, "studying foreign cultures becomes more and more important and precious. This kind of study can provide us access to different worldviews, bringing to mind that ours is not the only one and not eternally true."

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