Baking in the details
In the basement of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, Alex Douglas looked at the pieces of baked clay in front of him, teasing out how they fit together into a small tablet, thousands of years old and marked with ancient cuneiform writing. Finding a void in the reassembled tablet without a piece to fit into it, Douglas referred to a computer screen, where a photograph of the intact tablet was displayed. “I want to make sure that wasn’t me getting the mend wrong,” Douglas said. “When I first took it out, there were a lot of pieces. I wasn’t sure where they all went.” Douglas, a graduate student in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is part of a long-running project at the Semitic Museum to conserve its unusual collection of thousands of clay tablet. The project seems humble enough. A furnace on a table behind Douglas bakes a handful of the small tablets,...