Save your receipts

[debgeisler]

Someday, your paper could be the key to unlocking history. One person's receipt (a small cuneiform tablet) has moved the world of scholarship a step closer to understanding the factual basis of the Old Testament. From the Telegraph (UK) is this story of unseemly celebration in the British Museum:

The sound of unbridled joy seldom breaks the quiet of the British Museum's great Arched Room, which holds its collection of 130,000 Assyrian cuneiform tablets, dating back 5,000 years.

But Michael Jursa, a visiting professor from Vienna, let out such a cry last Thursday. He had made what has been called the most important find in Biblical archaeology for 100 years, a discovery that supports the view that the historical books of the Old Testament are based on fact.

Searching for Babylonian financial accounts among the tablets, Prof Jursa suddenly came across a name he half remembered - Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, described there in a hand 2,500 years old, as "the chief eunuch" of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon.

I live in fear that all people will know about the 21st century world 5,000 years from now they will glean from a stack of graded papers in my office.