Newly Deciphered Cuneiform Tablet Contains Unknown Sumerian Myth

[Judi Lynn]

July 28, 2025



Hand copy of the cuneiform tablet

Jana Matuszak

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—A riveting lost Sumerian myth was recently rediscovered thanks to University of Chicago Sumerologist Jana Matuszak, Phys.org reports. She deciphered a forgotten cuneiform tablet that currently resides in the collection of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. Known as Ni 12501, the 4,400-year-old inscribed clay object was originally found during nineteenth-century excavations at the ancient city of Nippur in present-day southern Iraq, but was given little scholarly attention due to its fragmentary nature. The tablet was mentioned in a publication by esteemed Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer in the 1950s, though it was not fully studied until Matuszak’s recent research. The text conveys a tale of how the Sumerian storm god Ishkur was trapped in the netherworld, causing chaos on earth due to the lack of rain. Ishkur’s father Enlil, the king of the gods, summons a divine assembly and asks one of the gathered deities to retrieve Ishkur. No gods volunteer, but, surprisingly, a lone fox does. The fox slyly enters and maneuvers through the underworld on its journey, but the broken tablet unfortunately ends the narrative. Until other, more complete tablets are found that record the same myth, scholars may never know whether the fox successfully completed its mission. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Iraq.To read about another inscribed tablet from the ancient city, go to "Mapping the Past: Nippur Map Tablet."

More:
https://archaeology.org/news/2025/07/28/newly-deciphered-cuneiform-tablet-contains-unknown-sumerian-myth/