The National Museum of Denmark is currently home to a clay brick from the palace of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, situated in the ancient city of Kalhu. This palace is now recognized as the North-West Palace in Nimrud, located in what is today northern Iraq. Its foundations were laid aroun
d 879 BCE. The brick features a cuneiform inscription in Akkadian, a now-extinct Semitic language, which reads: ‘The property of the palace of Ashurnasirpal, king of Assyria.’ This inscription allows us to accurately date the brick to between 879 BCE and 869 BCE.
The clay brick from the National Museum of Denmark from which the samples were derived. Credit: Arnold Mikkelsen og Jens Lauridsen. With the interdisciplinary team comprising assyriologists, archaeologists, biologists, and geneticists, they were able to compare their findings with modern-day botanical records from Iraq as well as ancient Assyrian plant descriptions.
Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen , joint first author of the paper, said: “We were absolutely thrilled to discover that ancient DNA, effectively protected from contamination inside a mass of clay, can successfully be extracted from a 2,900-year-old clay brick.
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