The Sumerian Tablet That Says Cats Were Sent to Watch Us — And Describes What They Report Back

In the basement storage of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, in a wing closed to the public since 2003, under inventory number IM 23107, sits a clay tablet about the size of an open palm. It was recovered in 1934 from excavations at Tell Harmal on the outskirts of Baghdad. The ancient city was called Shaduppum, an administrative archive of the Old Babylonian period. The tablet sat in storage for nearly seventy years, marked household text, incomplete. It was not a household text. In 2001, the Iraqi Assyriologist Farouk al-Rawi began a re-cataloging of the Shaduppum archive and lifted a layer of dried silt from the tablet's surface. Underneath were three columns of cuneiform. The text described an animal. Small, four-legged, with eyes that the scribe wrote would glow in the dark when the gods looked through them....