The Monica of Mesopotamia

"No, no, absolutely not! I did not have sex with her!" Believe it or not, this quote appears nowhere in the records of our president's current scandal. It is, however, from a politician slammed with a deposition concerning sexual misconduct and other crimes. The only things separating the two are about 7,000 miles--and about 3,000 years.

The quote comes from a tablet currently on display at Harvard's Semitic Museum. It is part of an exhibit on the excavations of the town of Nuzi, a small provincial city in northern Mesopotamia that was once part of the Mittani kingdom, a Near Eastern world power from around 1500 B.C.E. The tablet is one of 14 preserved from the deposition of Kushshi-harbe, the mayor of Nuzi, during investigations into his sexual misconduct and criminal behavior.

According to the museum display, the mayor was accused of illicit sexual relations as well as "making a door for his private house from wood belonging to the palace, looting a sealed house, numerous thefts and kidnapping." All this and more is waiting for you at the Semitic Museum.

I actually do spend a somewhat surprising amount of time at the Semitic Museum, but I must admit that the second-floor exhibit on "Nuzi and the Hurrians: Fragments from a Forgotten Past"--which I have passed many times on my way to my thesis adviser's office--never quite grabbed me. What drew me to the exhibit was an article in a New Jersey newspaper, entitled "Ancient Scandal Reads Like Today's News."

The article offered a few facts that actually don't appear in the exhibit, except perhaps to a visitor fluent in Hurrian. It included the Paula Jones-like detail that the mayor "used government agents to bring Humerelli [the woman in question] to 'the trysting place.'" And it mentioned an article in the current issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review that identifies the leader of the 1920s expeditions that unearthed the tablets. His name was Richard F.S. Starr.

But most intriguing was the article's suggestion that one could view this exhibit as a sort of secret key to the present and the future. In the report, the curator calls Humerelli the "Monica of the day." He explains that the people of Nuzi were "throwing the book at a corrupt, a criminally corrupt, mayor" and says the museum was "keenly aware of a certain bitter irony." The article's ending makes the connection between the two scandals explicit: "So what happened to Kushshi-harbe, the alleged philandering leader of Nuzi? No tipoff to Clinton's fate there. The cuneiform tablet with the ruling has never been found."

Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Before, the Semitic Museum was just a repository of large fiberglass statues and 3,000-year-old broken plates. But with this exhibit, it has become a vision of the future cast into the past, a concrete reason why history matters. Naturally, I had to stop by and see the secrets of Nuzi for myself.

When I actually visited the exhibit, however, I quickly realized that the Kushshi-harbe scandal comprises no more than a single displayed tablet--just a few inches tall--and a corresponding plaque. The exhibit, planned well before Clinton's troubles came to light, does not emphasize or explain the scandal in any more detail than it gives to the construction of toilet plumbing in Nuzi--the artifacts of which, also on display, are far larger and quite well-preserved.

The rest of the exhibit shows scraps of writing exercises by Mittani students, contracts between shepherds, court records from civil cases, stone weights, beaded jewelry, ritual objects and a heck of a lot of broken plates. It's a neat display. The work that went into it is impressive. It's exciting to know that we can learn such things about lives so distant from our own. But if you're looking for the lessons of history, the Semitic Museum's message might not be one you'd expect.

Since the beginning of the current sex scandal in Washington, pundits from every part of the political spectrum have differed in their opinions of how or whether President Clinton should be punished for his actions. Despite these differences, all of them have displayed a strangely unshakable faith in one single thing: ultimately, they intone, History will pass judgment.

Yet if the less-than-overwhelming crowds at the Nuzi exhibit are any gauge (visitors are pretty much guaranteed to have the place to themselves), History will not only fail to pass judgment, but History is probably not going to care. What we leave behind, it turns out, are non-biodegradable objects, a few random legal contracts, a few pieces of jewelry and a whole lot of garbage.

One could argue, of course, that things aren't like that anymore. Our records are more extensive, more carefully catalogued, more painstakingly reproduced. But one could also argue that this just means we will leave behind even more garbage. Likewise, we might defend the pundits by granting that when they talk about "history," they aren't talking about 3,000 years from now--they're talking about 30. If the Nixon scandal fits these pundits' conception of "history," well, sure. Problem is, most of the people who watched that scandal unfold are still alive. We can't be honest about allowing "history to pass judgment" when the people passing judgment are the same people who saw the whole thing happen--and maybe even commented on it at the time. If we really want to see what history has to say, we have to wait until the witnesses are dead. And what, then, does history have to say? Aside from a few academic commentaries, probably not much.

Presidents, of course, are concerned about their mark on History. So are many other people, including many intelligent and ambitious ones. But if we can glean any general truths from the Nuzi exhibit, one might be that on a macrocosmic scale, what people will know of us in the future is more or less random. Our reward will not be in the inscription of our names on credit cards in a museum's glass case a thousand years from now, or in copies of out-of-print books we authored or in the condemnations of the Starr Report. We cannot leave it up to History to decide whether what we do is worth doing. The consequences of what we do are ours to face--not 30 or 3,000 years from now, but today.

Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot house. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.