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How a French Botanist Brought to Europe the First Complete Written Testimony of Mesopotamian Civilization. André Michaux owned a farm in Satory, near Versailles. Once, while visiting a friend who was a doctor in Baghdad, they went to some ancient ruins near the city of Taq Kasra. There, Michaux found a strange black stone. It had a series of odd carvings on its upper part and what seemed like a type of strange writing on its lower part. As he noted in his journal, he kept it and took it with him for three and a half years, in 1786, when he returned to France with a large herbarium and a wealth of plant seeds that earned him the title of Royal Botanist. He sold it to the French Museum of Antiquities in 1800 for about 1,200 francs, which stored it in the National Library. Historians across Europe had never seen anything like it, and news of its discovery spread like wildfire through the continent’s scientific societies. Because the fact was that this stone was the first complete written testimony of the existence of the ancient Mesopotamian culture to reach Europe. Rawlinson was the first to propose a transcription of the stele in 1861, but a complete translation came from Jules Oppert in 1895. Image / The Michaux Stone, now at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia CommonsThis kudurru is 46 centimeters tall and 20 centimeters wide and weighs 22 kilograms. It’s dated between 1099 and 1082 B.C., during the reign of Marduk-nadin-ahhe in Babylon. On its front and back, it contains 95 lines written in four columns, crowned by two registers containing 21 iconographic symbols representing mythical animals, divine attributes, and stars.https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2024/05/how-a-french-botanist-brought-to-europe-the-first-complete-written-testimony-of-mesopotamian-civilization/