Matthew Rutz
Assistant Professor of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies
Matthew Rutz traces his interest in ancient civilizations to a mid-1980’s marathon family trip across the Southwest. He and his family explored Mesa Verde National Park and Canyon de Chelly, impressive and important archaeological sites of the Anasazi. “Trying to imagine what it was like for people to live in those cliff dwellings,” he recounts, “that’s when archaeology really came to life for me for the first time.”
Rutz later visited the prehistoric Fort Rock Cave in Oregon with noted anthropologist Luther Cressman, and was hooked. “What fascinated me about that experience was the encounter with archaeology as a process of discovery and analysis — the idea that our picture of the past is constantly changing, sometimes refined in small ways, sometimes radically revised.”
Now armed with an undergraduate degree in religious studies from the University of Oregon–Eugene and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania, Rutz joins the Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies as an assistant professor.
He specializes in Assyriology, the archaeological, historical, and linguistic study of ancient Mesopotamian texts written in the indigenous cuneiform — wedge-shaped — script. “They’re not as beautiful as Egyptian hieroglyphs, but they’re written on clay, which preserves well in hot, dry climates. So we have hundreds of thousands of documents, everything from literature to mythology to medical texts to private letters to legal contracts dealing with marriage and divorce — the full spectrum of human experience.”
Most of the tablets are a few centimeters square, with the impressions incised into the clay with a reed stylus. Rutz says about 800 characters were used, forming a writing system that was more like the repertoire of Chinese characters than an alphabet. Researchers theorize that most of the writing was done by professional scribes, as reading and writing were not widely practiced. Cuneiform was primarily used to write Sumerian, a language isolate, and Akkadian, a Semitic language.
Unlike other ancient writing systems which have been passed down through the ages, the complex cuneiform writing system died out around 75 A.D., replaced by the simpler alphabetic systems still widely used today. Cuneiform writing was rediscovered and deciphered about 150 years ago by several scholars studying ancient Biblical lands.
“There’s a huge corpus of material and very few people studying it, so it’s an exciting field to be in,” says Rutz. “Some of the material is new, coming out of the ground in archaeological excavations this year — or it could be something that was excavated 100 years ago and has never been looked at, just put in a box and shipped off to a museum where it’s been sitting ever since.”
Rutz’s specific contribution to the field is his work on cuneiform tablets from Emar, a site in Syria that dates to about 1200 B.C.E. It’s here that he and his colleagues are trying to understand Mesopotamian intellectual history by analyzing a library of cuneiform documents that belonged to a family of diviners.
Puzzling over incomplete pieces of the distant past is arduous work and probably not suitable for those in need of solid answers, he says. “Maybe half of what we do is right, and endures. But one discovery, one artifact can make us revise an idea that we’ve had for half a century.”
Rutz is often struck by the juxtaposition of his work, centered on a durable medium from the archaeological record, and the ephemeral nature of today’s digital correspondence and record keeping. “Oftentimes I think to myself, if I really wanted to save an important document, I’d write it on a clay tablet.”