professor erle leichty. leichty: we get passages that we don't understand, and we get tablets that we have extreme difficulty reading, but we do know the language. we know it primarily because of ancient dictionaries. the people that lived at the time made bilingual dictionaries between akkadian and sumerian. and akkadian is a semitic language closely related to hebrew and arabic. so that was much easier for us. keach: the tablets contained specific records of day-to-day living. the world's oldest known medical text, with remedies of snake skin, turtle shell and figs. a detailed map of the ancient city of nippur. even the price of tin in the twenty-first century b.c. historian marvin powell. in this line we see the amount of silver written across here. and in this line we see the amount of tin that it buys. and after this we also find the name of the individual, a chap called lucin from nippur, who was engaged in the tin trade. keach: names and places, professions and materials from the ancient world come to