c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Bill and Monica and Ken: Their story is as old as the ancient Mittanis.

A relentless prosecutor accuses the ruler of an illicit affair and says there is the testimony of a government agent to back up the allegation. The head of government testifies, “I did not have sex with her.”

So went life in the town of Nuzi, in the ancient Mittani empire of the Middle East, somewhere around 1400 B.C. The scandal had many parallels to the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky-Kenneth Starr affair.

In a case of archaeology imitating life, a new exhibit at the Semitic Museum of Harvard University displays ancient cuneiform tablets that tell the sexually charged tale of a head of government whose alleged philandering put him on public trial.

Clinton, Lewinsky and Starr were far from the minds of officials at the Semitic Museum two years ago when they began planning the exhibition “Nuzi and the Hurrians: Fragments From a Forgotten Past.”

But as current events unfolded and scholars pieced together the evidence found at Nuzi, “We were keenly aware of a certain bitter irony,” said James Armstrong, curator of the exhibit, which is scheduled to run until April 2001. The tablets were unearthed in 1927 and 1928 on an expedition in northeastern Iraq sponsored by the Semitic Museum and the Fogg Art Museum in Boston. Half the tablets are part of the museum’s collection, and half were left in Baghdad. The museum’s tablets tell the story of criminal charges from kidnapping to bribery brought against the mayor of Nuzi.

Among the charges are two acts of sexual misconduct with a woman called Humerelli. According to the deposition of one official, the mayor, named Kushshiharbe, used government agents to bring Humerelli to “the trysting place.”

“They were throwing the book at a corrupt, a criminally corrupt, mayor of Nuzi,” Armstrong said.

The mayor was answerable to the king of the Hurrian city-state of Araphe, which is the modern city of Kirkuk, Iraq, Armstrong said. All were allied with the powerful king of Mittani. The Mittani empire, the political equivalent of the Babylonian and Hittite empires mentioned in the Bible, encompassed northern Iraq, northern Syria and Southern Turkey.

Armstrong said the people of Nuzi would have worshipped a god called Shawushka, a variation of Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. The Old Testament prophets condemned such figures as false deities, but the two moral codes had similar prohibitions against adultery.

Humerelli was “the Monica of the day,” Armstrong said, describing how the Nuzi culture would view such acts. “Was it wrong? Yes, with someone who is not your wife.”

In testimony comparable to Clinton’s vigorous denials in January, the Nuzi mayor’s response is captured on the tablets: “No, no, not a word of it is true. I did not have sex with her.”

An article in the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review mentions the name of the man who led the long-ago expedition that unearthed the tablets in Yorgan Tepe, the site of ancient Nuzi in Iraq. He was Richard F.S. Starr. It is unknown whether the independent counsel is a relation.

So what happened to Kushshiharbe, the alleged philandering leader of Nuzi? No tip-off to Clinton’s fate there. The cuneiform tablet with the ruling has never been found.

DEA END BRIGGS