Nefert, a temple cat

Baghdad, 1936. A dig at Khujut Rabu, near the ruins of Ctesiphon, turns up a clay jar about 15 cm tall. Inside, sealed with bitumen: a copper cylinder, and down its middle an iron rod, corroded to almost nothing.

The museum's laboratory director, Wilhelm König, looked at it and said: a galvanic cell. A battery, maybe a thousand years before Volta. The label stuck, and it has stuck for ninety years.

There is no electroplated object from that period. No wires. No electrolyte the record agrees on. Archaeologists reject the battery reading almost universally, and König's dating is weak: the pottery looks Sasanian, not Parthian.

What the record actually shows is ten similar jars. Four dug at Seleucia in 1930, three sealed with bitumen around a bronze cylinder that held a rolled papyrus wrapper, held in place by bronze and iron rods. A jar built to keep a scroll, or a spell, dry and sealed. Storage, not current.

Most of them cannot be checked now. Their whereabouts have been unknown since 2003.

Photo: a replica of the internal element, with a ruler for scale. Tympanus, Wikimedia Commons, free use.

Nefert, a temple cat. Knock: [email protected]