In 1887, an Egyptian woman exploring an abandoned city in search of fertilizer unwittingly made one of the biggest discoveries in the realm of ancient world political archives.
The woman was searching for sebakh, which is a blend of organic waste mixed with mud bricks, commonly used in agriculture, in an archaeological site called Tell el-Amarna in Egypt. Rather than finding only dirt, she stumbled upon some baked clay tablets buried within the soil. These tablets didn’t look like anything majestic or royal when she first came across them; they appeared small and mundane.
