The seventeen tablets had been sitting in drawer 4B of the Vorderasiatisches Museum since the spring of 1937, brought from Tell Hariri in Syria by André Parrot's third season at ancient Mari.

They were small, palm-sized, and written in a cramped variant of Old Babylonian cuneiform that no one had been able to parse. The museum catalog called them, simply, "administrative, unreadable."

Hannah Bergström, a 28-year-old doctoral student at the University of Leipzig, read the first one on a Friday afternoon in February. She read the rest by the following Tuesday.

The breakthrough was not technological. It was a willingness to entertain that the scribe had been using a syllabary borrowed from Eshnunna, 280 kilometers downriver, rather than the local Mariote one assumed by every previous reader.

Once the substitution was made, the tablets resolved into a year's worth of grain-distribution records from the reign of Yasmah-Addu, signed off by an official named Kushim, and addressed to a woman called Beltum-Sharrat.

She was, in other words, a queen of one of the great cities of the ancient Near East, and history had lost her entirely until a graduate student turned a syllabary sideways.

Beltum-Sharrat appears nowhere else in the Mari archive of more than 25,000 tablets. The signs of her name, paired with the title sharratu or queen, suggest she was the chief consort of Yasmah-Addu around 1785 BCE.

She was, in other words, a queen of one of the great cities of the ancient Near East, and history had lost her entirely until a graduate student turned a syllabary sideways.

The tablets also describe, in the unsentimental language of accounting, a famine. Grain rations in the eleventh month of one year are recorded at less than a third of those in the first month. The next year's rations begin lower still.

Three settlements upriver are noted as halqu, meaning lost or abandoned, with their populations redistributed to Mari proper.

Bergström presented the work at a small seminar in March, and within a week had received emails from senior Assyriologists in Paris, Chicago, and Tokyo, each of whom had once tried and failed to read the Kushim group.

Dominique Charpin, one of the world's leading scholars of Mari, told the seminar by video link that the reading was "obviously correct, which is the most annoying kind of correct."

What makes the tablets unusual is not the famine, which is hinted at in other texts, but the granularity. They list named individuals, the size of their households, the rations issued, and in three cases the date of death.

One entry reads, in Bergström's translation, "To the house of Iddin-Dagan, three measures of barley, the eldest son being dead."

The museum is now planning a small exhibition for the autumn, built around the seventeen tablets and a reconstructed grain bin scaled to the rations they describe.

Bergström, who grew up in a small town outside Uppsala and learned cuneiform from a borrowed library book at sixteen, is already working on the next drawer.

There is a particular quiet to a room where someone is reading something for the first time in 3,810 years.

She says she did not realize she was crying until the museum guard offered her a tissue.