Kelsie Abbt and Dan Orzechowski
Special to The Leader
This past summer, senior Benjamin Schrantz revealed a major piece to a 3,000-year-old puzzle. Using opportunities and connections provided by the State University of New York at Fredonia, he was able to make a previously overlooked discovery that has since been placed in a database maintained in the University of California, Los Angeles.
During his internship at the Oneida County Museum in Utica, New York, which he acquired to fulfill a museum studies minor, Schrantz discovered an ancient cuneiform stone inscription miscategorized as Egyptian hieroglyphics.
“Cuneiform is a script system developed by ancient Mesopotamian cultures and used to write a variety of languages,” explained Dr. John Arnold, who taught Schrantz in Western Civilization I. “It is generally written on mud tablets with a stylus that has a triangle on one end and a bar on the other. The scribe made impressions into the writing surface to create characters. The dried tablet then formed a written document. What Ben found was something more permanent — a cuneiform inscription carved into rock with a chisel.”
A self-proclaimed “history nerd,” Schrantz suspected the artifact was mislabeled. After reporting the potential find to Dr. David Owen, who teaches Near Eastern Languages at Cornell University, it was officially established as an ancient Akkadian language spoken by early Assyrians. “It was a previously unknown 3,000-year-old inscription of a dedication ceremony,” explained Schrantz, featuring an Akkadian king named Shalmaneser V.
Arnold went on to explain the significance of this inscription in particular by adding, “Any ancient figure like this king is shadowy and difficult to assess because there are so few sources and little evidence. This inscription does tell us that Shalmaneser used an ideology of royal power expressed in a long-used list of titles and did so to advertise himself in the expected manner.”
Schrantz agrees that, “While [the discovery] is a small step, it is a step nonetheless in helping us understand the past that much more clearly … No one knew about the existence of the inscription outside of the historical society. And even the historical society had no idea where it came from, let alone what it actually was.”
Arnold points out that Schrantz’s discovery “validates [the History Department’s] commitment to our mission statement, for our Department impresses upon our students the need to develop critical thinking skills and use them to analyze evidence and communicate findings to the larger community.
“I was also pleased to see him plow ahead with determination to find out what he had there. Contacting a professor at Cornell that you’ve never met takes a certain fortitude. But he handled it well and carried through on the project to make a real contribution to knowledge,” Arnold said.
Schrantz is proof that focus and dedication can lead to great achievements.
When he first started college, Schrantz initially had the goal of becoming a high school history teacher.
“That lasted for about a year and a half,” Schrantz said. “Between working at my church’s before-and after-school program and going to my education placements, I quickly found out that working with children was not for me.”
Schrantz has graduated from Fredonia and is now taking a year off to “figure out what I really want to do with my life before I go into debt and dedicate the next two years, at least, of my life to more schooling.” He is currently working at his church as the parish historian and office worker.
However, through his internships at the Oneida County Historical Society and the archives and special collections department in Reed Library, Schrantz has discovered a new love for the idea of becoming a librarian. His current plan is to get a dual master’s degree in American history and library science with an archival concentration.
“I was always fascinated by history. I love visiting museums, reading historical books, both fiction and nonfiction, and watching historical documentaries. I was one of those students in high school who would read the history textbooks during study hall just for the fun of it,” Schrantz said. “So when I graduated from high school, I knew I wanted to do something with history … It wasn’t until my last year that I added the museum studies minor.”
Schrantz recalled that his support groups while attending Fredonia were, in equal parts, the History Department and the Newman Center, a Catholic ministry near campus.
“It’s hard to put into words … We all became really close, and we genuinely cared about each other,” he said.
Currently, an exhibit curated by Schrantz called “The Oneida County Historical Society: Bringing the World Back Home for 140 Years” is on display at the Oneida County Historical Society in Utica, New York. For more information, visit www.oneidacountyhistory.org.