Archaeologists unearth a 3,500-year-old shopping list

[Warpy]

3. They needed to tell us what was on the list

which would tell us whether it was for a village, a large household, a palace, whatever. You'd think that would be important, but i suppose the story was about cracking Akkadian, once the dominant language of the region, rather than sharing the contents of an embarrassingly humble item. They were looking for poetry or to fill in the gaps in Gilgamesh's story, I suppose.