For the first time, researchers have read a 3,800-year-old letter without damaging the sealed clay envelope that had protected it for millennia.
The document was recovered from Kanesh, a bustling trading city in what is now modern Turkey.
Its author was a woman named Anna-anna, who wrote to her husband while he was travelling on business.
In her message she raises a practical, deeply human concern: she wants him to recover the silver that others still owed him.
Until recently, the only way to read a tablet inside such an envelope was to shatter the outer casing, destroying part of the artifact forever.
Now, advanced scanning technology can peer through the clay and reconstruct the writing without a single crack.
The breakthrough promises to preserve countless sealed documents while still revealing their secrets.
It also offers a rare, intimate glimpse into the everyday commercial life of the ancient Near East.