Lot of 4 Mesopotamian Terracotta Cuneiform Tablets

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Warehouse Clear Out - Ancient & Ethnographic

By Artemis Gallery

Dec 20, 2018

Set Reminder 2018-12-20 10:00:00 2018-12-20 10:00:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : Warehouse Clear Out - Ancient & Ethnographic https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/artemis-gallery/warehouse-clear-out---ancient-ethnographic-3742
Time to clear out the warehouse, as these lots are going, going, gone... plus a we've added a nice selection of lots brand-new to auction! Artemis Gallery info@artemisgallery.com

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• Lot Description
  **First Time At Auction**
  
  Ancient Near East, Mesopotamian ca. 3rd to 2nd millennium BCE. Four pottery cuneiform tablets - known as "biscuits" - all translated. Cuneiform script is one of the oldest known writing systems in the world, made using a reed as a stylus and scratching wedge-shaped marks onto clay tablets. Early cuneiform was pictographic, but in the 3rd millennium BCE it shifted to the more abstract form you see here. First, an account of textiles from the Ur III period, ca. 2150 to 2000 BCE; second, a list of deliveries of food by three people, from the Sargonic period, ca. 2350 to 2150 BCE; third, a list of fields held by one man, from the Old Babylonian period, ca. 1900 to 1700 BCE; fourth, also from the Old Babylonian period, a scribal practice tablet repeating the number 90 over and over again - an unusual find. Size of largest (all are fairly similar in size): 2.3" W x 2.8" H (5.8 cm x 7.1 cm)
  
  These cuneiform tablets are some of the roughly 2 million known from this culture; of these, between 30,000 and 100,000 have been translated. The earliest translations came in 1836 from the work of French scholar Eugene Burnouf and by the 1850s multiple scholars were able to produce similar translations, meaning the language had been deciphered. Similar to many other known cuneiform tablets, the ones here are concerned with financial transactions, the movement of workers, soldiers, and goods. Cuneiform tablets seem to have been used mainly as a way of tabulating economic concerns. For example, one of the tablets here comes from Puzrish-Dagan, which was a cattleyard that provided animal offerings to temples throughout Sumer, and records the transfer of an animal between two Sumerian government officials. Although it might be more romantic to imagine that these tablets discussed the doings of kings and gods, from a historical standpoint, it is much more interesting to learn about the daily transactions of humanity's first great urban center.
  
  Provenance: private East Coast, USA collection
  
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  #137748

  Condition

  One is repaired from two pieces, with some adhesive marks on the surface. One is missing one corner. One is intact. One is missing one corner and has had modern clay added to the loss area.
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