Ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Old Babylonian Period, ca. 1900 to 1700 BCE. A hand-built clay cuneiform tablet with slanted top and bottoms, rounded sides, and lightly convex faces. The tablet bears 34 lines of impressed cuneiform script which are created by impressing a sharpened reed or stick into the still-wet clay just before undergoing the firing process. Though not fully translated, the subject of this letter concerns agricultural fields. Cuneiform tablets provide an insight into the daily lives of ancient Mesopotamian peoples as well as how they communicated across vast distances. Size: 1.5" W x 3.5" H (3.8 cm x 8.9 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. 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; ex-Richard Wagner collection, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA, acquired in the 1960s
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#137737
Condition
Small chips to top and bottom, with small areas of fire-darkening and encrustations, and light softening to some cuneiform characters, otherwise intact and very good. Light earthen deposits throughout.