Ancient Near East, Sumeria, ca. 3rd to 2nd millennium BCE. A round-edged, square "biscuit" or tablet with both sides incised with cuneiform. 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. Size: 1.45" W (3.7 cm)
This cuneiform tablet is one 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, this one is concerned with property. Cuneiform tablets seem to have been used mainly as a way of tabulating economic concerns. 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 Davis collection, Houston, Texas, USA; ex-Joseph Klein collection, formed in New York, New York, USA between 1941 and 1980, thence by descent
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#132824
Condition
Intact. Not translated but could be, with very clear characters.