Ancient Near East, Babylon, Middle Babylonian Period, 11th year of the reign of King Kadashman-Turgu, ca. 1270 BCE. A gorgeous and finely-detailed clay administrative tablet, formed by impressing a sharpened reed into bricks of soft terracotta and then firing in a kiln. The tablet, rectangular and bulbous in form, depicts twenty-five lines of intricate Cuneiform lettering used as a record to carefully monitor the transportation and allocation of certain agricultural materials. The tablet itself has two bulging faces, is rounded along the top and bottom ridges, and is somewhat planar along the lateral sides. This document is a wonderful insight into how material goods were logged and kept on track in ancient Babylon. Size: 4.7" W x 3.125" H (11.9 cm x 7.9 cm).

In summation, the script listed in this document describes the harvest revenues from the town or Dur-Enlille, a trading center not far from the city of Nippur during the 11th year of King Kadashman-Turgu. The agricultural products mentioned in the various lines of text include barley, wheat, and cress – a nutritious microgreen that has been consumed and cultivated for centuries. Also described are the specific amounts of each material kept by government officials for taxation purposes.

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. 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.

Provenance: private East Coast, USA collection

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#132497

Small chips to three corners. Surface wear commensurate with age and use, a few stable hairline pressure fissures, some fading to impressed Cuneiform script, and light discoloration, otherwise excellent. Nice earthen deposits throughout.