Ancient Near East, Sumeria, ca. 3rd to 2nd millennium BCE. A group of three Sumerian pottery cuneiform tablets. 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. One of these is a fragmentary letter, one is a letter to Ludingira from his father, and the third is a scribal student exercise converting minas to the equivalent in shekels. It is written using the sexagesimal base counting system that was used in all Mesopotamian mathematics. Size of largest: 2.15" W x 3.4" H (5.5 cm x 8.6 cm)

Provenance: private East Coast, USA collection; ex-Richard Wagner collection, Massachusetts, USA, collected in the 1960s

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#137753

All three have been repaired from multiple large pieces.