Sumerian·Book

Five thousand years. Written in clay.

The history of Mesopotamia, told by its tablets.

Cities, gods, kings and everyday lives. Discover humanity's first great civilization through the words it left behind.

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5,500–330 BCE · 12 periods

Find your place in time.

Explore the full chronology

Mesopotamia

Uruk Period

The birth of the city, the birth of writing.

1,783 tablets in the collection

Explore this era
Nine turning points, told through the tablets
  1. c. 3300 BCE · emergence of writingGoods become written records
  2. c. 2450–2425 BCEA city tells the story of its war
  3. 24th–23rd centuries BCE · Sargon's conquestsFrom rival cities to the Akkadian empire
  4. c. 2300 BCE · Enheduanna's lifetimeEnheduanna: a named woman at the center of power
  5. c. 2100 BCE · law collectionJustice becomes a written collection
  6. c. 2004 BCE · fall of Ur, conventional chronologyThe fall of Ur, remembered in lament
  7. c. 1750 BCEBabylon puts royal justice on a monument
  8. c. 1347–1330 BCECuneiform connects foreign courts
  9. 539 BCE · Cyrus takes BabylonBabylon enters the Persian empire
Meanwhile, around the worldTurning points from the tablets alongside world beliefs, inventions and civilizations.

Select a numbered marker or a title below. Positions are approximate; long traditions have date ranges, not single birthdays.

Mesopotamian turning pointsBeliefs & religionWriting & inventionsCities & civilizations

c. 3300 BCE · emergence of writing · Mesopotamian history

Goods become written records

Early scribes turn quantities and commodities into durable records on clay. MS 2497 is a later witness to this emerging administrative practice, not the first tablet ever written. Surviving witness: MS 2497: Uruk III, c. 3200–3000 BCE. Our engine used a photograph and an existing transliteration. Proto-cuneiform signs and units remain partly uncertain; this is not an independently verified full decipherment.

Read this turning point in the bookSource: The Metropolitan Museum of Art · The Origins of Writing (opens in a new tab)

A selection of historical reference points, not a complete history or a family tree of religions. Dates refer to evidence or gradual developments, not dates assigned to events in sacred narratives.

The chronology

Periods

An elderly woman decorating pottery beside other villagers in an Ubaid marshland settlement
5500 – 4000 BCE
0 tablets

Ubaid

Before writing — the first villages, the first temples.

Illustration of a scribe recording grain beside a canal, reed boats and mudbrick buildings in ancient Uruk
4000 – 3100 BCE
1,783 tablets

Uruk Period

The birth of the city, the birth of writing.

Illustration: Irrigation workers beside barley fields and a canal near Girsu
2900 – 2334 BCE
3,141 tablets

Early Dynastic

City-states, kings, the first wars.

Illustration: A temple priestess and scribes working in an Akkadian-period courtyard
2334 – 2154 BCE
3,671 tablets

Akkadian Empire

Sargon brings rival city-states under imperial rule.

Illustration: A scribe recording sheep received in an Ur III livestock yard
2112 – 2004 BCE
29,204 tablets

Ur III · Neo-Sumerian

A bureaucratic golden age, the Code of Ur-Nammu.

Illustration: A teacher and apprentice working with clay tablets in a Babylonian courtyard
2000 – 1600 BCE
22,543 tablets

Old Babylonian

Hammurabi, the Epic of Gilgamesh, mathematics.

A gray-haired Assyrian merchant and a middle-aged woman examining a sealed clay envelope beside a donkey caravan
2000 – 1700 BCE
1,541 tablets

Old Assyrian

Aššur the merchant city — the great trade with Anatolia.

Illustration: A messenger delivering a clay letter to a scribe in Kassite Babylonia
1600 – 1155 BCE
6,142 tablets

Middle Babylonian

The Kassite kings, international diplomacy.

An elderly woman and an adult farmer inspecting barley during a Middle Assyrian harvest
1400 – 1077 BCE
1,737 tablets

Middle Assyrian

Aššur's first imperial expansion.

Illustration: Scholars examining clay tablets in an Assyrian archive at Nineveh
911 – 609 BCE
25,030 tablets

Neo-Assyrian

Empire, library, terror, scholarship.

People of different ages trading dates near Babylon's blue glazed gate
626 – 539 BCE
4,950 tablets

Neo-Babylonian

Nebuchadnezzar, exile, late astronomy.

Illustration: A Babylonian scribe and Persian official beside a riverside storehouse
539 – 330 BCE
2,515 tablets

Achaemenid Persian

Persian rule, the long twilight of cuneiform.

Across the eras

Themes

An alabaster votive figure beside a bronze libation bowl and incense vessel

Religion & Myth

13,822 tablets

Gods, prayers, hymns, the sacred narratives.

What we call 'mythology' today was, for the people of Mesopotamia, religion lived in daily and royal life: hymns sung to gods, prayers carved into stone, accounts of creation and the flood, journeys to the underworld, and the building of temples. Preserved in clay long before papyrus or parchment existed.

A clay agreement tablet with a cylinder-seal impression and a carved stone seal

Law

5,121 tablets

Codes, contracts, justice.

From the Code of Ur-Nammu to Hammurabi's stele: the first attempts to write down justice, contracts, and the rules of common life — the deep ancestor of every legal system since.

Bronze balance pans with silver, stone weights and a basket of barley

Economy

53,332 tablets

Grain, silver, ledgers, trade.

Tens of thousands of tablets recording cattle distributions, silver weights, temple inventories, and merchant contracts. The world's first accounting — and the reason writing exists at all.

A circular clay star diagram beside a geometric tablet under lamplight

Astronomy & Mathematics

3,438 tablets

Stars, omens, base-60, geometry.

Babylonian astronomers tracked planets for centuries; their mathematicians invented sexagesimal arithmetic — the reason we still divide hours into 60 minutes and circles into 360 degrees.

A household clay jug and cups with flatbread, dates and pomegranate

Daily Life

11,707 tablets

Letters, recipes, schools, complaints.

A merchant's complaint about poor copper, a scribe's homework, a recipe for stew, a love song. The texture of everyday life four thousand years ago — startlingly familiar.

An older hand pressing a reed stylus into wet clay beside a younger hand

Writing & Literature

12,216 tablets

From accounting marks to the Gilgamesh epic.

The invention of writing itself, the slow drift from pictogram to cuneiform sign, the rise of literary form — and the first named author in human history, the priestess Enheduanna.

The sources, versus the myths

Dossiers

Star-filled night sky over a dark horizon — the sky the Mesopotamian astronomers watched

Anunnaki · Nibiru · ancient astronauts

The Mesopotamian Sky: Anunnaki, Nibiru and “Ancient Astronauts”

What 102,000 cuneiform tablets actually say about gods descending from heaven, strange stars, and beings from elsewhere — every claim checked against the primary sources.

Read the dossier
The Flood Tablet — Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, British Museum

the Flood · Gilgamesh · Ziusudra

The Flood Before Noah: Ziusudra, Utnapishtim and the Tablets Behind Genesis

A Mesopotamian flood story was written down more than a thousand years before Genesis. Here are the actual tablets — Ziusudra, Atra-hasis, the Gilgamesh Flood Tablet — and the 107 places the word “flood” really appears in the translations of a 102,000-tablet corpus.

Read the dossier
Cuneiform signs cut into stone — the wedge-shaped script of ancient Mesopotamia

cuneiform · how to read cuneiform · oldest writing

How to Read Cuneiform: What 102,246 Tablets Actually Say

Cuneiform is not a language, and it is mostly not literature. A guided reading of the world’s oldest writing — sign by sign, from a 3300 BCE receipt to a hymn — with the corpus counted: 60.9% of the classified tablets are accounting, 5.5% are literary.

Read the dossier

The state of the corpus · live

How far we've come, and how far is left.

102,257 / 353,283tablets ingested · 29% of the CDLI catalogue

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative is the world's reference catalogue. We have indexed 102,257 of its 353,283 entries — and beyond that, an estimated 750,000 cuneiform tablets exist in museums and excavation stores worldwide, many still unpublished.

10,666 / 102,257with an English translation · 10% · 7,925 scholarly + 2,741 engine+140 / 7 d

91,591 tablets in our corpus have never been translated into English. For many of them, no translation exists in any modern language. Each day, the engine closes a little more of this void — and re-reads its older work as it learns.

96,709 / 102,257with a photograph · 95%+16 / 7 d

Without a photograph the tablet cannot be re-read. CDLI lists 103,496 photographed tablets in total — about 6,787 of those are still missing from our local cache, and many more tablets have never been photographed at all.

external snapshot as of 2026-05-12 · corpus counts live · last engine pass 2026-10-26

Help close the gap

Two ways to add a stone to the edifice.

Donate photographs

If you work in a museum, in a university collection, in archaeology, or simply have access to high-resolution images of cuneiform tablets — every photograph unlocks a tablet that the engine can read.

Right now 6,787 CDLI tablets that have a photograph somewhere are not yet in our local cache, and far more have never been photographed at all.

Get in touch

Fund translations

Every tablet the engine translates costs a few cents in compute. Multiplied by 91,591 tablets, it adds up — and most have never been translated into any modern language.

Your support pays directly for AI engine runs over the catalogue. Every contribution moves the translation bar above forward.

Get in touch
Ancient desert ruins under a clear sky — evoking the archaeological landscape of the ancient Near East

The Mesopotamian world

Between the Tigris and the Euphrates, humanity's first cities, first laws, first stories.

Sumer, Akkad, Ur, Babylon, Nineveh — names from the deepest layer of human memory. What they wrote, on clay, has survived four thousand years of fire, flood, and forgetting. We read it again.

From the sources.

Every claim is anchored to a tablet — visible inline, with transliteration, translation, and scholarly note. No second-hand commentary.

Beautifully accessible.

Written for the curious reader, not the specialist. Three modes of entry: chronological, thematic, and the raw tablets themselves.

Open scholarship.

Built on CDLI, ETCSL, ORACC, and public museum collections. Translations are AI-assisted, scholar-validated, and confidence is always shown.

Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh — the Flood Tablet, British Museum, cuneiform clay tablet from the Library of Ashurbanipal

~650 BCE · Library of Ashurbanipal

The flood, told a thousand years before Genesis.

Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, recovered from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. When George Smith first deciphered the flood narrative in 1872, he reportedly began undressing in the British Museum reading room from sheer excitement: the source of one of the world's most famous stories was, all along, here in clay.

Read the tablet
Detail of cuneiform inscriptions on stone — wedge-shaped marks of the world's first writing system

Writing

The wedge in the clay was the beginning of memory itself.

Selected tablets

Highlights

~1754 BCE·Old BabylonianEditorial

Code of Hammurabi (stele)

A major surviving ancient law collection, carved on a basalt stela over two meters tall. Royal authority and legal decisions become a monument; this is not a code in the modern sense.

Law
~650 BCE·Neo-AssyrianEditorial

Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI (the Flood)

A major witness to the Mesopotamian Flood tradition and its relationship to later biblical literature. The date of this particular copy must be distinguished from the older history of the story.

Religion & MythWriting & Literature
~1800 BCE·Old BabylonianEditorial

Plimpton 322

Whatever its purpose, this single tablet shows that Babylonian mathematicians, working in base-60, had an arithmetic understanding of right triangles a millennium before Pythagoras was born.

Astronomy & Mathematics
~2300 BCE·Akkadian EmpireEditorial

Disk of Enheduanna

An object naming and depicting a powerful priestess and royal daughter around 2300 BCE. Enheduanna is also a landmark in named literary authorship, but that literary legacy must be distinguished from this disk’s dedication.

Religion & MythWriting & Literature
Starry night sky over a dark horizon — evoking the celestial observations of Babylonian astronomers

For the long horizon

“The full history is long. We tell it tablet by tablet, period by period, until the whole picture is here — sourced, beautiful, open.”

About this project

12 periods · 6 themes · 11 curated · 102,246 catalogued · v0.1