Position in chronology
BM — $ OIM A17634 (cast of BM fragment)
Not yet translated
This tablet is catalogued, but no published translation exists yet. Our translation engine works through the untranslated corpus every night, oldest first — this page will update the day its turn comes. If you are a specialist and can read it, we would love your help.
From the same catalogue range (near P357162)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Neo-Assyrian (ca. 911-612 BC)) — BM — $ OIM A17634 (cast of BM fragment). No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: BM — $ OIM A17634 (cast of BM fragment) (British Museum, London, UK; Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P357162). source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P357162..
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One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
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