Position in chronology
WCMA 20.1.33a
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 P424405)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Neo-Assyrian (ca. 911-612 BC)) — WCMA 20.1.33a. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: WCMA 20.1.33a (Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P424405). source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P424405..
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Related sources
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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