Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

Clay tablet, record of barley and emmer. Late Uruk period, 3300-3100 BCE. Purchased via Christie's, no provenance

~3300 BCE·Uruk Period·BM 140853

Not yet translated

This tablet is catalogued and photographed, 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.

The world it comes from

The birth of the city, the birth of writing.

Read the Uruk Period chapter →

Scholarly note

Tablet image sourced from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). No scholarly translation referenced in source metadata. Source description: Clay tablet, late Uruk period, 3300-3100 BCE. Emmer wheat is differentiated from barley by writing numbers with extra strokes. The proto-cuneiform signs document barley. Barley appears 4 times here an

Attribution

Image: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) — Wikimedia Commons. source
Translation excerpted from Wikimedia Commons file: File:Clay tablet, record of barley and emmer. Late Uruk period, 3300-3100 BCE. Purchased via Christie's, no provenance.jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AClay_tablet%2C_record_of_barley_and_emmer._Late_Uruk_period%2C_3300-3100_BCE._Purchased_via_Christie's%2C_no_provenance.jpg. Description: Clay tablet, late Uruk period, 3300-3100 BCE. Emmer wheat is differentiated from barley by writing numbers with extra strokes. The proto-cuneiform signs document barley. Barley appears 4 times here and is represented by a single stalk with.

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