Position in chronology
Numerical and proto cuneiforms tablets - Oriental Institute
Translation · reference
ExperimentalSource: Wikimedia Commons file: File:Numerical and proto cuneiforms tablets - Oriental Institute.jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ANumerical_and_proto_cuneiforms_tablets_-_Oriental_Institute.jpg. Description: Numerical tablet (left), numerical-ideographic tablet (center) and proto-cuneiform tablet (right), from the collections of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. Late Uruk period (maybe Jemdet-Nasr for the last one, no informations).
Why it matters
Transliteration
Scholarly note
Tablet image sourced from Wikimedia Commons (CC0). No scholarly translation referenced in source metadata. Source description: Numerical tablet (left), numerical-ideographic tablet (center) and proto-cuneiform tablet (right), from the collections of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. Late Uruk period (maybe Jemdet-Nasr for th
Attribution
Image: Original: Daderot Derivative work : Zunkir — Wikimedia Commons. source
Translation excerpted from Wikimedia Commons file: File:Numerical and proto cuneiforms tablets - Oriental Institute.jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ANumerical_and_proto_cuneiforms_tablets_-_Oriental_Institute.jpg. Description: Numerical tablet (left), numerical-ideographic tablet (center) and proto-cuneiform tablet (right), from the collections of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. Late Uruk period (maybe Jemdet-Nasr for the last one, no informations)..
Related tablets
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.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.