Position in chronology
Cuneiform tablet case impressed with four cylinder seals Old Assyrian
Translation · reference
ExperimentalSource: Wikimedia Commons file: File:Cuneiform tablet case impressed with four cylinder seals Old Assyrian.png. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACuneiform_tablet_case_impressed_with_four_cylinder_seals_Old_Assyrian.png. Description: Cuneiform tablet case impressed with four cylinder seals, for cuneiform tablet 66.245.15a. Full description available at the museum website .
Why it matters
Transliteration
Scholarly note
Tablet image sourced from Wikimedia Commons (CC0). No scholarly translation referenced in source metadata. Source description: Cuneiform tablet case impressed with four cylinder seals, for cuneiform tablet 66.245.15a. Full description available at the museum website .
Attribution
Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art — Wikimedia Commons. source
Translation excerpted from Wikimedia Commons file: File:Cuneiform tablet case impressed with four cylinder seals Old Assyrian.png. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACuneiform_tablet_case_impressed_with_four_cylinder_seals_Old_Assyrian.png. Description: Cuneiform tablet case impressed with four cylinder seals, for cuneiform tablet 66.245.15a. Full description available at the museum website ..
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The earliest historical document in human history.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.