Position in chronology
Tablet city seal offering Ashmolean
Translation · reference
ExperimentalSource: Wikimedia Commons file: File:Tablet city seal offering Ashmolean.jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ATablet_city_seal_offering_Ashmolean.jpg. Description: Cuneiform tablet, with record of offerings to temples, possibly by a league of cities, whose seals are impressed on the sides of the tablet (so-called "city seals"). Ashmolean Museum AN1926.591. https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/4854
Why it matters
Transliteration
Scholarly note
Tablet image sourced from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). No scholarly translation referenced in source metadata. Source description: Cuneiform tablet, with record of offerings to temples, possibly by a league of cities, whose seals are impressed on the sides of the tablet (so-called "city seals"). Ashmolean Museum AN1926.591. https
Attribution
Image: Zunkir — Wikimedia Commons. source
Translation excerpted from Wikimedia Commons file: File:Tablet city seal offering Ashmolean.jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ATablet_city_seal_offering_Ashmolean.jpg. Description: Cuneiform tablet, with record of offerings to temples, possibly by a league of cities, whose seals are impressed on the sides of the tablet (so-called "city seals"). Ashmolean Museum AN1926.591. https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/4854.
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The earliest historical document in human history.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.