Tablet in Proto-Cuneiform Writing
Unknown · Late Uruk period, Uruk III, circa 3300 to 3100 BC
Small enough to fit in the palm, this tablet is not clay but pale limestone, and its face is divided into boxes filled with some of the oldest writing on earth. The signs are proto-cuneiform: simple pictures and strokes pressed or scratched into the surface before the wedge-shaped script of later centuries had taken form. According to the museum, the text is an economic or administrative record, probably a list of personal names belonging to a register of personnel. Look at how the cases run across the surface in ordered rows, each one a separate entry in an ancient bookkeeper's account.
Writing was invented in the cities of Sumer at the end of the fourth millennium BC, not to record poetry but to keep track of goods, rations and workers. Tablets of the Uruk III phase, around three thousand one hundred BC, are the last step before true cuneiform, and their signs can be partly read as Sumerian. This piece is recorded as coming from Babylonia, the land of Sumer, without a precise site, and it was purchased by the Louvre in nineteen forty-seven. Its complete state makes it a rare, intact witness to the moment when accounting became script.
Did You Know? The earliest writing in the world was invented for bookkeeping, and lists of workers like this one outnumber every other kind of early text.
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