Lot 32C
Ancient Near East, Sumeria, ca. 3rd to 2nd millennium BCE. A group of ten Sumerian pottery cuneiform tablets and small "biscuits", all translated. They come together in a special padded frame and accompanied by a large binder of translation information. This includes a letter about some of the translation, written by Professor Paul-Alain Beaulieu, when he was at Yale in the mid-1990s (he is currently at the University of Toronto). Cuneiform script is one of the oldest known writing systems in the world, made using a reed as a stylus and scratching wedge-shaped marks onto clay tablets. Early cuneiform was pictographic, but in the 3rd millennium BCE it shifted to the more abstract form you see here. If you would like further information about the translations, please contact us - they fill a full binder and are too much information to display here. Size of largest: 2.2" W x 2.3" H (5.6 cm x 5.8 cm); size of frame: 16.1" W x 12.1" H (40.9 cm x 30.7 cm)
These cuneiform tablets are some of the roughly 2 million known from this culture; of these, between 30,000 and 100,000 have been translated. The earliest translations came in 1836 from the work of French scholar Eugene Burnouf and by the 1850s multiple scholars were able to produce similar translations, meaning the language had been deciphered. Similar to many other known cuneiform tablets, the ones here are concerned with financial transactions, the movement of workers, soldiers, and goods. Cuneiform tablets seem to have been used mainly as a way of tabulating economic concerns. For example, one of the tablets here comes from Puzrish-Dagan, which was a cattleyard that provided animal offerings to temples throughout Sumer, and records the transfer of an animal between two Sumerian government officials. Although it might be more romantic to imagine that these tablets discussed the doings of kings and gods, from a historical standpoint, it is much more interesting to learn about the daily transactions of humanity's first great urban center.
Provenance: Ex-Private Ventura County, CA collection
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#118318
- Condition: Some are fragmentary; one is repaired from multiple pieces. All are readable.
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Artemis Fine Arts
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