Lot 33
Ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Pre-Sargonic period, ca. 2500 to 2400 BCE; Old Babylonian period, ca. 1900 to 1700 BCE. A wonderful ensemble of four hand-built clay tablets of rectangular forms that illustrate one of humanity's oldest forms of structured writing, with three from the Old Babylonian period, and one from the Pre-Sargonic period. Each tablet bears several lines of inscribed cuneiform text formed by impressing a sharpened stick into the clay just prior to being placed inside a kiln. The first tablet bears 9 lines that give a receipt for oil made from vegetables. The second tablet displays 24 lines of text across both faces and the peripheries. The Pre-Sargonic tablet has 24 lines and described a legal contract for a loan of silver to purchase barley. The largest tablet exhibits 27 lines of text and portrays a letter that concerns the irrigation from agricultural fields. Lucite display stands for photography purposes only. Size of largest: 1.75" W x 3.6" H (4.4 cm x 9.1 cm)
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. 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.
Provenance: East Coast collection, New York Gallery, New York City, New York, USA, acquired before 2010
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#137741
- Condition: Repairs to largest tablet and black tablet, with small chips and light adhesive residue along break lines; two smaller tablets are intact and very good. All four items have nicks and abrasions to faces and peripheries, with minor softening to some inscribed cuneiform characters, and light encrustations. Nice earthen deposits throughout.
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