Lot 65
Ancient Near East, Sumer, reign of Ishme-Dagan of Isin, ca. 1953 to 1935 BCE. A hand-built clay foundation cone with a tapered conical body, a rounded tip, and a flat head. The smooth surfaces of the cone are inscribed with 21 lines of cuneiform text that are formed by impressing a sharpened reed or stick into the still-wet clay just before undergoing the firing process. When translated this cone reads, "Ishme-Dagan, mighty man, King of Isin, King of the Four Quarters (of the world) when he exempted the tribute obligations of Nippur, the city beloved by Enlil, and took its populace away from forced labor, he built the wall of Isin, naming it 'Ishme-Dagan,' with Enlil, the might of the great god.'" Size: 5.375" L x 1.8" W x 1.875" H (13.7 cm x 4.6 cm x 4.8 cm)
Clay nails like this are also referred to as dedication pegs or funerary pegs; they were inscribed, baked, and stuck into walls made of mud-brick to mark ownership either by a god or a ruler. These dedications sometimes include stories or boasts about the rulers they describe, and are some of our earliest sources of written royal history.
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 objects 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.
Translation from: George, A.R. "Bibliotheca Orientalis 53." 1996, no. 366; also from: George, A.R. "Cuneiform Royal Inscriptions and Related Texts in the Schoyen Collection." CDL Press, Bethesda, Maryland, 2011, p. 91, no. 39
Provenance: private Las Vegas, Nevada, USA collection, acquired from Bruce P. Ferrini, Medieval & Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts, Akron, Ohio, USA, March 30, 1999
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#184881
- Condition: Intact and near-choice with great preservation and legibility to most cuneiform characters.
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