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In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian ṭuppu(m) 𒁾) [1] were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed . Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air ...
The following is a list of the world's oldest surviving physical documents. Each entry is the most ancient of each language or civilization. For example, the Narmer Palette may be the most ancient from Egypt, but there are many other surviving written documents from Egypt later than the Narmer Palette but still more ancient than the Missal of Silos.
The tablets fall primarily into two styles: the earlier (building level IV) set featuring more naturalistic figures, written with a pointed stylus, and the later set (building level III) with a more abstract style, made using a blunt stylus. These correspond to the Late Uruk c. 3100 BC and Jemdet Nasr c. 3000 BC periods respectively.
A Sumerian clay tablet potentially signed by Kushim in the upper left corner. Not the more well known "Kushim Tablet" Kushim (Sumerian: 𒆪𒋆 KU.ŠIM; fl. c. 3200 BC) is supposedly the earliest known recorded name of a person in writing. The name "Kushim" is found on several Uruk period (c. 3400–3000 BC) clay tablets used to record ...
Sumerian was the last and most ancient language to be deciphered. Sale of a number of fields, probably from Isin, c. 2600 BC. The first known Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual tablet dates from the reign of Rimush. Louvre Museum AO 5477. The top column is in Sumerian, the bottom column is its translation in Akkadian. [44] [45]
The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with a stylus. Actual writing is first recorded in Uruk (modern Iraq), at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near East. [30] An ancient Sumerian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing:
These records were written in the Sumerian language in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC during the Middle Bronze Age. [ 1 ] The Sumerians invented one of the first writing systems, developing Sumerian cuneiform writing out of earlier proto-writing systems by about the 30th century BC.
Sumerian speakers were among the earliest people to record their beliefs in writing, and were a major inspiration in later Mesopotamian mythology, religion, and astrology. The Sumerians worshiped: An as the full-time god equivalent to heaven; indeed, the word an in Sumerian means sky and his consort Ki , means earth.