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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.
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 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:
A smaller number of tablets were found in Jemdet Nasr (2 Uruk V, 236 Uruk III), Umma, Eshnunna (2 Uruk III), Larsa (23 Uruk III), Khafajah, Kish (5 Uruk III), and Tell Uqair (39 Uruk III). [ 31 ] [ 32 ] [ 33 ] They tend to be less fragmentary and are sometimes found in stratified contexts.
Writing in ancient Sumer was a time-consuming activity known to few. For this reason, writing was mainly used to keep necessary economic records. Literacy in Uruk was also likely limited at the time. [1] A clay tablet detailing a trade transaction contains one of the first examples of rebus writing. [2] It reads "28,086 [a] measures barley 37 ...
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]
Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script, and, probably, [were] invented under the influence of the latter", [42] and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia".
Uruk is also the site of the most important discoveries of early writing tablets, in levels IV and III, in a context where they had been disposed of, which means that the context in which they were created is not known to us. Uruk III, which corresponds to the Jemdet Nasr period, sees a complete reorganisation of the Eanna quarter, in which the ...