Clay Tablets facts
While investigating facts about Clay Tablets In Mesopotamia and Clay Tablets In Mesopotamia (2400 Bc), I found out little known, but curios details like:
The first person in history whose name we know is 'Kushim', who was not a King, poet or a warrior, but an accountant. He signed a receipt which said "29,086 measures barley 37 months Kushim", which was found on a clay tablet in Mesopotamia.
how clay tablets were made?
The massive ancient library of Ninevah (think: Mesopotamian equivalent of the library of Alexandria) was burnt by the Medes. Unlike a library containing organic documents, the fires treated the ~30,000 clay tablets and preserved the cuneiform text very well rather than destroying it.
What are clay tablets?
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what is clay tablets in mesopotamia. Here are 19 of the best facts about Clay Tablets Meaning and Clay Tablets History I managed to collect.
what were clay tablets used for?
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There is a 4000 year old clay tablet which is a customer's letter complaining about sub-standard copper and wanting a refund.
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Researchers at Yale cooked 4000-year old Babylonian stews from recipes written on ancient clay tablets, including a stew made from onion and leeks, beets, and broth of lamb
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Fingerprints were used as signatures in ancient Babylon in the second millennium BCE. In order to protect against forgery, parties to a legal contract would impress their fingerprints into a clay tablet on which the contract had been written
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A Cuneiform clay tablet made in 703 BC, copied from an astronomers notebook from 3100 BCE, is evidence that Sodom and Gomorrah were actually destroyed by a 1 km wide asteroid that then went on to hit Austria.
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There are many clay tablets that exist from the time period when the Hanging Gardens would have existed. None of these ancient tablets mention the Hanging Gardens.
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Soap dates back to 2800 BC. A Babylonian clay tablet (2200 BC) was discovered with the recipe, while an Egyptian papyrus (1550 BC) mentions soap made with animal and vegetable oils. - The word sapo (soap in Latin) is first mentioned in Natural History by Pliny the Elder (77-79 AD).
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the first name ever recorded comes from an excavated Sumerian clay tablet. It's estimated that the tablet is from around 3,400 BC, and appears to be a recording of barley. In the bottom corner it says simply: 'signed, Kushim'.
Why did sumerians write on clay tablets?
You can easily fact check why did mesopotamians write on clay tablets by examining the linked well-known sources.
The British Museum has a 5,000 yr old clay tablet which is a record of the daily beer rations for workers written in cuneiform.
Beer was used as pay for some workers in ancient Mesopotamia. A 5,000 year old clay tablet recording the beer rations for workers in cuneiform was found in modern day southern Iraq. - source
In the 1950s, archaeologists unearthed several clay tablets from the 14th B.C.E “in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit,” these tablets “contained cuneiform signs in the hurrian language” which turned out to be the oldest known piece of music ever discovered, a 3,400 year-old cult hymn - source
Americans injured in Israel tried to seize ancient Persian artifacts from a Chicago museum. The cultural artifacts, on loan from Iran to the museum since the 1930s, include clay tablets boasting some of the oldest writing in the world.
A clay tablet at the National Museum of Iraq, dated to c. 1770 BCE, shows a calculation that uses the Pythagorean theorem—twelve centuries prior to the birth of Pythagoras. - source
When were clay tablets discovered?
The earliest known YELP review/customer complaint discovered was a clay tablet written to a Babylonian merchant in 1750 BCE, which criticized the quality of the copper ingots and the rudeness of the customer service representative who sold them.
How to make clay tablets?
About Hormudz Rassam, a Chaldean/Assyrian archeologists and assyriologist whom in 1877-1882 discovered clay tablets containing the Epic of Gilgamesh, the worlds oldest literature.
