Cuneiform Temple Receipt, Barley allotments for the foremen of female millers, as well as a ship-builder, a brewer and a "yarn man."

Label

Cuneiform is not a language but rather a style of script that can be used to write several different languages. Cuneiform literally means “wedge-shaped,” from the way the stylus made marks on clay. Cuneiform tablets developed out of a need to keep records of the storage, movement, and distribution of material goods. Once fired in a kiln or baked in the sun, the clay tablets could be held in storehouses indefinitely. The small cuneiform tag, which would have been attached to a larger container much like we might write on the exterior of a cardboard box, still holds impressions of a cord across its surface. The largest tablet has the seal of a scribe repeatedly pressed into the clay beneath the cuneiform inscriptions. Furthermore, the individuals mentioned in the tablets—from named administrators to women working in a brewery to a “yarn man”—provide valuable insight into the people of ancient Mesopotamia who are otherwise invisible to history.

From the exhibition, Stone, Sand, and Clay: Connecting Cultures in the Ancient Mediterranean, curated by Ashley B. Offill, Curator of Collections

Course History

ANTH 39, Archaeology of the Middle East, Jesse Casana, Fall 2019

ANTH 39.01/MES 3.02, Archaeology of the Middle East, Jesse Casana, Spring 2021

Anthropology 39.01, Middle Eastern Studies 3.02, Archaeology of the Middle East, Jesse Casana, Fall 2023

Anthropology 39.01, Middle Eastern Studies 3.02, Archaeology of the Middle East, Jesse Casana, Fall 2024

Anthropology 39.01, Middle Eastern Studies 3.02, Archaeology of the Middle East, Jesse Casana, Fall 2024

Exhibition History

Stone, Sand, and Clay: Connecting Cultures in the Ancient Mediterranean, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 7, 2025 - Ongoing

Publication History

Benjamin R. Foster, Yale University, "Texts and Fragments," Journal of Cuneiform Studies, April 31, 1979, p. 238.

Widell, Magnus, Ur III Economy and Bureaucracy: The Neo-Sumerian Cuneiform Tablets in the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (I). Orient: Reports of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan, 55 (1), 2019.

Provenance

Dartmouth Scientific Association; given to present collection, 1923.

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Subject