A Stray Sumerian Tablet

this little piece of clay from the library's collections is packed full of information from 4200 years ago the language of the inscription is Sumerian Sumerian is the oldest written language it's not related to any of the indo-european or Semitic languages in that part of the world there are six professionally written lines of cuneiform script on it and this script is already a thousand years old it descends from the first pictographic to Sumerian scripts of about 3200 BC in the early years of the 20th century we have a disaster the antiquities market in the West was flooded with thousands of cuneiform tablets they had been ripped out of their original context in the sites where the illicit robbers were working and distributed across the world so that tablets of an individual archive can be found in museums from Moscow to London to Chicago we may be able to reconstruct what's going on in the individual tablets and by comparison with the others in the archive as a whole but we can never reconstruct the physical archaeological context from which they came and so there's a great loss of information there the content of the tablet is very simple it simply mentions a large quantity 22 jars of lard or eggs fat it gives the name of the responsible official and it states that this fat was dispensed in the city of zabala [Music] we think that these jars were perhaps 18 litres each so that means they are talking about 400 litres of lard we do have texts which are deal with textile workers and they are issued quantities of lard along with other substances including what I called potash and potash is an alkali produced from burning salt loving plants aliphatic plants as they're called and it's well known as a substance used for making soap or a substitute for soap in antiquity soap itself is very rarely mentioned in ancient texts whether they are biblical classical or Mesopotamian and we don't know a word for Sumerian soap but we might perhaps have some evidence in the archaeological evidence for the essence of soap the impression of a cylinder seal on a tablet from about 2100 BC which shows the king we know he's the king because he has the Kings characteristic turban the King marching along wearing nothing at all except a towel draped over his left arm and he's holding a little cup in one hand my guess is that he's not holding a drink to take into the shower but soap and this is the soap dish that he's carrying an amount of 400 liters of makes that whether it's some intended for soap or anything else is obviously something outside the range of an individual household and so I think we can reasonably assume that this document comes from an institution whether that's a secular institution which is more likely or possibly a temple that it's a reasonable assumption is in fact very clear because there are other tablets in the museum's of the world which mentioned one of the principal members in our text mr. Bali as his name is and he is found in similar documents of course the tablet itself mentions the city of Zabala which is in South Iraq and it's 8 kilometers north of an even larger city called umma this tablet might possibly have come from Zabala but it's perhaps more likely that it came from Omer itself how then did it arrive here it formed part of the collection of sisty van gays Lee peeps librarian for modeling college who presented it to Cambridge University Library in the 1920s Thomas fish later distinguished zoologist deciphered the tablet but never published the text since then many other tablets from the same archive also illicitly excavated at oma have surfaced in museums all over the world and our tablet now makes its own small contribution to the reconstruction of a government office more than 4,000 years you

Channel: Cambridge University Library (the UL)

Views: 466,903

Rating: 4.8550549 out of 5

Keywords: Sumerian Tablet, MS Doc. 829, cuneiform, cuneiform script, Balli, Zabala, Stephen Gaselee, Thomas Fish, Cambridge, Nicholas Postgate

Id: Mm4mXmivuZg

Length: 5min 55sec (355 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ThePopeJones]

People are suspicious because it's human nature. We want to believe that the world is full of wonder and incredible things (which in many ways it is), but most things are pretty mundane.

It's also pretty easy to come up with crazy theories about a civilization that has been gone for so long. There's no one around tothat can directly dispute the. Even if a person from ancient sumaria showed up and told them they were wrong they'd call him a government shill.

[u/JamesSway]

Because of stuff like HobbyLobby owner David Green wanting them. George W Bush's friend. Is a millionaire, has over one million bibles,Torahs, Qurans everything else. Wants these tablets bad enough to take advantage of war and wait years to get them. Most are useless but they're older than any text he's got and he owns a bible museum blocks from the White House. Turns out three of them tell how to recall the Gods, ^{ReadLinkAbove} An, Enlil and Enki. The rest are records like your video link. Everybody's just looking for the truth but the answer to your questions is Zachariah Sinchen. He's the father of that movement.

[u/yalllove]

Funnily, I was at the Met last month. And I must have seen the Mesopotamian relief sculptures dozens of times there. As of recent, I have been more engaged into the topic of ETs. And this time I looked at them with my new perspective and I was SHOOK. Hell yeah they are aliens.

[u/way26e]

The Sumerian Civilization exploded onto the scene. From the first settlements like Jericho and then boom out of nowhere: Sumeria -a full blown civilization with writing, agriculture,architecture, irrigation, tools, and astronomy, math, laws, royalty and priesthood in apparently just a few generations at most. With a complete mythos that the tools were given to it at once by strange Gods from the sea. Now all the ancient civilizations explained their origins in terms of Gods and Goddesses. However, the Sumerians were different because all the others' mythos were derivative from Sumerian. They all had time to evolve from the original, but the Sumerians did not have hardly anytime at all to even come into being. The mythos seemingly came into the existence at once with the other stuff of civilization that the Sumerians explain as "Gifts of the Gods". They could have taken credit for themselves. They should have known where the technologies came from. Its just all very strange.