Writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform
List of the victories of Rimush, king of Akkad, upon Abalgamash, king of Marhashi, and upon Emahsini, King of Elam, c. 2270 BCE.
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 (reed pen). Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air, remaining fragile. Later, these unfired clay tablets could be soaked in water and recycled into new clean tablets. Other tablets, once written, were either deliberately fired in hot kilns, or inadvertently fired when buildings were burnt down by accident or during conflict, making them hard and durable. Collections of these clay documents made up the first archives. They were at the root of the first libraries. Tens of thousands of written tablets, including many fragments, have been found in the Middle East.[2][3]
Surviving tablet-based documents from the Minoan/Mycenaean civilizations, are mainly those which were used for accounting. Tablets serving as labels with the impression of the side of a wicker basket on the back, and tablets showing yearly summaries, suggest a sophisticated accounting system. In this cultural region, tablets were never fired deliberately as the clay was recycled on an annual basis. However, some of the tablets were "fired" as a result of uncontrolled fires in the buildings where they were stored. The rest, remain tablets of unfired clay and are therefore extremely fragile. For this reason, some institutions are investigating the possibility of firing them now to aid in their preservation.[4]
^Black, Jeremy Allen; George, Andrew R.; Postgate, Nicholas (2000). A concise dictionary of Akkadian (2nd ed.). Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 415. ISBN 978-3-447-04264-2. LCCN 00336381. OCLC 44447973.
^Guisepi, Robert Anthony; F. Roy Willis (2003). "Ancient Sumeria". International World History Project. Robert A. Guisepi. Archived from the original on 17 December 2017. Retrieved 5 November 2010.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
^The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative gives an estimate of 500,000 for the total number of tablets (or fragments) that have been found.
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