Tools that these scribes used were styluses with sharp triangular tips, making it easy to leave markings on the clay the clay tablets themselves came in a variety of colors such as bone white, chocolate, and charcoal. The clay tablet was thus being used by scribes to record events happening during their time. These, initially very small clay tokens, were continually used all the way from the pre-historic Mesopotamia period, 9000 BCE, to the start of the historic period around 3000 BCE, when the use of writing for recording was widely adopted. These marketplaces were purposed for the trade of sheep, grain, and bread loaves, where transactions were recorded with clay tokens. This convention began when people developed agriculture and settled into permanent communities that were centered on increasingly large and organized trading marketplaces. In that way, the exact number of goods involved in a transaction could be recorded. In Mesopotamia, writing began as simple counting marks, sometimes alongside a non-arbitrary sign, in the form of a simple image, pressed into clay tokens or less commonly cut into wood, stone or pots. For this reason, some institutions are investigating the possibility of firing them now to aid in their preservation. The rest, remain tablets of unfired clay and are therefore extremely fragile. However, some of the tablets were "fired" as a result of uncontrolled fires in the buildings where they were stored. In this cultural region, tablets were never fired deliberately as the clay was recycled on an annual basis. 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. Surviving tablet-based documents from the Minoan/ Mycenaean civilizations, are mainly those which were used for accounting. Tens of thousands of written tablets, including many fragments, have been found in the Middle East. They were at the root of the first libraries. Collections of these clay documents made up the first archives. 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. Later, these unfired clay tablets could be soaked in water and recycled into new clean tablets. Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air, remaining fragile. In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets ( Akkadian ṭuppu(m) □) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age.Ĭuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed ( reed pen). The earliest known attempts at forming large-scale empires were made by the Sumerian and Akkadian kings of the late third millennium BCE.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. During times of great political unity, kings expanded their control beyond the two rivers, dominating neighboring lands and controlling the trade routes of the Near East. The rulers of various regions-Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria-dominated Mesopotamia as a whole at one time or another. Over centuries, the flood pulse of the Euphrates and Tigris left the southern plains of what is now Iraq with the richest soil in the Near East.įor 3,000 years the peoples of Mesopotamia maintained a significant degree of cultural unity, even though politically they were much more fragmented. In the midst of a vast desert, the peoples of Mesopotamia relied upon these rivers to provide drinking water, agricultural irrigation, and major transportation routes. The civilization of Ancient Mesopotamia grew up along the banks of two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris. Ancient Mesopotamia: "The Land Between Two Rivers"
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