Clay tablet

This clay tablet is the State Library of South Australia's oldest artefact. It originated in the area referred to as Mesopotamia, generally equivalent to modern Iraq, and is written in the Akkadian language. This clay tablet is inscribed with wedge-shaped cuneiform script, a script similar to but more abstract than hieroglyphics. The stylised marks represent words or phrases. A wedge-shaped reed or stick 'stylus' was pressed into damp clay to make the impressions, and the tablets were dried or baked for preservation. A cuneiform tablet is turned on its horizontal axis, unlike the page of a book, which is turned from obverse to reverse on its vertical axis.

Scribes wrote on tablets made from readily available clay. The people of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians and Akkadians, used the plentiful mud from the banks of the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates as their writing material, just as the Egyptians used the papyrus which grew so profusely along the banks of the River Nile. The mud was convenient, easily marked with a stylus, dried quickly and was recyclable.

The text of this clay tablet is a list of people's names, and the headwear with which they were issued for working in the fields. These ancient peoples were the first great bureaucrats and recorded and documented everything—their crops, the workmen and their daily transactions. They even had a system of seals for authenticating the tablets. Eventually they also used the cuneiform writing to record their history and their stories, as well as in the great monuments they erected to their kings and gods.

Thousands of clay tablets have been found, and each could be considered as the page of a book. Some are even numbered so they could be read in sequence. The clay tablets have been found stored in libraries at Nippur, Sippara, Ur and Nineveh, and were generally attached to the palaces of kings or to temples. The library of the great king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh was discovered by Sir Henry Layard in 1853.

Akkadian was a Semitic language (part of the greater Afro-Asiatic language family) spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly by the Assyrians and the Ancient Babylonians. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived from ancient Sumarian, an unrelated, language isolate. The name of the language is derived from the city of Akkad, a major centre of the Mesopotamian civilization.

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