This tablet is of a type used by the Assyrian merchants to track the income and expenses generated by caravan shipments. The cuneiform text, read from left to right, records not only the amount of silver invested in tin and textiles, but also the less commonly traded precious stone lapis lazuli, which was sourced from Afghanistan.
At first, I thought it strange that a lot of these ancient tablets are receipts and bank statements.
That’s exactly what writing was invented for, from after the mid fourth millennium bce, the first few hundred years of rudimentary writing are accounting archives and lists of names (gods, jobs). Actual information (royal achievements, how-to, religion) came shortly before the mid third millennium.
Hundreds of years of nothing but bean grain counting.
I can’t find this exact tablet on Google (it could be AI generated), but this is a meme, the text is made up. The tablet is definitely unrelated.
edit - well shit, duckduckgo got it.
http://blog.hmns.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/cuneiform.png https://blog.hmns.org/2020/06/crazy-for-cuneiform-decoding-ancient-text/
Old Assyrian Trading Colony; Cuneiform tablet; Clay-Tablets-Inscribed – ca. 20th–19th century B.C.
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-cuneiform-tablet-clay-old-assyrian-trading-colony-middle-bronze-age-118099278.html
it’s a the Met museum https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/325851 4th picture.
At first, I thought it strange that a lot of these ancient tablets are receipts and bank statements.
Then I thought about how a huge portion of all the paper sitting in our landfills might be exactly that.
That’s exactly what writing was invented for, from after the mid fourth millennium bce, the first few hundred years of rudimentary writing are accounting archives and lists of names (gods, jobs). Actual information (royal achievements, how-to, religion) came shortly before the mid third millennium.
Hundreds of years of nothing but
beangrain counting.