Reading from the top, it lists 21 fatted bulls, 1 fatted cow, 2 sheep, and 1 lamb. See a view of the entire tablet. See if you can find gu4, the compressed sign for "bull or ox". Click here for the answer. The above tablet is quite small 35 x 32 mm, approximately 1.
Other tablets were much larger. See an administrative tablet from the reign of Urukagina circa B. Literary tablets were even larger, such as this tablet about Gilgamesh , which contains a flood story similar to the biblical tale. Very long compositions were written on rectangular columns, like The King List shown below:. The King List , recording the names of the rulers of Mesopotamia.
As stated earlier, most Sumerian tablets were used for accounting purposes. Administrative tablets are usually recognizable by numbers at the beginning of the lines recording the quantities of the items on the list as seen on the tablet above. Sumerians were a practical people. Most of their writing was devoted to the daily necessities of business and government, which is why an original work of fiction like Tablet 36 is such a great rarity.
The Sumerian sign for scribe. It literally means "tablet writer". Sumerian was a very difficult language to read and write, even for the scribes.
There were many complicated signs that had to be memorized, and all the signs had multiple meanings and pronunciations. There were very few clarifying rules of grammar, and there wasn't any capitalization, punctuation, or spaces between the words; so it was difficult to tell where one word ended and another began.
A sentence was just one long string of symbols. The scribe did not so much read a line of text as translate it. In addition, the scribe also had to learn business, math, science, and literature so he could write of the these intelligently.
The cirriculum at a scribal school edubba , meaning 'tablet house' was tough and demanding. It required many years of hard work for a scribe to master the art of cuneiform writing.
Line-drawing of a scribal school tablet where the student copied the signs given by his teacher. The schoolmaster even slaps the boy for giving a wrong answer and tells him that he will never amount to anything. The boy goes home and complains to his father, saying he wants to quit. He invites the schoolmaster for dinner.
He lavishes honor and respect on the schoolmaster, gives him expensive gifts, such as a beautiful bowl and a costly robe, then serves him a sumptuous meal with plenty of beer. It isn't long before the schoolmaster is praising the boy to the heavens. He'll go far in this life. One day he will be a great scribe. Nisaba be praised! The composition was given as a writing assignment to all students, in all scribal schools, in every generation.
The students had to copy it word for word. It was also a pointed reminder to their fathers to make sure the schoolmasters were well paid for their services. Nisaba be praised. Nisaba was the patron goddess of the scribes.
She is also the one credited with the invention of writing. In her temple, the scribes offered their "presentation tablets", dedicating to her the best examples of their compositions and calligraphy. More information about Sumerian scribes can be found on " The Scribe " page of this website. The scribes continued to hone their craft for 1, years, until the fall of Sumerian civilization in the year B.
Afterwards their writing lived on in the form of Babylonian literature, which still used the Sumerian writing system in the centuries that followed. The Babylonians also copied much of the history and literature that the Sumerians had written. Were it not for the efforts of the scribes, we would know next to nothing about the Sumerians.
Next, have students discuss the following questions. You may wish to have them work together in small groups. The above video is an excerpt from the film The Cyrus Cylinder and provides an overview of the origins of cuneiform.
In addition to the historical basis for these activities, this lesson is also about the nature of written language, how it evolves and how it serves civilization. Ask the students the purposes of writing in the world today. You may wish to have them discuss questions such as:.
Next, ask them to imagine that in an instant all knowledge of alphabetic writing disappeared. Only the drawing of simple pictures remained as the means of written communication.
Have the class brainstorm: What would be some of the most essential things for which you would need signs? Which objects, concepts and ideas are the ones you would make sure were standardized and learned right away?
Review the list of essential signs that the class has compiled. Have students create a few of them and draw them on the board.
Discuss examples of messages relatively easy to communicate with pictographs and others that would be more difficult. Writing in ancient Mesopotamia arose from necessity—specifically, the need to keep records. Gradually, civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley became more urbanized. Eventually, a number of complex systems developed: political, military, religious, legal, and commercial. Writing developed as well, becoming essential to those systems.
Did writing enable those complex systems to arise or did complex systems create the need for a more sophisticated system of writing? Ask students to recall a time they started to do a task and then realized at some point that they should have been writing things down? For example, they might imagine organizing a collection of trading cards by writing down categories. Did writing change the way they approached the task? For example, they might think of deciding to make lists of the cards by category.
Ask students to think about the following questions as they track the evolution of civilization and writing in ancient Mesopotamia:. How is it used?
What does it look like in its natural state? You may wish to sketch barley on the board, or show a photograph of barley, such as this photograph. Barley was a very important crop in ancient Mesopotamia. The first Mesopotamian written representation of barley was a picture. Ask students to think about and discuss the following questions:. Next, navigate with the class, or have students navigate on their own, through The Story of Writing website.
Each page contains information on the history and development of the cuneiform character for the word "barley" over time. Students should complete the quiz Treasure Hunt: Bowling for Barley. Have students answer the following questions in class discussion. For larger classes you may wish to divide the class into small groups and have each group work on answering one of the following questions, which they should share with the rest of the class. In this activity students will be challenged to make hypotheses about civilization in ancient Mesopotamia.
It will be helpful for students to return to the timelines they created in the second activity as a reference point while completing this exercise. To help them understand the task they will be completing in this activity, begin by asking students to look at one contemporary object on which writing is found, such as a penny. They should imagine they are from the distant future. They know the English language, but they know little else about America in the 21st century.
What hypotheses can they make from a penny? The members of this unknown civilization. Cuneiform writing was understood before we knew much about civilization in Ancient Mesopotamia. How did that happen? In what is now Iran, there is an inscription carved high on a rock face with the same message in three different languages. One is in Persian the language that is still used in Iran today and another is Assyrian cuneiform from Mesopotamia.
In , an Englishman—Sir Henry Rawlinson—copied the inscriptions from that rock. Once he had translated the Persian, he was able to use the Persian as a key to decipher the cuneiform.
As a result, people were able, for the first time, to read the writing on clay tablets found in the vicinity of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Ask students to think about the previous lesson in which they learned about how the use of writing might have evolved in Mesopotamia.
The first writing recorded agricultural transactions. What kinds of thoughts, ideas, actions, or things were easiest to put into pictures? What kinds of things did they believe were the most necessary to keep a record of?
After thinking about both of these questions ask students to try to imagine why it is that agricultural transactions—the buying and selling of grains or livestock- were among the first written messages on earth.
Next, students should think about what kind of an effect this type of record keeping might have on the rest of society. If there is a record of who bought what kind of grain, how much they bought, and from whom, what else becomes possible? For example, authorities expecting to take a portion of the revenue from taxes might be interested in having a record of the financial transactions which took place.
Now instead of trying to guess how much they should tax someone they had a record of how much the transaction was worth. Having a written record of those transactions would make the collection of taxes both more exact and more efficient.
You may wish to begin by working through the model below. For beginning students you may wish to design an additional model in order to make the process explicit to your students. Next, divide the class into small groups of two or three and assign each group of students an artifact from ancient Mesopotamia from the list below. Then, each group will present its hypotheses about what the object can tell us today about life in ancient Mesopotamia.
He notes that the Sumerians were the first to cross kin lines and form larger working organizations for making textiles—the predecessors of modern manufacturing companies. An archaeological site in Mari, Syria modern Tell Hariri that was an ancient Sumerian city on the western bank of Euphrates river. To make up for a shortage of stones and timber for building houses and temples, the Sumerians created molds for making bricks out of clay, according to Kramer. Their buildings might not have been as durable as stone ones, but they were able to build more of them, and create larger cities.
The lion-headed eagle made of copper, gold, and lapis lazuli by Sumerian civilization. The Sumerians were some of the earliest people to use copper to make useful items, ranging from spearheads to chisels and razors, according to the Copper Development Association.
According to Kramer, Sumerian metallurgists used furnaces heated by reeds and controlled the temperature with a bellows that could be worked with their hands or feet. Primitive people counted using simple methods, such as putting notches on bones, but it was the Sumerians who developed a formal numbering system based on units of 60, according to Robert E.
At first, they used reeds to keep track of the units, but eventually, with the development of cuneiform, they used vertical marks on the clay tablets. Their system helped lay the groundwork for the mathematical calculations of civilizations that followed. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History.
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