Sumerian cuneiform is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. First appearing in the 4th millennium BC in what is now Iraq, it was dubbed cuneiform (‘wedge-shaped’) because of the distinctive wedge form of the letters, created by pressing a reed stylus into wet clay. Early Sumerian writings were essentially pictograms, which became simplified in the early and mid 3rd millennium BC to a series of strokes, along with a commensurate reduction in the number of discrete used (from c.1500 to 600). The script system had a very long life and was used by the Sumerians as well as numerous later groups – notably the Assyrians, Elamites, Akkadians and Hittites – for around three thousand years. Certain signs and phonetic standards live on in modern languages of Middle and Far East, but the writing system is essentially extinct. It was therefore cause for great excitement when the ‘code’ of ancient cuneiform was cracked by a group of English, French and German Assyriologists and philologists in the mid 19th century AD. This opened up a vital source of information about these ancient groups that could not have been obtained in any other way.

Cuneiform was used on monuments dedicated to heroic – and usually royal – individuals, but perhaps its most important function was that of record keeping. The palace-based society at Ur and other large urban centres was accompanied by a remarkably complex and multifaceted bureaucracy, which was run by professional administrators and a priestly class, all of whom were answerable to central control. Most of what we know about the way the culture was run and administered comes from the cuneiform tablets, which record the everyday running of the temple and palaces complexes in minute detail, as in the present case. The Barakat Gallery has secured the services of Professor Lambert (University of Birmingham), a renowned expert in the decipherment and translation of cuneiform, to examine and process the information on these tablets. The following is a transcription of his analysis of this tablet:

This is an administrative document dated to the 2nd year of king Ibbi-Sin, last king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, c. 1017 BC. It concerns aromatics: substances with the nice smell in their various uses (incense or perfume?). The tablet is beautifully written in a large clear band and is in perfect state of preservation. There are problems in translating: while some of the substances are well-known, others are only known as words, not their meanings, and some appear to occur only here. They are all given with their weights or capacity measures proving that even when not prefixed with the sign for ‘aromatic’ they are not e.g. the timber, as the first line ‘cedar’ might mean in other contexts. This is a rare type of tablet, and the background is extremely interesting, as will be explained later.

Translation:

3 talents, 52 1/3 minas of cedar.

10 minas of cypress.

5 minas of juniper.

46 minas 10 shekels of myrtle.

53 1/3 minas of …….

1 talent 39 ½ minas of spurge.

50 minas of …..

10 minas of ……

1 talent 59 ½ minas of sweet reed.

262 sila of …..

41 1/3 sila of ‘juniper grains’.

1 gur 120 sila of …..

190 sila of …..

235 sila of …..

61 sila of ‘juniper fronds’.

88 talents, 25 minas of gypsum.

Bakmum, the scribe, received from Turam-ili, supervisor of the merchant bankers.

Year: the highest priestess of Inanna of Uruk was chosen by divination.

The merchant bankers were individuals who financed trade, especially foreign trade. Most of the aromatics dealt with here were necessarily imports into Sumer, and the large quantities here in one document imply government purchase or other form of acquisition from these merchant bankers. It is always a question how far these people were private bankers, how far they were state controlled, so perhaps these substances were a kind of government tax imposed on the bankers. A mina was about 500 grams, a talent 60 minas, a shekel 1/60 of a mina. A sila was about .85 of a litre and a gur was of 300 sila.