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:

The obverse of this tablet is covered with salt incrustation coming from the Mesopotamian soil. The reverse is clean and legible. The tablet is a record of a court case, dated to the third year of Ibbi-Sin, last king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, c. 2026 BC. The reverse does not allow a full understanding of the case, but some sense can be obtained:

…] shepherds and herders. The foreman Lugl-itida declared that so long as they barely …………… Lugal-iti-da swore by the king that his barley ration existed.

Cylinder seal inscription:

Ibbi-Sin, mighty king. King of Ur, king of the four world regions.
Lugal-iti-da, scribe, son of Ur-Dumuzida, your servant.

Year: Ibbi-Sin, king of Ur, destroyed Simurun.

The whole of the surface of the tablet was rolled with the scribe’s cylinder seal so as to show the inscription, and in addition it was rolled on a blank part of surface just before the date at the end of the tablet. The purpose was to ensure that the document as written was authentic: only the holder of the seal could copy or alter the text. The case was apparently about some one’s barley ration: a kind of wage paid to serfs. The salt incrustation could be removed with expert treatment, and then no doubt the case would be fully clear.