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 signs 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 the 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 court control. Most of what we know about the way the culture was run and administered comes from cuneiform tablets, which record the everyday running of the temple and palace 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 text is an administrative document from the period of the Third Dynasty of Ur, dated to the 9th year of Shu-Sin, fourth king of the dynasty, c. 2029 B.C. A record of some materials used for the manufacture of shovels:

Translation:

24 shovels. 1 mina of goats’ hair thread, their pitch: 70 sila. 2/3 of a mina of goats’ hair thread: shovels. Basmum received from Ku-elak. Seal inscription: Lugal-imru’a scribe son of Lu-Ababa. Month: Shuniggal. Year: Shu-Sin, king of Ur, built the temple of Shara in Umma.

A mina was a weight: about 500 grams. A sila was a measure of capacity, about .85 of a litre. This document seems to give us information about the shovels of the Sumerians. Wood was not readily available in Sumer: only the palm tree grew in Sumer, and that did not provide useful wood. Thus wood for handles of tools had to be imported, while the blades would have been of bronze. They were (it seems) attached to the handles by being tied on with goats’ hair thread which was consolidated with pitch poured over it. The persons named were workers on state or temple estates, the one (Ku-elak) apparently a store keeper, the recipient, Basmum, no doubt the worker who made the shovels from wood, bronze and the pitch and thread from the one store-keeper named. Evidently another store-keeper had the wood and the bronze.’