A Sumerian tablet with proto-cuneiform pictograms

[Sumerian proto-cuneiform]. Pictographic proto-cuneiform clay tablet.

€ 8,000.00

A well-preserved Sumerian clay tablet from the Jemdet Nasr period (c. 3100-2900 BCE), containing an example of the pictographic system that would eventually evolve into cuneiform, the earliest form of writing. At this early stage, the pictographs were still clearly representations of objects rather than abstracted characters, giving the script a distinctive and elegant appearance compared to the cuneiform to which it would later give rise.

The dots on the left of the obverse represent numbers, in this case in a fourth-millennium numerical system specifically used for counting barley, with a total on the reverse next to pictogram apparently representing barley. The other pictograms on the obverse seem to relate to something other than the numbers. Prof. W. G. Lambert, Professor of Assyriology at the University of Birmingham and Fellow of the British Academy, who examined this tablet in the 1980s, described its contents as administrative and dated it to c. 3000 BCE.

The transition from pictograms to a syllabary was made possible by the characteristics of the Sumerian language, which contained a relatively high number of homonyms, so that, for example, the word for "reed" (gi) was identical to the word for "return". Thus the pictogram for a reed came also to mean "return", and from there to take on a syllabic value. As this process repeated itself and the signs became more abstracted, the proto-cuneiform pictograms evolved into cuneiform, the first syllabic writing system ever developed. This tablet represents Sumerian scribal practice on the threshold of this transformation, when the pictograms still bore a clear visual resemblance to the quantities they represented.

Jemdet Nasr artefacts first appeared on the market in the early 1900s and caused great excitement among scholars due to their preservation of the archaic proto-cuneiform script. The developments of Jemdet Nasr are shared by the preceding Uruk III and later Early Dynastic periods, but its material culture is still reckoned as distinctive enough to merit its own designation.

This tablet is listed in the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, and a transcription of the signs can be consulted on their website. It is documented as being in a London private collection since at least the 1980s, when it was examined by Prof. Lambert. Proto-cuneiform tablets are a relative rarity on the private market, particularly ones in such good condition, with only one auction listing on Rare Book Hub, from 2019.

A rare and beautiful example of a crucial moment in the history of script.