clay tablets
Mesopotamian writing surfaces
Clay tablets are slabs of wet clay used as a writing surface in ancient Mesopotamia and other early civilizations.
Scribes pressed wedge-shaped marks into the soft clay with a stylus, creating cuneiform script, then dried or baked the tablets to preserve them.
Thousands survive today, recording everything from trade receipts to epic poetry: The clay tablets at Nineveh preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh.
- MesopotamiaTigris-Euphrates river region
- Fertile CrescentMideast arc where civilization began
- scribesProfessional document copiers
- SumeriansAncient southern Mesopotamian people
- logogramsSymbols representing words
cuneiform script · kiln-fired · impressed · syllabary · cuneiform · wedge-shaped marks · pictograms · epigraphy · stylus · Assyrians · Epic of Gilgamesh · flood story · Babylonians · baked · written records · writing · temple · Akkadian
- MesopotamiaBabylon, Sumer, Tigris, Mesopotamia, Euphrates
- Mesopotamian ruinsBabylon, Ur, Nineveh, ziggurats, cuneiform tablets
- ancient inscriptionscuneiform tablets, stone tablets, stele, cuneiform, inscription
- Mesopotamian textscuneiform, cuneiform tablets, Epic of Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, Code of Hammurabi
- ancient historyancient history, ancient world, classical antiquity, ancient empires, Mesopotamia
- artifactspottery shards, knives, masks, pottery, antiquity
clay tabletsdigital screens
Electronic visual output surfaces
electronic displays · touchscreens · e-ink · computer monitors · papyrus
clay tabletscloud storage
Online data preservation service
solid-state drives · flash memory · hard drives · databases · servers
clay tabletsdisappearing messages
Auto-deleting digital correspondence
volatile memory · RAM · Snapchat · skywriting · oral tradition