Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet secrets revealed - records probably more accurate than the Iraqi Occupation Forces

This beautiful palm sized dried clay tablet comes from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Umma (Jokha in modern Iraq) and can be dated by year, at the very end of the third millennium, was written in month six of the third year of the reign of Su-Sin, 2035 BCE. It records the harvest of ripe dates in two gardeners' date palm orchards (and also shows some dodgy maths - they used a sexagesimal system - based on 60) . It was a gift to Brown University from Henry Thatcher Fowler, Professor of Biblical Literature at Brown University from 1901 to 1934.

Virginia Rimmer an archaeology major and Nicholas Kammer an economics major both at Brown and working with Professor Alice Slotsky's class, HM0232 (Ancient Scientific Writing: Akkadian) translated this , and another tablet.

Read the whole fascinating story here - Whilst the US Government is destroying 21st century civilisation, 2 very bright students are helping to provide insights into what we call the cradle of Civilisation.

Pic © 2002, Brown University Library. All rights reserved

Former Coalition Provisional Authority official John Russell, writing in 2005 in Architectural Record, estimated that some 400,000 to 600,000 cultural artifacts have been removed from the 11,000 registered archaeological sites in Iraq since spring 2003. More

More here about Cuneiform tablets at Black Hills University , Dakota collected by Edgar J. Banks was born May 23, 1866, in Sunderland, Massachusetts who was American consul in Bagdad, Turkey, (!) in 1897. Banks seems to have been an active collector / dealer.