Record of food supplies

Probably from southern Iraq
Late Prehistoric period, about 3000 BC

An early administrative text

During the Late Prehistoric period administrators developed new ways of recording information. Representations of objects issued as rations, or stored for future use, were drawn on pieces of clay as memory aids. These pictographs, made by drawing a sharp stick or reed across the clay, gradually became more abstract. Increasingly, the end of the reed was simply pressed at an angle a number of times into the clay to form the design. The signs were thus made up of wedge-like lines, or cuneiform (the Latin for wedge is cuneus).

This clay tablet records the allocation of rations. The sign drawn in the top left corner represents a human head with a triangular object in front. The triangular shape, that looks like a bowl being brought up to the mouth, is the regular symbol for bread. This combination of pictographs expressed the idea of eating, and was later used to write the Sumerian verb ku, 'to eat'. The three types of impressions around the pictographs represent numbers.

C.B.F. Walker, Cuneiform (Reading the Past) (London, The British Museum Press, 1987)

H.J. Nissen, P. Damerow and R.K. Englund, Archaic bookkeeping (Chicago University Press, 1993)