 |
| © Trustees of the British Museum |
To listen to the entire show, click here
On this clay contains some of the world's earliest writing called cuneiform which literally means "wedge-shaped." All the letters were written with a cut reed. It contains a record of daily beer rations for the workers.
Beer during this time period was not like today's beer, but in fact was more of a meal.
The tablet is found in modern day Iraq is from about the year 3,100 BCE to 3,000 BCE.
 |
| © Trustees of the British Museum |
When did writing develop?
The earliest examples of writing came from out of Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE. As time progressed, different forms of writing came out of Egypt, the Indus Valley, Central America and China. It is unknown whether this orginiated in Mesopotamia and spread or if each culture came up with their form of writing independently. In Mesopotamia, the cuneiform writing was mostly used for record keeping.
 |
| © Trustees of the British Museum |
Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the British Civil Service, wrote:
This tablet is amazing. For me it’s a first sign of writing but it also tells you about the growth of the early beginnings of a state. You’ve got a civil service here, starting to come into place in order to record what is going on. Here is very clearly the state paying some workers for some work that’s been done. They need to keep a track of the public finances, they need to know how much they have paid the workers and it needs to be fair.
What’s amazing for me is that this is a society where the economy is in its first stages, there is no currency, no money. So how do they get around that? Well, the symbols tell us that they have used beer - beer glorious beer, I think that is absolutely tremendous; there is no liquidity crisis here, they are coming up with a different way of getting around the problem of the absence of a currency and at the same time sorting out how to have a functioning state. As this society develops you can see that this will become more and more important and the ability to keep track, to write things down, which is a crucial element of the modern state – that we know how much money we are spending and we know what we are getting for it – that is starting to emerge.
This tablet for me is the very equivalent of the cabinet secretary’s notebook, it’s that important.
Irving, Finkel, Curator, British Museum, wrote:
A tablet with beer allocations – a good 5,000 years old – pinned up in a glass case like a butterfly for all to see. What can be interesting in that beyond the fact, obvious enough when you think about it, that hard-working individuals throughout history have always wanted their glass of beer?
Well, this most ancient document – like all its neighbours in the British Museum – deserves more than a quick glance.
It is written in cuneiform, the oldest known writing in the world, a non-alphabetic kind of writing that grew out of a simple system of pictographs into a flexible medium with which the Sumerian (unrelated to anything) and Babylonian (related to modern Hebrew and Arabic) languages could alike be recorded.
And all this began before 3,000 BC. From the outset the writing was done on clay, a most fortunate decision because tablets survive in the ground for millennia even when unbaked. A cascading waterfall of inscriptions has gradually become available, accounting for more than 3,000 years of history. Only a handful was originally intended to survive long-term; the remainder are more or less ephemeral documents that cover many aspects of life in Mesopotamia, state and private – from beer rations to heroic literature with every kind of document in between.
In the British Museum we have a treasure-store of such writings, about 130,000 of them. They represent a marvellous challenge. One hard-to-learn script, two hard-to-learn languages and the whole of ancient Mesopotamia is at your feet.
For more information, please see the website.
-VB
