“We often think about skill in terms of a great painting by Michelangelo. But we don’t think about the skill it takes to create the everyday.”
By MUSKAAN VASANDANI
“About 3000 years before Jesus of Nazareth was born, the Sumerians formed their own system of characters and put them down in a defined pattern on soft clay, letting it set to perfection. These clay tablets are now referred to as cuneiform tablets, after the Sumerian system of writing.”
“In Rare Books and Special Collections at the University, there is a set of three of these artifacts, dating back to around 2000 B.C.E. The first — from the reign of Litpi Istar — is a cone-shaped tablet, an inscription that was set into a wall. It is a written ode to Istar’s accomplishments. The other two tablets are possibly records of grocery stores and other everyday things, or perhaps just notes that people wrote to each other. Interestingly, on one of these tablets, the scribe’s fingerprints remain.”
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