7 less-known facts about cuneiform tablets
7. Cuneiform tablets were not “carved”, and they did not take ages to make. They were made of clay, which was humidified so that wedges could be effortlessly pressed into the surface. The reason the tablets you see in museums are so hard is because they have had several millennia to dry. (Alternatively, they may have been baked in an oven - or when the building they were stored in caught fire - but this was not the case for the majority of tablets.)
6. Clay was not the only material tablets were made of. Scribes also used wax tablets with a wooden frame. These were easier to use outdoors or on a journey, since they don’t need to be re-moistened before writing, like clay does. In the Hittite empire, “scribes of the wax tablets” were distinguished from “scribes of the clay tablets” and may not have had the same duties, nor even the same scribal education.
5. Tablets were often reused. This was done by moistening the tablet and reshaping it into a new one, or more simply, rubbing the cuneiform off the surface. The cutest examples of reused tablets are those of school children: the teacher would write a text on the left side of the tablet, and the student would try to copy it on the right side. Because of all the rubbing and rewriting, the right side is often much thinner than the left one.
4. The last part of scribal education consisted in copying literature. This means that many of the literary texts we’ve found in Mesopotamia (including many copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh) were written not by professionals, but by ancient high schoolers.
3. Tablets were made in different shapes, which can help us know at first glance what type of text they contain. The majority of literary texts are large and rectangular, while letters and contracts are small and rectangular. Cuneiform cylinders usually record historical texts like annals, or the construction of a temple. Important buildings had commemorative inscriptions written on bricks. Small, round tablets were used for school practise, since they easily fit into a child’s palm.
2. If there was some extra space at the end of a letter, the scribe might use it to write a greeting to the scribe at the letter’s destination. A large number of letters from one ruler to another, full of official business, have final notes from scribe to scribe saying things like “I hope you’re well” and “your wife says hi”. In one tablet, a scribe asks his correspondent what his name is so they can be better friends.
1. Most cuneiform tablets haven’t been translated and published yet. This is because there are hundreds of thousands of them (with only a handful of people able to read them), and new ones are still being discovered. A large number of these tablets aren’t particularly interesting - business agreements, marriage contracts, and the ancient equivalent of shopping receipts - but who knows what fascinating texts some of them could contain?
