Cuneiform Tablet Recording Sailors’ Wages
Ur-dingir-ra
ca. 2150—2000 BCE, Ur, 3rd Dynasty (Neo-Sumerian), Sumeria (present-day Iraq)
Ceramic Stoneware
Roughly 4,100 years ago, Ur-dingir-ra, a Sumerian scribe, sat down to “balance his accounts.” Recorded in soft wet clay, this diminutive tablet was the result. First “notarized” by a seal impression, and then rotated 45º and impressed with a reed in cuneiform, it describes payment to a sailor for services rendered. Was this tablet created and then handed to the sailor? Or was it created by the scribe and set aside as a record of payments made? We will likely never know. As a “wage tablet,” we may do better to think of this object less as a receipt, and more of a Sumerian bureaucratic way of tracking expenses.
Bradford Davis
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