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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Nemo, post: 2983974, member: 58462&quot;]Very cool piece!&nbsp; Here&#039;s one I acquired a few years ago. 112mm x 100mm, 583 g</p><p><br /></p><p>This one is a student&#039;s exercise tablet that was part of his school work to teach him to read and write Sumerian around the year 1800BC, long after Sumerian had died out as a spoken language.</p><p><br /></p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; In particular, this exercise was to teach all the Sumerian vocabulary dealing with food items. When complete, the list probably had over 500 entries. As part of their training, students had to memorize long lexical lists containing everything from plants and animals to metal objects, textiles, types of professions, body parts etc. </p><p><br /></p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; These lists of vocabulary words were fairly standardized throughout Southern Babylonia at this time, so that you find many tablets containing the same entries, not always in the same order, but usually pretty close. Of course, some students were better than others, so some tablets contain more mistakes and some are written in messier script. This tablet seems to have been written by a fairly good student, although there are a number of deviants from the standard version of the food items list.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]734589[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The obverse is the side with 3 columns and wide rows. The obverse represents a new part of the word list that the student is learning. In this case, each column repeats the same section of the list, so the student had a chance to practice it over and over. Unfortunately, not much is preserved on the obverse - just several different types of barley including “white barley” and “black barley.”</p><p><br /></p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; The reverse contains a much larger section of the list that the student had already memorized, and is just practicing here. This side is divided into 4 columns, the first column is almost entirely broken. The second column contains a list of different types of beer including “beer mixed with water,” “market beer,” “beer that foams like soap”, and “sweet beer.” Column three contains types of soup, most of which are not known from other versions of this list and will take more work to decipher, and types of fragrant plants, most of which are plants that cannot be identified.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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