Ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets with cuneiform writing, dating back over 4,000 years, will on display in the Firestone Library’s Eighteenth-Century Window from October 2 to 8. Cuneiform writing was a method of incising script into wet clay with a wedge-shaped writing implement. For nearly 3,000 years, the scribes of Mesopotamia mastered the vertical, horizontal, and oblique strokes necessary to write words and numbers in Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and other languages of the ancient Near East. The Manuscripts Division has a substantial cuneiform collection of approximately 1,350 baked and unbaked clay tablets and tablet cases, as well as some clay cylinders and nail-shaped cones. Continue
No. 665. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the Princeton University Library.
