The First Books:
Our Own Treasure

Seen here is a clay tablet that was used in commercial trading about 4,000 years ago. It's market value in Sumerian times was as a receipt for the payment of one goat. This actual clay tablet can be viewed in Special Collections on the 3rd Floor of Main Library where it is preserved as a treasured item in the "The Charlotte M. Smith Collection of Miniature Books. " collection. As you can see it fits in the palm of your hand. The writing is cuneiform and was etched onto the wet clay with a stylus and then dried. Following are some detail scan shots this tablet .

Click on image above for a high resolution view.

Click on this life size image of the clay tablet and you can study the intricacies of cuneiform writing style scanned at a high resolution. These images were processed in the Libraries' Information Arcade. They were scanned in gray scale. The use of desaturate color scan seemed to make the worn edges of the stylus marks more visible in the centuries old clay substance.

CLAY TABLET SHOWING CUNEIFORM WRITING Initially, writing in Mesopotamia was pictographic: a symbol stood for a specific word, such as sheep or sun. Later, writing became syllabic: a multi syllabic word, such as sheepskin, would be represented by combining the symbols for sheep and skin, rather than by developing an entirely new symbol. Eventually, writing became alphabetic: symbols stood for vowels and consonants, thus greatly reducing the number of symbols needed for complex written communication. Clay was the most abundant material available in Mesopotamia to be used as a writing material. The cuneiform script, done with a wedge-shaped stylus, developed from earlier pictographic writing since it was faster, and more exact, to incise a series of wedges and lines than it was to draw curvilinear shapes in the wet clay.

PRESERVATION OF CLAY TABLETS Clay is a more permanent material than leather or papyrus, and thus thousands of tablets have been unearthed. Researchers have used known scripts to decipher earlier, unknown scripts. The Rosetta stone, with inscriptions in hieroglyphic, Egyptian demotic, and Greek, is the most famous example of this process.