Sumerian clay tablet 2089 BC

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Library YouTube channel. My name is Andrea and today we are going to take a look at a Sumerian clay tablet from 2089 BC. Now this is a very tiny tablet and we acquired it in 2006. We're going to take a very good look at it. When we got it we were fortunate enough because it was accompanied by this tiny little pamphlet explaining its content. In the early 1980s Dawson's Bookshop in Los Angeles offered a sale for a selection of tablets from a large collection, most of which were administrative tablets written in the Akkadian language and from the earth third period. This is how it's written, I'll just put it on the screen. Like I said this is incredibly small so I'm gonna have to zoom in. It's about three and a half centimeters both ways or 1.4 inches. I am using special gloves for this one. So what you see here is cuneiform or wedge-like script which would have been impressed line by line with the end of a broad-headed stylus consisting of a stick and that stick could have been made from reed or hard wood or even metal. There are two sides to this. So on the obverse which is this side, it says goat dead delivery for the Gula temple from Urtut. Gula also known as Ninkarak was the goddess of medicine and healing and she was the patroness of the healing arts and doctors. There would definitely be a temple dedicated to her and historical records show that her name started to become more mentioned during this Ur three period. So it kind of correlates to the dating of this tablet. And on the reverse which is this side, it says receded by Lukala month one year following of the high priestess of the great sanctuary of Inanna was elevated. Inanna was the goddess of sex, beauty, love, but also of war and justice and political power. She's kind of like the hybrid of Aphrodite and Athena in classical Greek mythology. What you saw on the screen was done prior to the purchase in 2006 at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Now the way we preserve this is by putting it in a box that was specially made for it. This little flap comes undone here. It's a perfect space to keep it sort of snug but it would also be on the shelf as a book. I really wish I had more to say on this little tablet because it's so amazing that we have this but unfortunately I'm not very well versed in ancient civilization so I'm really hoping that a student studying ancient Mesopotamia and cuneiform or any kind of writing or script will one day come in and take a closer look and actually do an in-depth study of just this one tablet. So as always that's my open invitation to you. Thank you all very much for watching and I hope to see you soon in our next YouTube video. Bye!