The Kish tablet is a limestone tablet found at the site of the ancient

Sumer Sumer () is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia (south-central Iraq), emerging during the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages between the sixth and fifth millennium BC. It is one of the cradles of c ...

ian city of Kish in modern-day Tell al-Uhaymir, Babil Governorate, Iraq. A plaster-cast of the artifact is today in the collection of the

Ashmolean Museum The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University of ...

. The original is in the

Baghdad Museum The Iraq Museum ( ar, المتحف العراقي) is the national museum of Iraq, located in Baghdad. It is sometimes informally called the National Museum of Iraq, a recent phenomenon influenced by other nations' naming of their national museum ...

. It should not be confused with the

Scheil dynastic tablet The Scheil dynastic tablet is an ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform text containing a variant form of the ''Sumerian King List''. Discovery The tablet came into possession of the Assyriologist Jean-Vincent Scheil in 1911, having bought it from a pr ...

, which contains part of the

Sumerian king list The ''Sumerian King List'' (abbreviated ''SKL'') or ''Chronicle of the One Monarchy'' is an ancient literary composition written in Sumerian that was likely created and redacted to legitimize the claims to power of various city-states and king ...

and is also sometimes called the Kish tablet. The Kish tablet, which has not yet been deciphered, is inscribed with Proto-Cuneiform signs. It has been dated to the Uruk period (ca. 3500–3200 BC).Hayes, John L., 1990 ''A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts'', Undena Publications, p.266 Several thousand proto-cuneiform documents dating to Uruk IV and III periods (ca. 3350–3000 BC) have been found in Uruk. It is considered the world's oldest known written document. The writing is still purely pictographic, and represents a transitional stage between proto-writing and the emergence of the partly syllabic writing of the cuneiform script proper. The "proto-literate period" of Egypt and Mesopotamia is taken to span about 3500 to 2900 BC. The administrative texts of the Jemdet Nasr period (3100–2900 BC), found among other places at

Jemdet Nasr Jemdet Nasr ( ar, جمدة نصر) is a tell or settlement mound in Babil Governorate (Iraq) that is best known as the eponymous type site for the Jemdet Nasr period (3100–2900 BC), and was one of the oldest Sumerian cities. The site was first ...

and Tell Uqair represent a further stage in the development from Proto-Cuneiform to cuneiform, but can still not be identified with certainty as being written in

Sumerian Sumerian or Sumerians may refer to: *Sumer, an ancient civilization **Sumerian language **Sumerian art **Sumerian architecture **Sumerian literature **Cuneiform script, used in Sumerian writing *Sumerian Records, an American record label based in ...

, although it is likely.

See also

References

Further reading