Researchers Decipher Cuneiform Tablet—and Discover It’s a Furniture Receipt

Researchers have discovered that a clay tablet found in Turkey is actually a 3,500-year-old receipt, on which someone recorded a furniture sale. Written in cuneiform—an ancient Middle Eastern script—the record details a purchase of wooden tables, chairs and stools by an unknown buyer.

Excavators discovered the tablet during construction work in Reyhanlı, a southern Turkish city near the border with Syria, according to a translated statement by the country’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

As Mehmet Ersoy, minister of culture and tourism, says in the statement, the newly discovered tablet sheds light on the economic and state systems of Late Bronze Age Anatolia, the land between the Black and Mediterranean seas that’s now occupied by Turkey. Measuring just over an inch and a half long and weighing less than an ounce, the tablet dates back to the 15th century B.C.E.

The tablet’s list of furniture was written in the extinct language of Akkadian, one of the oldest known Semitic languages, reports Live Science’s Kristel Tjandra. It was spoken from the third millennium B.C.E. until the first century C.E., and scholars deciphered it in the 19th century. Akkadian was written in cuneiform, a system invented by the Sumerians that involves engraving pictograms and symbols into clay with a reed stylus. Akkadian’s specific script contained 600 signs; some of the signs stood for entire words, some for single syllables.

Cuneiform is the world’s oldest known form of writing. It was characterized by distinct, often wedge-shaped gouges cut into moist clay. Many surviving examples of the practice are—like the recently found tablet—administrative records of sale. Another slightly newer cuneiform tablet in the Met’s collection, dating to about 2039 B.C.E., documents the selling of some sheep, ewes and goats.

Researchers found the tablet in Reyhanlı’s Alalakh archaeological site, which was a flourishing city in the second millennium B.C.E.—the Bronze Age—as Newsweek’s Aristos Georgiou writes. Also known as Tell Atchana, Alalakh was the capital city of the Kingdom of Mukish and the region’s largest settlement, occupied by the Amorite people from western Mesopotamia, per Live Science.

As Ersoy writes in a translated post on X, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism is working meticulously to preserve Anatolia’s rich heritage for future generations.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.