Explore · The Tablet Room
Clay tablets, read again The ten latest clay tablets to be deciphered or newly read: what they say, who wrote
them, where they were found and how long they went unread. Each one links to its source.
0
years: the longest wait in this room
Touch an arc to see one tablet's wait.
How the room is filled: a tablet comes in when a new reading is published, from our own stories and from
papers and university announcements we link on each card. Dates of writing are the researchers' own.
3,400-year-old Hittite tablets from Turkey record a fever epidemic and a princess's death (Cuneiform, c. 1400 BC): Excavators at Kayalıpınar, ancient Šamuḫa, found 131 tablets and fragments from the reign of Tudhaliya II, including a generals' warning that the army could be destroyed.Clay fragment of Kadesh peace treaty's fugitive clauses found at Hittite capital in Turkey (Cuneiform, Late Bronze Age, c. 1259–1258 BC): The matchbox-sized piece comes from a Hittite copy of the 13th-century BC treaty between Hattusili III and Ramesses II, the oldest peace agreement surviving in writing.Two Linear B signs read as perfume ingredients on Mycenaean tablets from Pylos (Linear B, c. 1200 BC): Researchers read one sign as a plant root and argue that another, long taken to mean fruit, records a dry stalk such as cinnamon or fenugreek.Three lost Assyrian kings, each ruling under two years, identified in cuneiform texts (Cuneiform, 10th–8th century BC): Rereading old tablets, a Yale and Münster study argues that later rulers erased three brief reigns of the 10th and 8th centuries BC from Assyria's official king list.Chance find in Iraq gives Nebuchadnezzar II's own account of rebuilding Kish ziggurat (Cuneiform, 604–562 BC): Two baked clay cylinders handed in by local people in 2013 are the first foundation texts to record the king's restoration of the temple-tower of Zababa and Ishtar.A hymn to the city of Babylon (Cuneiform, c. 1000 BC): A poem of about 250 lines in praise of the city of Babylon, with rare detail on women, priestesses and their tasks. A computer search of the electronic Babylonian Library matched its scattered pieces.Lunar eclipse omens for the king (Cuneiform, 18th–17th century BC): Up to 61 omens that read the timing, duration and moving shadow of a lunar eclipse as signs for the king and the land. They are the oldest known collections of eclipse omens.A ritual in a lost language from Kalašma (Cuneiform, Hittite period, before c. 1200 BC): A Hittite ritual text quotes a recitation in the language of the land of Kalašma. The language is Indo-European, close to Luwian, and is still largely not understood.