Gaby
A 3,500-year-old cuneiform document from the 15th century BCE records the purchase of a large quantity of wooden furniture.
Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Ersoy, announced that the relic was discovered in the southern province of Hatay. The artifact was first uncovered by workers who were cleaning up after an earthquake.
Cuneiform, the world’s oldest known writing system, developed about 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia and was used there for roughly three millennia. The Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians each adapted it for their own languages, IFLScience reports.
Ersoy said the recently discovered receipt is likely written in Akkadian, which served as the international language of the world’s earliest empire. The Akkadian Empire existed from the 24th to the 22nd centuries BCE in central Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq.
Soon, artificial intelligence will decode cuneiform tablets
Linguists are currently working on deciphering the text. The first few lines record the sale of large numbers of chairs, tables, and stools and include the names of the buyers and sellers.
This isn’t the first Akkadian trade document archaeologists have found. In 2018, researchers discovered a similar clay tablet containing a buyer’s complaint about the quality of copper he had purchased.
Deciphering these tablets is difficult, but that could change as artificial intelligence systems are developed to translate Akkadian and other ancient languages with around 97 percent accuracy.
