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In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian ''ṭuppu(m)'' ) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed (reed pen). Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air, remaining fragile. Later, these unfired clay tablets could be soaked in water and recycled into new clean tablets. Other tablets, once written, were fired in kilns (or inadvertently, when buildings were burnt down by accident or during conflict) making them hard and durable. Collections of these clay documents made up the very first archives. They were at the root of first libraries. Tens of thousands of written tablets, including many fragments, have been found in the Middle East.〔The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative gives an estimate of for the total number of tablets (or fragments) that have been found.〕 In the Minoan/Mycenaean civilizations, writing has not been observed for any use other than accounting. Tablets serving as labels, with the impression of the side of a wicker basket on the back, and tablets showing yearly summaries, suggest a sophisticated accounting system. In this cultural region the tablets were never fired deliberately, as the clay was recycled on an annual basis. However, some of the tablets were "fired" as a result of uncontrolled fires in the buildings where they were stored. The rest are still tablets of unfired clay, and extremely fragile; some modern scholars are investigating the possibility of firing them ''now'', as an aid to preservation. == Scribes == Writing was not as we see it today. In Mesopotamia it started out as simple counting marks, along side which sometimes a non-arbitrary well understood sign, in the form of a simple picture image, that was cut into wood, stone, pots but more often pressed onto clay tokens. In that way, recorded accounts of amounts of goods involved in a transaction could be made. This convention began when people developed agriculture and settled into permanent communities that were centred on increasingly large and organised trading marketplaces〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Early Writing )〕 These marketplaces traded sheep, grain, and bread loaves, each and every one of these items was recorded by clay tokens. These initially very small clay tokens were continually used all the way from the pre-historic Mesopotamia period, 9000 BC, to the start of the historic period around 3000 BC, when the use of writing for recording was widely adopted.〔 The clay tablet was thus being used by scribes to take down the events of what was happening during his time. Tools that these scribes used were styluses with sharp triangular tips, making it easy to leave markings on the clay, the clay tablets themselves came in a variety of colors such as bone white, chocolate and charcoal.〔(Cuneiform, Sumerian tablets and the world's oldest writing (factanddetails.com) )〕 Pictographs then began to appear on clay tablets around 4000 BC, and after the later development of Sumerian cuneiform writing, a more sophisticated partial syllabic script evolved that by around 2500 BC was capable of recording the vernacular, the everyday speech of the common people.〔 Sumerians used what is referred to as “pictograms”.〔 Pictograms are symbols that express a pictorial concept, a logogram, as the meaning of the word. Early writing also began in Ancient Egypt using what are called “hieroglyphs”; early hieroglyphs and some of the modern Chinese characters are other examples of pictographs. The Sumerians later shifted their writing to Cuneiform, defined as “Wedge writing” in Latin, which added phonetic symbols, syllabograms.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Clay tablet」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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