“Unearthed 5,000-Year-Old Beer Receipt Reveals Secrets of Ancient Sumer and the World’s First Signature!”
He continued, “Our names are important to us, they are a fundamental part of our identity and probably the first thing any child learns about itself.”
The artifact was projected to fetch a sum of £90,000, or a little below $200,000. But bidders at the auction showed high enthusiasm for the tablet which possibly bears the earliest known personal name recorded in writing. In the end, the Sumerian tablet went to a private American collector for $230,000.
Other recording tablets have been found in Sumer, the earliest known civilization in the region of ancient Mesopotamia, depicting the population’s beer culture. One Sumerian tablet shows people drinking beer through a long straw.
British MuseumA different tablet from ancient Mesopotamia depicting possible rations for beer.
Beer was integral to the Sumerian way of life, possessing significance in religion and society, and even demonstrating currency value as experts believe the beverage was also used to pay workers. No doubt, these tablets are an incredibly valuable source of history.
But Sumerian tablets have become an increasingly hot commodity on the antiquities market as shown from the high bidding for this tablet. Many of these artifacts were likely illegally excavated and looted from Iraq amid the instability of the region’s wars.
As Craig Barker, a classical archaeologist and museum educator based in Sydney, Australia, wrote, “The looting is regarded as one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism in modern times, but much more of Iraq’s rich cultural history has been destroyed, damaged or stolen in the years since.”
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