You know what is useful in any kind of research endeavor? In addition to the expected copious amounts of caffeine, a disregard for the fact that your life is finite, and the merciful existence of takeaway food services while working overtime, that is.¹ Tables! And this got me thinking: when did tabular accounts appear in ancient Mesopotamia? Or in other words: was there a cuneiform alternative for programs like Excel and Calc, that are so ubiquitous today? As with many questions we try to answer here at Bildungblocks – and one of the primary reasons that these blogs are often published irregularly – this matter turned out to be way more complicated then you would expect at first. But one could argue, if only for my own sanity, that such complications make a topic merely more intriguing than it already is.

The history of ancient Mesopotamia, an area which used to be comprised of present-day Iraq as well as parts of Türkiye and Syria, can appear overwhelmingly vast.² And many thousands of years, most of them before our common era, is indeed a lot of time. But some eras of this history are better known than others. On of the most celebrated of these eras is the Old-Babylonian period, which followed some two centuries after the end of the so-called Ur III or Neo-Sumerian period in 2003 BCE and lasted from the ascension of the famous king Ḫammurabi of – you guessed it! – Babylon in 1792 BCE and was quite violently ended when the Hittite king Muršili sacked that city in 1595 BCE.³ This admiration of modern scholars for the Old-Babylonian period has a few reasons. Most relevant to us is that new text genres, layouts, and styles were introduced to the art of writing.⁴ But for the kind of texts we discuss today, the tabular ones, there is still a scholarly discussion whether these were an invention of the Old Babylonian period or that we can identify older precursors.

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Theories on Tables

Whether ancient texts have remained available us is not only a matter of luck, but also of the importance that was allotted to them back then.⁵ The quintessential writing material of ancient Mesopotamia, clay tablets that were inscribed with cuneiform signs which could indicate entire words or just spell them, did prove durable under certain circumstances. But there were also writing materials, such as wood and wax, that were less likely to stand the test of time. And even the texts on clay tablets were regularly erased to use them for other purposes. Or the tablets could be considered of so little importance that they were not baked to make them more sturdy. Worse, they could be simply thrown away and be unrecognizably damaged. Lastly, many of the clay tablets that did come down to us today, were saved by accident – they were baked when the buildings they were kept in burned down and remained subsequently abandoned, for example.⁶ These circumstances, as you can imagine, do not really favor utilitarian texts like the tables that we are looking for today.

And this brings us to the conundrum of declaring tabular texts an invention of those living in the Old-Babylonian period. Because, as Niek Veldhuis remarks, the polities of previous eras with their impressively extensive bureaucracies would have greatly profited from the advantages this format brings with it. But instead, we almost always find linear accounting on the clay tablets from those earlier periods, which are both harder to draw up and offer a less immediate overview of the data.⁷ Of course, it is difficult to argue for the existence of certain accounting methods preceding the Old Babylonian-period from practicality or silence – even though we know we only have a fraction of the texts that were in circulation in the distant past at our disposal. Luckily, we don’t have to do the latter in this specific case. Because the aforementioned Ur III-period has yielded at least one very interesting clay tablet that can be categorized as a tabular text – odd though as it may be.

Tabular Texts before the Old Babylonian Period

This judgment call is made by Eleanor Robson in her magnificent and eminently informative monograph Mathematics in Ancient Iraq.⁸ She presents a tablet from Puruš-Dagan which has an unmistakable tabular format. Interestingly, the row labels are at the end of the row and the columns are labeled at the bottom. Robson postulates that this tabular text, which may be merely the only one that we can date with certainty to the Ur III-period, was a rough draft of one of the familiar linear accounts that would eventually be drawn up for posterity. We can imagine that these kinds of drafts could be reused and would almost never end up in a position to survive the ages. In addition, we can hypothesize that such rough work would normally be done on another material, wax tablets perhaps.⁹ If this is correct, the surviving linear accountants are put in a whole different light. When you have a tabular draft, it is far easier to draw up a linear account than it would be from scratch.

And there are even tabular texts predating the Ur III-period! Earlier in the third millennium before our common era, as again noted by Robson, we find a tablet from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Šuruppag that can be said to be a table. This text includes headings and calculations along a horizontal axis.¹⁰ Though one could argue that this clay tablet is more of a mathematical text than a tabular one. In the end, we are again confronted with the fact that it is often difficult to categorize ancient texts according to our contemporary genres, like strictly tabular and mathematical texts.¹¹

In addition to the idea of tables as mere rough drafts that were written down on fragile materials, there is perhaps another explanation for the relative explosion of tabular texts that has come down to us from the Old-Babylonian Period onwards. Writing in that era became more widespread and decentralized. Many everyday people – who did not work for a polity like the erstwhile empire of the Ur III-period – began to be able to come into the possession of functional literacy. That is to say, they knew enough cuneiform signs to write letters and pursue commerce. Including with practical means of accounting, like tabular texts. In addition, cursive writing became en vogue, which means that cuneiform signs became less detailed and more difficult to differentiate from each other. Something that is not a big deal if you are fluent in the language written… Sadly for us, the resulting clay tablets are harder to read for modern scholars!¹² But the tabular texts that have come down to us from the Old Babylonian-Period and later do offer us fascinating insights into the ancient world.

Terrific Tables

Tables are widely known to be useful, even though they may sometimes bore us to tears when we have to deal with them professionally.¹³ And the same was true for those in antiquity, though I could find no textual or material evidence about any boredom in this regard! Such tables can also provide us with information that is otherwise difficult to come by for those studying the ancient past. Tabular texts from the Middle Babylonian– or Kassite-period, which lasted from ca. 1500 until 1100 BCE, have assisted us in learning more about eye afflictions and other sight problems back then, for example.¹⁴ And those tabular text deserve – if you forgive me the pun – a closer look.

This example was not chosen at random. Not only is the topic of disability in antiquity one of my personal interests, I also had to study one of these very tablets when I was still a student. And despite losing most of my hopes and dreams since then, I have by and large managed to hold on to the knowledge acquired during my studies! Among other matters, I learned about the fascinating administrative practices that can be found during the Middle-Babylonian period.¹⁵ And the tabular texts that interest us today are prime specimens of these practices. Most of these clay tablets were found in the southern Mesopotamian city of Nippur and gave administrators back then – as well as us – a useful overview of groups of workers, including their personal circumstances.¹⁶

And these circumstances included possible sight problems. Throughout these texts fifty-three persons are noted as being blind in some way. There are several kinds of blindness, which were delineated from other illnesses, spread across a number of categories of people.¹⁷ All of which we can ascertain because they have their own column in these tables. Many of the eye problems still lack a satisfactory translation, sadly.¹⁸ But what we do know, thanks again to the categorization throughout our tabular texts, is that twenty-nine of them were women and twenty-four men. That all ages are represented, except for babies. The reason for including this specific detail is still obscure. Perhaps people with sight problems were exempted from work, though for four of them a profession is noted – three herdspeople and someone who, it appears, did something involving the distribution of water. It may be a comforting detail that, again according to our tabular texts, all fifty-three of these people afflicted with sight problems seem to have received the same rations in grain and oil as those with better sight.¹⁹ This small vista on the position of disabled persons in the deep past, thus presents us with a recognizable humanitarianism. Though having sight problems was still very much stigmatized in ancient Mesopotamia, as it was in so many other places and times.²⁰

Conclusion: Uncomplicated Cuneiform

In those blogs wherein we travel to ancient West-Asia, I often emphasize the difficulties that the cuneiform script, which was used in these parts throughout antiquity, presents us with. But truth be told, this difficulty is exacerbated for scholars from our time. As during their schooling they have to learn the many languages, signs, and sign meanings that are necessary to read cuneiform texts from the fourth millennium BCE until the beginning of our Common Era. If you wanted to be able to just take notes or communicate back then during a specific lifetime, you could often do with a relatively small number of signs and knowledge of your own language – the functional literacy we discussed above. Cuneiform as a system allowed thus for various levels of literacy. The diverse layers of complexity of this script were evidently appreciated, despite the lack of efficiency and simplicity, as evidenced by the longevity of the use of this script. All of this makes cuneiform as fit for mundane but practical and informative write-ups, like accounting through tables, as well as monumental texts on important objects or at ditto locations.²¹

Tables are a conspicuous part of everyday life and they did exist from very early in human history.²² Where it pertains to ancient Mesopotomia, we may never be able to pinpoint the exact beginnings, despite the stubborn efforts chronicled above. But when Monday comes around and you once again see the numbers scroll by on your screen, you can take solace in the fact that thousands of years ago, there were people who had to go through the very same agony as you!

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References

1. Andrea Kis et al, “Leaving Academia: PhD Attrition and Unhealthy Research Environments”, PloS One 2022, 17 (10), p. 5-7. Perhaps I should also have mentioned alcohol, see: David R. Smith, “Alcodemia: Are We Training our Students to be Great Thinkers or Great Drinkers?”, EMBO Reports 2021, 22 (8), p. 1-2.
2. Marc van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East: Ca. 3000 – 323 BC (Malden: Blackwell, 2024), p. 3.
3. Ibidem, p. 359-360.
4. Niek Veldhuis, “Levels of Literacy”, in: Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 71-72.
5. Karen Sonik & Dahlia Shehata, “Mesopotamian Literature: Issues, Theories, and Methods of Sumerian and Akkadian Narrative Analysis”, in: Dahlia Shehata & Karen Sonik (eds.), Contemporary Approaches to Mesopotamian Literature: How to Tell a Story (Leiden: Brill, 2024), p. 16.
6. Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 4-5; Mario Liverani, The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy, Translated by Soraia Tabatabai (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), p. 5.
7. Veldhuis, “Levels of Literacy”, p. 71-73.
8. Eleanor Robson, Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 158–163.
9. Veldhuis, “Levels of Literacy”, p. 72.
10. Robson, Mathematics in Ancient Iraq, p. 158. Robson also mentions other possible tables from before the Ur III-period.
11. Sonik & Shehata, “Mesopotamian Literature”, p. 19.
12. Veldhuis, “Levels of Literacy”, p. 72-73.
13. David Oldroyd & Alisdair Dobie, “Bookkeeping”, in: John Richard Edwards & Stephen Walker (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Accounting History (Abbingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. 95-119.
14. For the Middle Babylonian period, see: Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 360.
15. John A. Brinkman, “Administration and Society in Kassite Babylonia”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 2004, 124 (2), p. 284-285.
16. Eric J. Harvey, “The Blind and Their Work in Mesopotamia in the Third and Second Millennia BCE”, Osiris 2024 39 (2), p. 70-71; Jonathan S. Tenney, Life at the Bottom of Babylonian Society: Servile Laborers at Nippur in the 14th and 13th Centuries B.C. (Boston: Brill, 2011), p. 2-5.
17. Harvey, “The Blind and Their Work in Mesopotamia in the Third and Second Millennia BCE”, p. 71.
18. Tenney, Life at the Bottom of Babylonian Society, p. 60-61, note 66.
19. Harvey, “The Blind and Their Work in Mesopotamia in the Third and Second Millennia BCE”, p. 71; Tenney, Life at the Bottom of Babylonian Society, p. 60-62.
20. Harvey, “The Blind and Their Work in Mesopotamia in the Third and Second Millennia BCE”, p. 72-73.
21. Veldhuis, “Levels of Literacy”, p. 68-70, 86.
22. Salvador Carmona & Mahmoud Ezzamel, “Ancient Accounting”, in: John Richard Edwards & Stephen Walker (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Accounting History (Abbingdon: Routledge, 2020), p. 79-101.