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Archaeology
|January/February 2025
The British Museum houses around 130,000 clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia written in cuneiform script between 3200 B.C. and the first century A.D.

Since so few scholars can read the languages on the tablets-which include Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite-the overwhelming majority remain untranslated. Four newly deciphered tablets written in Old Babylonian, a form of Akkadian, have been found to contain the earliest known mention of omens related to lunar eclipses. These tablets, which likely come from Sippar, a Babylonian city in modern Iraq, were acquired by the museum more than a century ago and date to between 1900 and 1600 B.C.
This story is from the January/February 2025 edition of Archaeology.
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