Қыш тақталар: Ежелгі жазу құралы

Writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform

In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian [[:wikt:𒁾) 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 either deliberately fired in hot kilns, or inadvertently fired when buildings were burnt down by accident or during conflict, making them hard and durable. Collections of these clay documents made up the first archives. They were at the root of the first libraries. Tens of thousands of written tablets, including many fragments, have been found in the Middle East. Surviving tablet based documents from the Minoan/Mycenaean civilizations, are mainly those which were used for 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, 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, remain tablets of unfired clay and are therefore extremely fragile. For this reason, some institutions are investigating the possibility of firing them now to aid in their preservation.

Writing was not as we see it today. In Mesopotamia, writing began as simple counting marks, sometimes alongside a non arbitrary sign, in the form of a simple image, pressed into clay tokens or less commonly cut into wood, stone or pots. In that way, the exact number of goods involved in a transaction could be recorded. This convention began when people developed agriculture and settled into permanent communities that were centered on increasingly large and organized trading marketplaces. These marketplaces were purposed for the trade of sheep, grain, and bread loaves, where transactions were recorded with clay tokens. These, initially very small clay tokens, were continually used all the way from the pre historic Mesopotamia period, 9000 BCE, to the start of the historic period around 3000 BCE, when the use of writing for recording was widely adopted. the clay tablets themselves came in a variety of colors such as bone white, chocolate, and charcoal. Pictographs then began to appear on clay tablets around 4000 BCE, and after the later development of Sumerian cuneiform writing, a more sophisticated partial syllabic script evolved that by around 2500 BCE was capable of recording the vernacular, the everyday speech of the common people.]] Text on clay tablets took the forms of myths, fables, essays, hymns, proverbs, epic poetry, business records, laws, plants, and animals.

Fragments of tablets containing the Epic of Gilgamesh dating to 1800–1600 BCE have been discovered. A full version has been found on tablets dated to the 1st millennium BCE. Tablets on Babylonian astronomical records (such as Enuma Anu Enlil and MUL. APIN) date back to around 1800 BCE. Tablets discussing astronomical records continue through around 75 CE. Late Babylonian tablets at the British Museum refer to appearances of Halley's Comet in 164 BCE and 87 BCE.