Counting years in Mesopotamia

The writing on the tablet is cuneiform, a writing system developed around 3300 BCE and in use until at least 100 CE. The cuneiform script was adapted to write about a dozen different languages in Antiquity and, while impractical, could even be used to write English, Dutch or any other language.

Mesopotamian civilization lasted for thousands of years in current day Turkey, Syria, western Iran, and Iraq. Many different peoples and cultures were part of Mesopotamia such as the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Persians and the Babylonians.

In Mesopotamia and over its more than 3000 years of history, there were three different ways to count the years. Firstly by using the name of an official who was in office for one specific year, eg. “Year of official so-and-so”, as was used by the Assyrians. Or secondly by counting the regnal years of the king, eg. “Year 13 of King so-and-so”, as was used by the Persians. Lastly by using a “year name”, meaning that an important event of the current or previous year was used to date the year, as was used for a while by the Babylonians. Using a year name is intuitively a very handy way to indicate the years. If we had year names in our age we could have examples such as “Year: the corona virus went over the world” (2020), “Year: the Second World War ended” (1945), or “Year: the French Revolution began” (1789). This object gives us the full version of a Babylonian year name.