A strange(r) thing
Fig 1 - LB 1200, a clay tablet dating to ca. 1875 BCE inscribed with cuneiform. The tablet is part of the De Liagre Böhl Collection of NINO.
Archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of thousands of clay tablets in the ancient Near East . These tablets are usually inscribed with cuneiform script, a script that was invented around 3400 BCE in Mesopotamia. It was used for over three millennia in a large area (Mesopotamia, Syria, the Levant and Anatolia) to record various languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite.
The tablet you see here, however, is an exception, as it does not contain cuneiform writing. You can see this, even if you do not know the script. The sign shapes are very different; the cuneiform script consists of wedge-shaped signs, which were made by pressing a sharp stylus into soft clay.