The E-Sylum:  Volume 5, Number 21, May 19, 2002, Article 9

NEW WEB SITE FOR PROTO MONEY RESEARCH.

  Dick Johnson writes: "What did early man use for money
  before coins were invented?  A new web site announced
  this week may reveal answers in the earliest written
  documents, cuneiform tablets. A California professor of
  Near Eastern languages and culture is building a library of
  cuneiform images and placing these on the internet for
  researchers to study.

  Cuneiform clay tablets were created by scribes in ancient
  Mesopotamia recorded in the first written language,
  Sumerian, four to five thousand years ago. While it was
  still moist they poked the clay to make wedge-shaped
  indentations, then baked it.

  Today it is estimated about 120,000 of these clay tablets
  have been preserved, housed in museums on three
  continents.  The clay can easily crumble, so handling must
  be a minimum.  Their scattered locations and fragile condition
  are why Robert Englund at the University of California,
   Angeles, created a file of their digital images, gathering
  these from seven museums around the world.

  "They are so incredibly dispersed," he said, announcing
  that he had recorded about half the total population,
  about 60,000 and placed their images on the internet.
  He established the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
  and received one of the largest grants of the National
  Science Foundation, $650,000, for this purpose.

  Text of the cuneiform tablets record ledgers, deeds,
  recipes, inventories, much of the mundane life of the
  period. A web-based dictionary of Sumerian, complied
  by Steve Tinney of the University of Pennsylvania, aids
  the study.

  "Historians hope the library will prove a boon for
  economic historians," said Tinney. This may answer the
  first money question.

  Several science news services carried the announcement
  this week.  One of the best was by Associated Press
  science writer Andrew Bridges at
  http.//digitalmass.boston.com/news/2002/05/17/web_library.html,
  with additional data from:
  http://www.today.ucla.edu/html/001023internet.html

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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