Voices from Clay, Stone and Ink: Ancient Records Beyond the Great Law Codes

The Akkadian king Naram-Sin had this limestone stele carved around 2250 BC to mark his victory over the Lullubi. It arranges its figures on a rising diagonal instead of in horizontal registers and gives the king a horned helmet, a sign until then reserved for gods. An Elamite king carried it off, and it was found at Susa in 1898.

Written in abbreviated hieratic script on a scroll more than seven meters long, the Prisse Papyrus is sometimes called the oldest complete book to survive from antiquity. It preserves two works of wisdom literature, the Instructions of Kagemni and the Maxims of Ptahhotep, probably composed around 2000 BC.

Thutmose III had this list of earlier rulers set into a hall at Karnak. It originally named sixty-one kings from Sneferu onward, though only thirty-nine names are legible now, and it preserves rulers of the two Intermediate Periods that most other Egyptian lists omit. Emile Prisse d'Avennes had the blocks removed in 1843.

About fifteen hundred cuneiform tablets from Ugarit, written mostly in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC, recovered the Ugaritic language and its alphabetic cuneiform script. They hold epic poems such as the Baal Cycle, ritual texts, letters and administrative records, and the earliest known abecedaries.

Three Aramaic basalt steles of the eighth century BC found near Aleppo record a treaty sworn by Levantine rulers on behalf of the kingdom of Arpad. They are considered the best surviving source outside the Hebrew Bible for sealing a treaty with formal blessings and curses.

Written in carbon ink on pottery fragments around 590 BC, these Hebrew ostraca were found at Tel Lachish by James Leslie Starkey in 1935. They record exchanges between a subordinate named Hoshaiah and a superior named Yaush as the Babylonian army approached, shortly before Lachish was destroyed.

These clay tablets, mostly in Elamite cuneiform, document more than fifty consecutive years from 509 to 457 BC under Darius I and Artaxerxes I. Historians treat the archive as the most important surviving primary source for the inner workings of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Several thousand documents from the Egyptian border garrisons of Elephantine and Aswan, written in Aramaic and several other scripts, include letters and contracts of a Jewish military community serving under Persian rule. One letter of 419 BC appears to instruct the garrison on observing the Festival of Unleavened Bread.

Acquired in Egypt in 1902, these four Hebrew fragments combine the Exodus and Deuteronomy versions of the Ten Commandments with the opening of the Shema. Later study dated the manuscript to about 150 to 100 BC, making it the oldest known Hebrew manuscript until the Dead Sea Scrolls came to light in 1947.

Found at a Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall from 1973, these postcard-sized wooden tablets in carbon ink mix military paperwork with private letters. They include a birthday party invitation from around the year 100, thought to be the oldest surviving Latin document written by a woman.