antiquities dealer had bought tablets that reportedly came from the site through looting. He sold them in lots to the French dealer Dumani Frères, the Louvre and the British Museum, while those resold to Dumani Frères were subsequently purchased by James Breasted for the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Another group of tablets was purchased in Kish in the 1930s and of these it was asserted that they came from Jemdet Nasr, although this is unlikely due to stylistic differences between these tablets and those excavated at Jemdet Nasr in 1926. During the first regular excavation season in 1926, between 150 and 180 tablets were found in Mound B; the error margin resulting from gaps in the administration kept by the excavators. Some of these tablets may actually have come from the 1928 excavations under Watelin. The tablets from the regular excavations are stored in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. The Jemdet Nasr tablets are written in proto-cuneiform script. Proto-cuneiform is thought to have arisen in the second half of the 4th millennium BC. While at first it was characterized by a small set of symbols that were predominantly pictographs, by the time of the Jemdet Nasr period, there was already a trend toward more abstract and simpler designs. It is also during this period that the script acquired its iconic wedge-shaped appearance. While the language in which these tablets were written cannot be identified with certainty, it is thought to have been Sumerian. Contemporary archives have been found at Uruk, Tell Uqair and Khafajah. The tablets from Jemdet Nasr are primarily administrative accounts; long lists of various objects, foodstuffs and animals that were probably distributed among the population from a centralized authority. Thus, these texts document, among other things, the cultivation, processing and redistribution of grain, the counting of herds of cattle, the distribution of secondary products like beer, fish, fruit and textiles, as well as various objects of undefinable nature. Six tablets deal with the calculation of agricultural field areas from surface measurements, which is the earliest attested occurrence of such calculations. See also Cities of the Ancient Near East Notes References Further reading External links Jemdet Nasr tablets at CDLI Populated places established in the 4th millennium BC Populated places disestablished in the 3rd millennium BC 1926 archaeological discoveries Archaeological sites in Iraq Archaeological type sites Babil Governorate Bronze Age