Abstract
Understanding the materialities and technologies of clay cuneiform tablets is a relatively new branch in archaeological sciences. Scholars still dispute the precise location of several cities and kingdoms that appear in the texts. A century of textual and archaeological research has clarified some of these problems, but many issues still remain unsolved. From the 1970s on, new methodologies were introduced, which approach the problem of locating the provenance of the tablets through mineralogical and chemical analyses of their clay. With the use of ceramic petrography, XRD, ICP-MS, NAA, and TGA, the origin and technology of clay tablets have been suggested. New methodologies adopt nondestructive methods such as pXRF, ESEM-EDS, Raman and surface FTIR.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences |
| Subtitle of host publication | Volumes 4 |
| Publisher | wiley |
| Pages | 1-2 |
| Number of pages | 2 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781119188230 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780470674611 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Jan 2018 |
Keywords
- ceramics
- clay characterization
- clay tablets
- NAA
- petrography
- provenance studies
- pXRF
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Social Sciences
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