The Scheil dynastic tablet is an ancient Mesopotamian

cuneiform Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...

text containing a variant form of the ''

Sumerian King List The ''Sumerian King List'' (abbreviated ''SKL'') or ''Chronicle of the One Monarchy'' is an ancient Composition (language), literary composition written in Sumerian language, Sumerian that was likely created and redacted to legitimize the claims ...

''.

Discovery

The tablet came into possession of the Assyriologist

Jean-Vincent Scheil Father Jean-Vincent Scheil (born 10 June 1858, Kœnigsmacker – died 21 September 1940, Paris) was a French Dominican scholar and Assyriologist. He is credited as the discoverer of the Code of Hammurabi in Persia. In 1911 he came into possessio ...

in 1911, having bought it from a private collection in France. The tablet when purchased was reported to have been unearthed from

Susa Susa ( ) was an ancient city in the lower Zagros Mountains about east of the Tigris, between the Karkheh River, Karkheh and Dez River, Dez Rivers in Iran. One of the most important cities of the Ancient Near East, Susa served as the capital o ...

. Scheil translated the tablet in 1911. The tablet dates to the early 2nd millennium BC. He obtained another document, a rather damaged prism similar to the

Weld-Blundell Prism The Weld-Blundell Prism ("WB", dated 1800 BCE) is a clay, cuneiform inscribed vertical Prism (geometry), prism housed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The prism was found in a 1922 expedition in Larsa in modern-day Iraq by British archaeologist ...

, which he translated in 1934, and completed using information from the 1911 tablet and other known documents. The 1911 tablet is currently owned by the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

, but is not on display.

References

{{reflist Clay tablets