| Kish tablet | |
| Map: | Tableta con trillo.png |
| Mapcaption: | Limestone tablet from Kish (Sumer) with pictographic writing, Ashmolean Museum |
| Region: | Iraq |
| Period: | Uruk period |
| Followedby: | Narmer Palette |
The Kish tablet is a limestone tablet found at the site of the ancient Sumerian city of Kish in modern Tell al-Uhaymir, Babylon Governorate, Iraq. A plaster cast of the tablet is in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, while the original is housed at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.[1] It should not be confused with the Scheil dynastic tablet, which contains part of the Sumerian King List and is also sometimes called the Kish tablet.[2]
The proto-cuneiform signs on the Kish tablet are purely pictographic, and have not been deciphered or demonstrated to correspond to human language. It has been dated to the Uruk period .[3] Several thousand proto-cuneiform documents dating to Uruk IV and III periods have been found in Uruk. The marks represent a transitional stage between proto-writing and the emergence of the partly syllabic writing of proper cuneiform writing . The proto-literate period of Egypt and Mesopotamia is taken to span . The administrative texts of the Jemdet Nasr period (3100–2900 BC), found among other places at Jemdet Nasr and Tell Uqair represent a further stage in the development from proto-cuneiform to cuneiform, but can still not be identified with Sumerian with certainty.