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Clay envelopes

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Hollow clay envelopes, sometimes enclosing tokens and bearing seals or numerical impressions; fourth-millennium administrative recording devices.

Sealed clay envelope and tokens in a museum display, Susa; Louvre SB 1932, ca. 3500–2900 BCE according to the museum record. A recording device, not a written linguistic sentence
Sealed clay envelope and tokens in a museum display, Susa; Louvre SB 1932, ca. 3500–2900 BCE according to the museum record. A recording device, not a written linguistic sentence© Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.5 · CC BYLicense · Image source

Text

Interior and surface

An envelope could preserve an account and make opening evident; some carry information outside too. Bulla is a broader term: this entry concerns hollow envelopes, not every clay sealing. Their existence does not establish the ancestry of every written tablet.[1]

References and notes

  1. Kathryn Kelley, Mattia Cartolano & Silvia Ferrara (2025; online 5 November 2024). Seals and signs: tracing the origins of writing in ancient South-west Asia. Antiquity 99(403), 64–82. doi:10.15184/aqy.2024.165. Introduction, Information technologies, Inter-related systems, and conclusion: recording and sealing precursors and proposed textile/vessel sign relationships. Table 1 not visually inspected; broad dates are approximate, with IV/III ranges independently checked in CDLI. Return to the text ↑

Research history

Substantive changes are retained here. Minor copy edits remain in the internal operational log.

  1. Edition 2 · 10 October 2026 · editor:aladmin

    Substantive record update

    Read this revision in its original language (Arabic)

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Cite this record

IL Archive, «Clay envelopes», Edition 2, https://ilarchive.com/en/entities/clay-envelope