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Comment by Wojtkie | Hacker News Reader

What I love about the Ea-Nasir story is the tablet was found in a pile of other tablets, suggesting that Ea-Nasir saved them. Why? Who knows, maybe he found them funny.

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I heard somewhere it was common practice to reuse tablets. It was easier to scrape the surface clean than to make a new tablet.

You'd save any tablets you have, and might wait until you need it to scrape it clean.

In Mesopotamia there was a period where it was fashionable to use a more rare softer red clay on top of the white clay. Your stylus would cut through the top layer leaving nice white letters on a red background. It made it easier to scrape clean and reuse, but much less durable over time.

Yes, the clay tablets were used over and over. The ones that are preserved have what was written on them when they were fired, accidentally, by being in a building that was destroyed by fire.

Yeah, and a large number of clay tablets found were training tablets. At any given time, there may have been more students working on properly learning the mechanics of writing on tablets then tablets in circulation so a surprising number of what is found is, basically homework, or apprentice practice.

That's fascinating to this lay clay tablet thinker. It had never occurred to me that clay tablets were reused. In fact, it nearly fundamentally changes my estimation of them as a long-term durable storage medium.

Hardening clay is relatively simple (just as any other pottery) but optional - you can choose to keep the clay unbaked if you want to reuse it (it would dry out but can be made wet again), but you can also make them permanent.

> You'd save any tablets you have, and might wait until you need it to scrape it clean.

The 3.5” floppies of yore.

The first meme dump.

Well done.

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