The Sumerian Tablet Listing 5 Species That Existed Before Humans — And How Each One Ended

In 1893, a team from the University of Pennsylvania pulled a clay tablet slightly larger than a man's hand from the excavation trenches at Nippur. It was cataloged as CBS 10673, packed into a crate with several hundred other fragments, and shipped to Philadelphia, where it sat in the basement of the Penn Museum for over sixty years, classified as a cosmogonic fragment, Old Babylonian copy, partial text. The first partial translation was attempted in 1956 by Samuel Noah Kramer, the same Kramer who spent decades assembling Sumerian myths from shattered pieces scattered across twenty museums worldwide. He translated the upper third, assigned it to the category of creation narratives, and moved on to better-preserved material that he considered more urgent. The lower two-thirds of CBS 10673, covered in dense cuneiform script arranged in two tight columns with unusually small sign spacing, remained untranslated until 2004. No one prioritized it. No one had reason to.