What are clay tablets?

Clay tablets are puzzles made from dirt that ancient people used to write on.

Imagine you have a big block of soft mud, like the kind you press your hands into when you’re playing in the park. Ancient scribes would take this mud, flatten it out, and then use a sharp stick or special tool to carve letters or pictures into it. Once they were done writing, they would bake the tablet in the sun or near a fire, kind of like how you might bake cookies, so the writing stayed on the tablet forever.

Clay tablets are like real-life sticky notes, but much harder and more permanent. People used them to keep track of things like money, stories, or even recipes! Sometimes they would write on both sides, just like how you use both pages of a notebook.

These tablets were super strong, some have lasted for thousands of years! You can still see the writing today, just like how you might see your own scribbles on a piece of paper from last year.