What Kind of Ancient Writing Actually Survived

I just finished reading a book, The Ancient Near East; a Very Short Introduction by Amada H. Podany. It discusses preserved writing from the period from 3600 BCE to 500 BCE. I was not aware of the huge volume of written material, many thousands of complete letters and documents, written during that period which were not rewritten or recopied by later scribes as is the case with the Bible.

That such writing was preserved intact is because of chance events in climate and human societies. While there is some writing in stone as we would expect, the huge volume was written in wet clay. The clay was not available everywhere humans lived so the fact the written word was developed where clay was available was fortunate. Further good fortune also was that the clay was not a building material that could be repurposed in later construction. Stones with engraving sometimes found their way into construction that used stone. After all of that, the dry climate of the near East was needed to keep the clay from falling apart. 

The clay tablets and "cones" were often simply discarded after their purpose was served. There were rooms in buildings, caves and shelters where the discarded clay tablets were found. Often they were broken but many was salvable and readable. Reading of them began in the mid 1800's.

Writing was developed during the 3,000 years covered. Most of the writing dealt with business transactions. There was buying and selling plus loans and repayment. The earliest writing was crude pictures and simple math. As the decades moved on, pictures were replaced with words and eventually the ability to express feelings and thoughts. 

Gods were big, even in the business contracts. The buyer and seller often had different gods. Each would pay appropriate respect for the other god. Business language was filled with "the will of god" type language. Someone tabulated the number of different gods mentioned and came up with about 2,000. No wonder the Ten Commandments warned not to put any of those other gods first. There was competition.

Israel and the Jews was mentioned only once in passing. The central focus of the lives of those involved with the clay tablets was their local life. The Jewish God and the lives of the Jews themselves had no importance. I suppose they were mostly unknown. It is we in the West who assigned earth shaking importance to the Jews and their particular god.