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How did early city dwellers get fed?

Feeding a city takes more than a successful harvest: grain has to reach people who did not grow it. A clay tablet dating to about 3100–2900 BCE, probably from Uruk, may record grain deliveries and distribution. It turns a broad question about early cities into a smaller puzzle about what an administrative record can reveal.

5–7 min

Questions you could explore

  • What would you need to reconstruct the journey from surrounding fields through storage to a city household?
  • Which parts of that journey could this tablet leave invisible?

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12–15 min

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8–10 min

When Britain’s railways needed a shared clock

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