GUEST: Well, it's a cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia, came through the family.

So, all I know is family lore on it.

A great-uncle was a British officer in Iraq around the late 1800s, early 1900s... APPRAISER: Oh, wow.

GUEST: ...and there was some insurrection that was going on, and family lore has it that he was stabbed to death, and then his stuff was sent back to England, and presumably this came with that.

APPRAISER: Ah, okay.

GUEST: I've lived and worked all over the Middle East, so I was quite aware of what it was.

I might know a little Arabic, but I don't know how to read cuneiform.

(chuckles) APPRAISER: Cuneiform is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, writing systems.

What they did was they took clay and they pressed it with reeds to create these pictographs, and the language was born.

And because of cuneiform, small villages were able to advance in complexity into urban city states.

Probably it's around 2100 BC, 2200 BC, so making it over 4,000 years old.

It's written on all sides.

It's completely intact.

Y-you sometimes have these referred to as biscuits, because of their shape.

I actually did email a photograph of it to a colleague of mine... GUEST: Yes?

APPRAISER: ...who's a scholar.

GUEST: Yeah?

APPRAISER: ...and I do have an exact translation of it.

GUEST: (laughs) APPRAISER: It's an Ur III administrative tablet, dating to year nine of King Amar-Suen of Ur in the third month, and it accounts for barley rations to be ground into the goats and taken to the granary by the officials in Igi-Shara.

The transaction was conducted through Lugina.

APPRAISER: Which would've been the center.

Yeah, so, it's... GUEST: (chuckles) APPRAISER: ...it was in a beautiful little protective box.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: And in the little box, I saw a card.

It helps us today, because that card had a date on it of 1916.

GUEST: And today was the first time I've seen that.

APPRAISER: It's a documentation that, that puts the collection history of this pre-UNESCO, which was where they protected all the cultural artifacts.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: And also with all of the recent... turmoil in the Middle East, you know, there's been looting.

So, provenance for these items, it's-- it gets tricky.

But this is absolutely 100% safe in the marketplace because the little card is dated to the early part of the 20th century.

And I believe that little card was written by an Assyriologist at Yale University, Albert Clay.

GUEST: Is that right?

APPRAISER: He was a very early language expert.

Because of the great provenance, if I were to insure it, I would say $3,000.

GUEST: Wow.

Wow, that's very interesting.

It's not for sale.

APPRAISER: And now it'll be in the world cuneiform database.