A nearly 4,000-year-old Akkadian contract inscribed on a clay tablet has entered the collection of the Matenadaran, Armenia's national repository of ancient manuscripts, following a donation by Prince Dani Badawi, a representative of the Badawi royal dynasty. The Matenadaran announced the donation on June 11. The tablet, dating to 1750-1712 BC, was produced during the Old Babylonian period, an era when Akkadian served as the administrative and commercial language of Mesopotamia. Contracts of this kind, recording agreements in cuneiform script pressed into wet clay, are among the oldest surviving legal documents in human history. The artifact dates to the years immediately following the reign of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king whose...