Re: And the content has not improved since then.
Funny thing, they didn't routinely bake tablets. The Library of Nineveh was (partly) preserved by the fire that destroyed the palace, this was hot enough to bake them, allowing them to survive millenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Ashurbanipal. The same fire also ruined many of the reliefs, limestone and gypsum not coping well with heat, so swings and roundabouts. A sample of the tablets is in the British Museum's Ashurbanipal exhibition (though it finishes this week I think). What's astonishing about them (other than their age) is how dense the information is, cuneiform really let scribes pack things together, so many of the tablets are surprisingly small.
(That exhibition also made very clear to me the reality of those gaps in translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh. They've got an example of each of the twelve tablets, which are, again, surprisingly small, and in some there'll simply be two pieces with a large triangular third fragment missing.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
