The most unexpected museum item in the Black Hills is an ancient receipt for a dead animal. We're talking really ancient, like 4,350 years old. It's found in an unlikely spot, on the Black Hills State University campus, on the first floor of the library, right next to the Einstein Bros. Bagel shop. The receipt is a tiny clay tablet created by a butcher in ancient Babylonia. It's one of eighteen such tablets that make up the university's collection, and the collection grew in significance a few years ago when similar artifacts were destroyed during violence in Iraq. Some of the human race's earliest forms of writing displayed next to a bagel shop? Don't knock it until you've nibbled on toasted sourdough or asiago while studying the old Cuneiform text.
