Tel Megiddo: Cuneiform tablets

The earliest writing preserved from Israel/Palestine are in the form of cuneiform on clay tablets like this one. The cuneiform script and the languages that were written in it (like Akkadian) were developed in Mesopotamia. This tablet fragment preserves part of the text of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian story that includes an account of the origin of the world, a worldwide flood, and a figure much like Noah from the biblical book of Genesis.