About Cuneiform
The world's oldest writing system, born in ancient Mesopotamia over 5,000 years ago.
What is Cuneiform?
Cuneiform (from Latin cuneus, "wedge") is a writing system that uses wedge-shaped marks pressed into soft clay tablets. It was developed by the Sumerians of southern Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE and remained in use for over 3,000 years.
Originally pictographic (pictures representing objects), cuneiform evolved into a logo-syllabic system where signs could represent whole words OR syllable sounds. This made it flexible enough to write multiple unrelated languages.
A trained scribe would use a reed stylus to press wedge-shaped impressions into wet clay. The basic wedges (horizontal, vertical, and diagonal) combined to form hundreds of distinct signs.
Sources: Britannica, World History Encyclopedia
The Building Blocks: Four Wedge Types
Every cuneiform sign is composed of these four basic wedge types in different combinations.
Source: British Museum
Timeline
Sources: Wikipedia, Decipherment of Cuneiform, Library of Congress
How Was It Deciphered?
For centuries after cuneiform fell out of use, no one could read it. The breakthrough came from the Behistun Inscription, a massive rock carving in Iran commissioned by Persian King Darius I around 500 BCE.
Like the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian hieroglyphs, Behistun contained the same text in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. In 1802, German schoolteacher Georg Grotefend made the first breakthrough by identifying royal names in the Old Persian version.
British officer Henry Rawlinson scaled the dangerous cliff face in the 1830s-40s to copy the full inscription. By 1857, four scholars working independently could all translate the same Akkadian text, proving cuneiform had been cracked.
Fascinating Facts
Over 3,000 years of use
Cuneiform was used for more than three millennia, making it the longest-used writing system in human history.
Multiple languages
The script was adapted to write Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, and Old Persian.
Half a million tablets survive
Approximately 500,000 cuneiform tablets have been excavated, with many still untranslated.
First literature
The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in cuneiform, is the oldest surviving work of literature.
First schools
Sumerian "tablet houses" (edubba) were the world's first schools, training scribes for years.
Clay preserved everything
Clay tablets survived fires (which hardened them) and millennia underground, preserving records that paper never could.
Sources: CDLI, Britannica, World History Encyclopedia
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