Cuneiform

Cuneiform is the oldest system in this building, and the one that had to invent the idea itself. Every other script in the collection was made by someone who already knew that speech could be written down. The scribes of southern Mesopotamia did not.

It began as accountancy. For centuries before writing, Mesopotamian traders had sealed small clay tokens inside clay envelopes to record a debt — so many sheep, so many measures of grain — and impressed the envelope's surface with the shapes of the tokens inside. The impressions eventually made the tokens redundant, and around 3200 BCE at Uruk the marks were being drawn straight onto flat tablets. The earliest of them are pictures and numbers, and they record no language at all: a quantity, a commodity, an official. They are legible without being readable.

Writing was not invented to carry literature. It was invented to count sheep — and everything else followed from a system built for a warehouse.

What turned that accounting into writing was the rebus principle: using the sign for a thing to spell a sound. Once a sign could stand for a syllable rather than an object, the system could reach any word in the language — names, verbs, grammar, and eventually the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh. That step, taken here first, is the one every later script inherits.

The wedge is a tool mark. A scribe held a reed stylus cut to a triangular tip and pressed — did not drag — it into the surface of a damp clay tablet. Pressing leaves a clean wedge; dragging tears the clay and leaves a ragged furrow. So the curved pictograms of the earliest tablets were rebuilt, over a few centuries, out of straight impressions in four orientations: vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and the corner wedge.

The name records only this. Cuneiform is from Latin cuneus, "wedge" — a description of the marks by scholars who could not yet read them, and one that names the technology rather than the writing. The script is called after its stylus.

The medium explains the survival too. Clay left in the ground does not rot, and a fire that destroys a palace bakes its archive hard. Several hundred thousand tablets have been excavated, and most of what is known about Mesopotamia is known because its records were kept on the one material that a catastrophe preserves.

There is no abecedary to show. Cuneiform has no fixed running order and no small closed inventory: a working scribe commanded several hundred signs, and a single sign may be read as a word in Sumerian, as a different word in Akkadian, and as a bare syllable in either — the reading depends on the sentence. The signs below are therefore printed as forms only. Assigning each a single value here would be a convenience, and a false one.

Cuneiform was not decreed out of existence; it was outcompeted. Aramaic, written in an alphabet of twenty-two letters on parchment and papyrus, was easier to learn and lighter to carry, and from the middle of the first millennium BCE it took over the everyday business of empire. Cuneiform retreated into what it still did best — temple ritual, and astronomy. The last securely dated tablets are astronomical almanacs of the first century CE, written by a priesthood computing planetary positions in a script almost nobody else could read. The tradition ends around 75 CE, some 3,300 years after it began.

Then it was lost completely, and for longer than most: not one person could read a cuneiform sign for roughly seventeen centuries. The way back in was a trilingual inscription cut a hundred metres up a cliff face at Behistun in Iran, and the decades of work by Grotefend, Rawlinson, Hincks and others that turned it into a reading. That case is filed in the Reading Room — see Decipherment Dossiers.