Cuneiform

The wedge-shaped writing of ancient Mesopotamia, pressed into clay with a cut reed. It was used for more than 3,000 years, from about 3000 BC to the first century AD, above all for Sumerian and Akkadian.

Mesopotamian symbols and gods. Also called cuneiform alphabet, cuneiform script, cuneiform tablet, cuneiform writing, what is cuneiform.

Meaning

Cuneiform is a way of writing, not a language. The British Museum curators Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor describe a script with no letters: between 600 and 1,000 characters, some spelling out syllables (“ca-at” for cat) and others standing for whole words, the way “£” stands for pound sterling. A scribe wrote by pressing a cut reed into slightly moist clay, and the wedge-shaped marks give the script its modern name, from the Latin cuneus, “wedge”. Its two main languages were Sumerian, which has no known relatives, living or dead, and Akkadian, which is related to Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic; the British Museum counts more than a dozen others written in it, Hittite among them. No one has used it as an everyday script for some two thousand years. Today it is read by Assyriologists, whose work Cécile Michel of the CNRS describes as decipherment that is still far from finished, and museums invite visitors to try it: the Penn Museum will show your monogram the way an ancient Babylonian might have written it.

Origin and history

Writing began as bookkeeping. The British Museum says scribes in cities such as Uruk, in what is now south-eastern Iraq, first used it to keep track of rations of bread and beer. The earliest signs, from the end of the fourth millennium BC, were pictures drawn with a pointed stylus, Steve Tinney writes in the Penn Museum’s magazine Expedition; they turned into wedges when scribes began pressing the corner of a shaped stylus into leather-hard clay, and over time the signs grew simpler, smaller and closer together. A sign stood first for a word or a group of related words: the sign KA could be read ka, “mouth”, inim, “word”, gu, “voice”, or dug, “speak”. Then someone used its sound alone for the syllable “ka”, the same rebus principle as a picture of an eye for “I”. About 80 syllable signs were enough to spell anything, beside the hundreds of word signs.

Learning it took years. In the schoolrooms of Nippur in the eighteenth century BC, pupils began by making single wedges, and Penn holds the tablets that trace their progress. Tinney describes one boy’s practice disc from almost 4,000 years ago, copying his teacher’s line “She guided your finger on the clay”. Advanced pupils copied lists of Sumerian words with the Akkadian translation in a column beside them: in Tinney’s words, one of the world’s first dictionaries.

The script lasted for more than 3,000 years and spread across the Middle East. The British Museum and the Penn Museum both say it was used until the first century AD; Cécile Michel dates its final abandonment to the first century BC. After it went out of use the history it recorded was almost completely forgotten, Michel writes, except for a few names kept in the Bible and the Greek historians: the Tower of Babel, Nineveh, the Hanging Gardens.

Is cuneiform an alphabet?

No. The British Museum puts it plainly: cuneiform is a way of writing distinct from the alphabet, and it has no letters. Most signs stand for a syllable or a whole word, and a scribe mixed the two. There is one exception. On a journey to Iran in 1763, Carsten Niebuhr counted the signs in the three versions of the royal inscriptions at Persepolis, found three different cuneiform systems, and concluded that the simplest used an alphabet of 40 signs. This was Old Persian, used between the sixth and fourth centuries BC, and once it was deciphered it opened the way to the rest.

How it was deciphered

The first cuneiform object to reach Europe, the Caillou Michaux, arrived in Paris in 1786, and the first readings of it were, in Michel’s word, outlandish. The way in was through kings’ names. Georg Friedrich Grotefend looked for repeated sequences in the Persian royal inscriptions, guessed that they meant “king, son of … king, king of kings”, found the names of Darius and Xerxes, and by 1802 had identified a quarter of the Old Persian signs. Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, an officer of the East India Company, finished the work about 45 years later after copying the vast inscription of Darius I on the rock face at Behistun, which repeats one text in three languages.

The decipherers were in Champollion’s position, working from texts in three languages, with one difference that made it harder: on the Rosetta Stone the three versions use three scripts, one of them Greek, while at Behistun all three are cuneiform. Michel points out a second difficulty. Egyptian hieroglyphs recorded a single language, while cuneiform was used for about a dozen. Rawlinson published the Akkadian version of Behistun in 1851, and four scholars worked on Akkadian at once, as colleagues and rivals: Rawlinson; Jules Oppert, who studied the tablets from Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh; Edward Hincks, a clergyman in Ireland who hardly left home; and Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the calotype photograph, whose photographs of the Nineveh reliefs in the British Museum led him back to languages.

The test of 1857

In 1857, at Fox Talbot’s request, the Royal Asiatic Society sent copies of a newly found inscription of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I to Talbot, Rawlinson, Hincks and Oppert. The text is written on four large eight-sided clay cylinders that were buried under the corners of the great temple at Ashur and are now in the British Museum. Each scholar sent his translation to the Society under seal. The envelopes were opened on 25 May 1857, and the four versions largely agreed. A. H. Sayce, introducing the text again in Records of the Past in 1888, wrote that the resemblance was greater than could be accounted for unless the decipherers’ method was sound. Michel takes that day as the moment Akkadian cuneiform was deciphered.

Sumerian, the language under the Akkadian

Some tablets from Nineveh paired Akkadian with a language no one knew. Hincks suggested that the script itself was not Semitic in origin, and Oppert named the unknown language Sumerian, from the royal title “king of Sumer and Akkad”. For decades others argued that it was not a language at all but a priestly code; Tinney writes that the last arguments died down only in 1900. Sumerian is still being worked out, partly from the same bilingual word lists the scribes made for their pupils. Hittite, written in cuneiform signs, was deciphered by Bedřich Hrozný in 1915, and Urartian by Johannes Friedrich in 1933.

Cuneiform today

Most of what was written has still not been read. Archaeology magazine notes that the vast majority of the tablets from Ashurbanipal’s library remain untranslated, and Michel writes that a very large number of texts still need to be deciphered, edited and analysed. Computers help without replacing the readers. In 2023 a team from Tel Aviv announced a machine-translation programme trained on about 8,000 Akkadian texts; Michel reports that its authors scored its understanding at 3.7 out of 10 working from transliterations, and 3.6 working from cuneiform signs typed as Unicode characters. Other projects match fragments of broken Hittite tablets and read worn signs from 3D scans. “We are still far from machine decipherment of texts,” she concludes. Penn’s online Sumerian dictionary links its entries to more than 50,000 Sumerian texts, and anyone can learn the strokes: Irving Finkel of the British Museum shows how with a lolly stick and a lump of clay.

Sources

How to write cuneiform (British Museum blog), British Museum blog, “How to write cuneiform”, with curator Irving Finkel, The British Museum, page text
The uses of writing (Steve Tinney, Expedition, Penn Museum), Steve Tinney, “The Uses of Writing: Inscribed Objects and Texts in the Middle East Galleries”, Expedition 60/1 (2018), University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, page text
From clay to computers (Stephen J. Tinney, Expedition, Penn Museum), Stephen J. Tinney, “From Clay to Computers”, Expedition magazine, Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, page text
Write your name in cuneiform (Penn Museum), Penn Museum, “Write Your Name in Cuneiform”, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, page text
The decipherment of cuneiform writing: a complex matter! (Cécile Michel, Mesopotamian Bulletins), Cécile Michel (CNRS; Universität Hamburg), Mesopotamian Bulletins, 8 May 2015, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Universität Hamburg, page text
Records of the Past, new series, vol. 1: Inscription of Tiglath-Pileser I (ed. A. H. Sayce, 1888), A. H. Sayce (ed.), Records of the Past, new series, vol. I (London: Samuel Bagster, 1888), introduction to the Inscription of Tiglath-Pileser I, p. 89, Internet Archive (out-of-copyright scan), page text
Can artificial intelligence decipher cuneiform tablets? (Cécile Michel, Mesopotamian Bulletins), Cécile Michel (CNRS; Universität Hamburg), Mesopotamian Bulletins, 14 June 2026, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Universität Hamburg, page text
Mesopotamian Bulletins: about this blog (Cécile Michel), Cécile Michel, Mesopotamian Bulletins, index page and author note, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Universität Hamburg, page text
The Assyrian renaissance (Archaeology magazine, July/August 2024), Archaeology (Archaeological Institute of America), July/August 2024, feature “The Assyrian Renaissance”, Archaeological Institute of America, page text

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research

Added October 8, 2026.

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