Thread by @PaulMMCooper

A thread on the cuneiform writing system, one of the world’s first scripts, and the writing system of the Babylonian & Assyrian empires.

Cuneiform developed from early pictographic systems, like this Sumerian tablet showing a worker’s food and beer rations (see the lil jugs?)

Originally, it was written on clay using a pointed stick, but later wedge-shaped styluses came into use. 'Cuneiform' means 'wedge-shaped'

Between the Sumerian and Assyrian periods, cuneiform developed into a more complex system of phonetic signs.

Typical late cuneiform signs have usually in the range of about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more

Students learned to write by copying. Here you can see the teacher (top) writing out 3 names, and the student trying to copy them

Here the student has even drawn a little caricature of their teacher, with what looks like a cane. The more things change...

Cuneiform was the script of the Gilgamesh Epic. Here is the tablet where Gilgamesh meets the demon Humbaba in the cedar forest & battles him

Some cuneiform tablets were also used to notate maps, mathematics and astrology. One was even apparently dictated to a scribe by a horse

King Ashurbanipal of Assyria (668 c. 627 BCE) is known to have been a lover of books, and collected tablets for his library

Many of these clay tablets were destroyed in the burning of Nineveh, though some seem to have been baked in the fire, and have thus survived

Texts from this period include letters, dictionaries, king lists, books on magic, astrology, numerology, medicine, myths & epics, prayers

Since the fall of the Assyrian & Babylonian empires, & its replacement by newer scripts, knowledge of how to read cuneiform was slowly lost

Attempts at deciphering cuneiform script date back to Arabo-Persian historians of the medieval Islamic world, but they had little luck

It took until the C19th to decipher, using the Behistun Inscriptions: identical texts in 3 languages: Old Persian, Assyrian, and Elamite.

The Behistun inscriptions were to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

However, it was an incredibly long and arduous journey to decipher cuneiform, and countless scholars contributed to it.

As many as 2 million cuneiform tablets have been excavated in modern times, of which only 30,000–100,000 have ever even been read.

Most of these have lain in their collections for a century, as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world.

That means there's still so much to be discovered, making cuneiform one of the most exciting fields of study in archaeology!

Thanks for listening! As a bonus, here's a brick stamped with cuneiform I found at Nippur, on one of my visits to Iraq.