What is cuneiform?
Cuneiform is the world's oldest known writing system, invented by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia around 3400 BCE. The name means "wedge-shaped," referring to the marks made by pressing a reed stylus into wet clay tablets. It was used for over 3,000 years to write at least fifteen different languages.
Cuneiform was the first writing system in human history, developed in southern Mesopotamia around 3400 BCE. It began as a system of pictographic symbols — simple pictures representing objects — used by temple administrators to track economic transactions: quantities of grain, livestock, and trade goods. Over centuries, these pictures evolved into abstract wedge-shaped marks that could represent not just objects but sounds, grammatical elements, and abstract ideas.
The writing tool was a reed stylus pressed at various angles into soft clay tablets. The characteristic wedge shape of the impressions gave the system its name — cuneiform comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning "wedge." Once inscribed, tablets could be dried in the sun for temporary records or fired in a kiln for permanent storage. Ironically, when ancient libraries burned, the fire often preserved cuneiform tablets rather than destroying them.
At its peak, cuneiform was used to write at least fifteen different languages across the ancient Near East, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, and Old Persian. It recorded everything from royal inscriptions and legal codes to personal letters, recipes, and literary masterpieces like the Epic of Gilgamesh — the world's oldest surviving work of narrative fiction.
Cuneiform fell out of use in the first century CE, replaced by simpler alphabetic scripts. The ability to read it was lost for nearly two thousand years until European scholars deciphered it in the 19th century, primarily through the trilingual Behistun inscription in Iran.