Cuneiform and Clay Tablets
Writing Begins in an Accountant's Office
The invention of writing was not a philosophical achievement. It was an administrative one. The earliest cuneiform tablets, dating to around 3300–3100 BC from Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, are administrative records: tallies of grain, livestock, and labour. The tokens and impressions that preceded them were even more explicitly about counting — small clay objects representing commodities, placed in clay envelopes and impressed on the outside to record what was inside. The envelope eventually became unnecessary when the system of impression could stand on its own as a two-dimensional record.
This origin in administration is worth keeping in mind when reading claims about ancient writing. Cuneiform was invented to manage the surplus economy of the first cities, not to record epic poetry. It took centuries before the system was flexible enough to represent the sounds of spoken language rather than just objects and numbers, and centuries more before it was applied to literature, law, and personal correspondence. The full expressive range of cuneiform — hymns to gods, diplomatic treaties, mathematical problems, medical diagnoses, love poems — emerged from a system whose earliest purpose was a grain receipt.
How Cuneiform Works
The name 'cuneiform' comes from the Latin cuneus (wedge), referring to the wedge-shaped impressions made by pressing a reed stylus into a soft clay tablet at different angles and with different orientations. Early cuneiform signs were pictographic — a stylised head meant 'head', a foot meant 'walk' or 'stand'. Over centuries, two things happened: the signs were rotated 90 degrees clockwise (so the foot now pointed sideways rather than downward) and became more abstract, and the system developed the ability to represent syllables rather than just whole words or concepts.
By the 2nd millennium BC, a fully developed cuneiform syllabary could represent almost any sound in a language. The script was adapted to write Sumerian, Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian), Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Urartian, and Old Persian, among others. Old Persian cuneiform, used for royal inscriptions under the Achaemenid dynasty, was a simplified syllabary with only 36 signs, partly alphabetic in character — a streamlined adaptation of the much more complex Mesopotamian system.
A scribe learning cuneiform underwent years of training, copying out lists of signs, words, and texts. The scribal schools (edubba in Sumerian) of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC have left behind huge quantities of school exercises: tablets with a teacher's model text on one side and the student's imperfect copy on the reverse. These tablets, because they were often discarded rather than archived, are among the most common finds at Mesopotamian sites.
The Great Archives
The systematic survival of cuneiform on clay is largely an accident of two physical processes: the clay hardened on its own over time, and fired or accidentally burned clay is essentially indestructible. Many tablet archives survived precisely because the buildings that housed them burned down, baking the clay harder than water-softened air-dried tablets would have been.
The palace archive at Ebla in modern Syria, discovered between 1974 and 1976 by Italian archaeologists, yielded roughly 17,000 tablets and fragments from a destruction level dating to around 2300 BC. The tablets, written in Sumerian and in a local Semitic language now called Eblaite, included administrative records, lexical lists, commercial contracts, diplomatic correspondence, and a number of literary and ritual texts. The Ebla archive demonstrated that the Mesopotamian cuneiform system had spread to Syria at least a century earlier than previously documented.
The palace archive at Ugarit (Ras Shamra) on the Syrian coast, dating to roughly the 14th–13th centuries BC, is important for a different reason: alongside Babylonian-language tablets using the traditional cuneiform syllabary, it includes tablets in a local alphabetic cuneiform script — one of the earliest alphabets, with only 30 signs. The Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform is closely related to the Phoenician alphabet that ultimately gave rise to the Greek, Latin, and Arabic scripts.
The library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, excavated by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam in the 1840s–1850s and now largely in the British Museum, is the most famous cuneiform archive. Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king who ruled from 668 to roughly 627 BC, systematically collected tablets from temples and scribal schools across Mesopotamia, commissioning copies of texts that might otherwise be lost. The resulting collection of roughly 30,000 tablets and fragments included the Standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh — the earliest surviving literary epic — as well as omen series, astronomical observations, medical texts, and royal annals.
The Decipherment of Cuneiform
Cuneiform fell out of use around the 1st century AD, and the tablets remained unread for nearly two thousand years. The decipherment began with the Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenid dynasty, which were carved on cliff faces in trilingual format — Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian cuneiform — alongside visible ruins that confirmed their royal authorship. The great inscription at Behistun in western Iran, carved by Darius I around 520 BC and recording his victories over rebellious provinces, was the key text: it provided a long bilingual parallel (with Old Persian partially readable because it used a simple syllabary and the language was related to Avestan and Sanskrit), which allowed scholars to crack the Babylonian syllabary and eventually read Sumerian.
Georg Friedrich Grotefend made the first breakthrough with Old Persian around 1802. Henry Rawlinson, an army officer who dangled on ropes to copy the Behistun inscription in the 1840s, completed the decipherment of Babylonian cuneiform. Edward Hincks, working independently in Ireland, contributed crucial insights about the phonological structure. The Royal Asiatic Society's 'Assyriology test' of 1857, in which four independent scholars produced similar translations of a newly discovered text, established that the decipherment was genuine and reproducible.
What the Tablets Tell Us
The range of what cuneiform texts contain is so broad that Assyriology — the study of Mesopotamian languages and civilisations as approached through cuneiform texts — is effectively several disciplines sharing a script. The mathematical tablets from the Old Babylonian period (roughly 1800–1600 BC) demonstrate knowledge of what we call the Pythagorean theorem more than a thousand years before Pythagoras. Astronomical tablets, particularly the systematic observations compiled under the Babylonian astronomers of the 1st millennium BC, formed the empirical basis for the earliest predictive mathematical astronomy. Medical texts record diagnoses and prescriptions alongside magical incantations, reflecting a medical practice that blended what we would separate as rational and ritual elements.
The Amarna Letters, a collection of diplomatic correspondence from the 14th century BC found in Egypt in 1887 and written in Babylonian cuneiform — the international diplomatic language of the Late Bronze Age — give an unprecedented view of the relationships between the great powers: Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, the Hittites, Mitanni. Vassal rulers write obsequiously to the pharaoh; great kings address each other as 'brothers' and argue about the value of diplomatic gifts. The letters are written in a Babylonian that often reflects the native languages of the senders, producing an accidentally vivid record of multilingualism in the ancient Near East.
Open the map to visit the sites where tablets were found — Nineveh, Ebla, Ugarit, Nippur, Ur — and the museums where the archives are displayed, including the British Museum, the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.