Cuneiform

The earliest known cuneiform records come from southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, toward the end of the fourth millennium BCE. Early tablets from Uruk include lists and accounts of commodities, quantities and people. The first stages of writing were closely tied to administration: recording deliveries and distributions helped institutions keep track of resources as settlements grew. Scholars describe cuneiform as the oldest known writing system, while evidence continues to be studied and interpreted.

Cuneiform is a way of writing, not a language or an alphabet. Its name refers to the wedge-shaped impressions that became characteristic of its signs. A scribe pressed the end of a cut reed or other stylus into damp clay, producing short strokes; the tablet could then be dried or fired. Early signs often depicted things or quantities, but the system developed signs that could represent spoken sounds as well as words. This combination let scribes write names, grammatical forms and ideas that were difficult to express with pictures alone.

Cuneiform began in a Sumerian context but was adapted to write other languages, including Akkadian and Hittite. As it spread, communities adjusted the inherited signs to suit their own speech and conventions. Its uses expanded far beyond bookkeeping: clay tablets preserve legal and administrative records, letters, religious works, literary compositions and scholarly material. The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, survives in cuneiform copies, including tablets from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.

For more than three millennia, cuneiform was used by successive societies across the ancient Middle East. Its many signs and the specialized training needed to read and write them made scribal learning important to the institutions that relied on written records. As political and cultural systems changed, cuneiform gradually fell out of use. Its clay tablets endured, however, preserving evidence about commerce, government, religion, literature and everyday life. Modern scholars have deciphered the script and its languages by comparing inscriptions and studying the tablets in their archaeological and linguistic contexts.