Write your name in clay

Five thousand years ago, a scribe who needed to write a name they had never written simply borrowed signs for their sound, one syllable at a time, and pressed them into wet clay. You can do the same, right now.

Inside The Long Record, at the station where writing is born, there is a small clay tablet waiting for a name. Type yours. The tablet spells it in cuneiform the way that scribe would have, by sound, sign by sign, and shows you how to read it back: a-ma-ra, ni-sha-ba, whatever your name becomes in the first writing the world ever kept.

It is honest about what it is. This is your name borrowed into signs by sound, the way a scribe would improvise it, not an official transcription. That is exactly how names traveled into cuneiform in the first place.

When you like what you see, keep it. The tablet becomes a small clay card you can save or share, your name pressed into the oldest writing there is.

It lives behind a free account, on the First Signs station of the walk. Go and see your name in clay.

the-long-record, cuneiform