Cuneiform, the first writing

Writing did not begin with poetry. It began with counting. For thousands of years, Mesopotamians tracked goods with small clay tokens, sometimes sealed inside clay envelopes. Around 3300 BCE, in Uruk and cities like it, scribes began pressing the shapes directly onto flat tablets instead, along with simple pictures of the things being counted.

Those early signs were pictographic: a drawing of a head, an ox, a sheaf of grain. Over generations the pictures were simplified into groups of wedge-shaped marks, quick to press into clay with the corner of a reed stylus. The name cuneiform comes from the Latin for wedge.

Cuneiform was invented to write Sumerian, but it did not stay with one language. It was borrowed to write Akkadian, the tongue of Babylon and Assyria, and later Elamite, Hittite, and others. A single script carried the words of many peoples for three thousand years.

Reading it was a craft. Signs could stand for whole words or for syllables, and a trained scribe learned hundreds of them in special schools. Scribes were among the most respected people in the ancient world, and the goddess of writing herself, Nisaba, was honoured as their patron. The last known cuneiform tablet was written close to the first century CE, after which the knowledge faded for nearly two thousand years.

For centuries the tablets were mute. Decipherment came in the nineteenth century, helped by great trilingual inscriptions like the one carved on a cliff at Behistun in Iran, which let scholars match a known language against the unknown wedges.

Once the code broke open, a whole civilisation spoke again. Cuneiform tablets have given us the first law codes, the first named authors, school exercises, astronomical records, business contracts, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Museums hold hundreds of thousands of them, and many have never been read. The past is still being translated.