Cuneiform: clay tablets, scribe gods and the writing of heaven

A reed cut to a point and a tablet of damp clay: with these very simple tools the Mesopotamians created one of the first scripts in history. The signs, formed by small wedges pressed into the clay, gave the system its modern name of cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus. For about three thousand years this script recorded accounts, laws, prayers, myths and observations of the sky in an area stretching from the Persian Gulf to Anatolia.

From Uruk to all Mesopotamia

The oldest tablets come largely from the sacred precinct of Eanna at Uruk, in present-day southern Iraq, and date to the last centuries of the fourth millennium BC. Almost all are administrative documents: lists of barley, livestock, textiles and workers connected with the temple. At first the signs were drawings traced in the clay; over time they became stylised and turned into ever more abstract combinations of wedges.

Cuneiform was born for Sumerian, but it was adapted to very different languages: Akkadian, with its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects, Elamite, Hittite and Hurrian. At Ugarit, on the Syrian coast, even a cuneiform alphabet of about thirty signs arose, while the Achaemenid Persian kings created another for Old Persian. Few writing systems have shown such adaptability.

The gods of writing

In Sumerian religion writing was protected by the goddess Nisaba, lady of grain and accounting. Later this role passed to Nabu, son of Marduk, whose symbol was the scribe's stylus itself. A Sumerian poem, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, tells in mythical form of the invention of writing: the king of Uruk is said to have impressed a message on clay because his messenger could no longer remember it by heart.

Scribes were trained in schools called in Sumerian eduba, «tablet house», copying sign lists, proverbs and literary texts. For them writing was not merely a technique: omens were read in the entrails of animals, in natural phenomena and in the stars, and Babylonian texts called the stars the «writing of heaven». Great compilations such as Enuma Anu Enlil catalogued thousands of celestial signs and their meanings for the king and the land.

Libraries, Gilgamesh and decipherment

In the seventh century BC the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal gathered at Nineveh a vast library of tablets, including religious, divinatory, medical and literary texts. Among those fragments, in 1872, the British Assyriologist George Smith recognised the flood story contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh, causing a sensation because of its similarities with the biblical account.

Decipherment had begun with Old Persian, thanks to the German Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Decisive was then the trilingual inscription of Behistun, in Iran, copied at great risk by Henry Rawlinson on a rock face. In 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society gave the same Assyrian text to four scholars, among them Rawlinson and Edward Hincks, who worked separately: their translations agreed, and Akkadian was considered deciphered.

The last known cuneiform tablets are astronomical texts of the first century AD, written by Babylonian priests who went on observing the sky when Greek and Aramaic already dominated the region. With them ended a tradition that for millennia had united administration, worship and the study of the signs of the cosmos.