Image: www.upenn/museum.com

"Seventy percent of all archaeology is done in the library, research, reading..." ~Indiana Jones, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989

Cuneiform is the earliest known form of writing and was created by the Sumerians as early as 3000 BCE. Cuneiform was written on clay tablets with a blunt reed. The reed acted like a pen or a pencil and is often referred to as a stylus. The impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped, which gave rise to the name cuneiform (meaning "wedge shaped"). The clay tablets were left outside to dry or fired in kilns. These tablets served as clay documents, which made up the very first archives and libraries. Different forms of cuneiform exist just like different forms of language exist today.

There are different theories on how cuneiform developed. The first, and most popular, is that pictograms, or drawings representing actual things (see image above), were the basis for cuneiform writing. Early pictograms resembled the objects they represented, but through repeated use over time they began to look simpler, even abstract. These marks eventually became wedge-shaped and formed the cuneiform script, which allowed people to convey sounds and abstract concepts.

Another leading theory developed by Denise Schmandt-Besserat argues that cuneiform may have descended from a use of three-dimensional clay tokens for goods or services. Clay tokens have been used as a form of record keeping since as early as 8000 BCE. Often there would be more than one token in a single transaction. These tokens were plain, unadorned geometric shapes like spheres, disks, cones, tetrahedrons, and cylinders as well as complex forms and were decorated with markings. Schmandt-Besserat further theorized that the ancient Mesopotamians kept these multiple tokens together using a clay envelope that were adorned on the exterior with markings representing the tokens. Eventually, the hollow envelope containing the tokens was replaced with a solid single clay object (tablet) inscribed with the cuneiform script representing the tokens.

As one can see with the presentation of these two theories, the development of cuneiform is still under current debate and further research and examination is needed to fully understand how the ancient form of writing originated.

Cuneiform alphabet

Thanks to the University of Pennsylvania's website, you have the opportunity to make your mark just like the ancients did. While the ancient Babylonians created their cuneiform tablets by carving in clay using a stylus (small wooden picks) and the ancient Babylonian alphabet, the U-Penn site has an interactive page that translates your initials from the roman alphabet to cuneiform.