04 Jan Cuneiform
Cuneiform Tablets and Writing System
Developed by the Sumerians, cuneiform is one of the earliest systems of writing. The markings started off as pictograms in Sumer, then evolved into the “simpler” classical wedge-shaped chinks that you may have seen at one time or another. Cuneiform translates to “wedge-shaped.”
We are able to translate these tablets thanks to a Rosetta stone found near the city of Kermanshah in western Iran. The Behistun Inscription gives us a multilingual inscription of the same text on the cliff at Mount Behistun which has allowed us to decipher the once lost language.
The largest collection of tablets is held in the British Museum. They have some 130,000 tablets, most which have not yet been translated.