The Ancients - How to Write Cuneiform

Episode Date: February 8, 2026

More than 5,000 years ago, a revolutionary script emerged in the fertile lands of Mesopotamia that would transform how people counted, governed, worshipped and told stories. This was cuneiform, the world’s earliest known writing system.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Irving Finkel to uncover how cuneiform actually worked and how you would write it yourself. From humble beginnings as simple pictograms tracking beer and grain, to the wedge-shaped signs that recorded myths, laws and epic tales long before the Bible, this episode explores how cuneiform spread across Sumer, Babylon, Assyria and Persia — and why these clay tablets remain one of archaeology’s richest windows into the ancient world.MORENoah's Ark and the FloodListen on AppleListen on Spotify The World's Oldest LettersListen on AppleListen on Spotify Watch this episode on our NEW YouTube channel: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Over 5,000 years ago, in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, one of the greatest technological leaps in human history occurred. One created with neither stone nor gold, but with clay. This is Cuneiform, the first ever writing system known to archaeology that would spread across Mesopotamia and beyond. A writing system preserved today on thousands of fascinating tablets that continue to reveal more and more secrets about these ancient civilizations.

From simple pictograms used to count jars of beer in ancient Sumer to the complex wedges that told the story of the Great Flood long before the Bible, Cuneiform became the script of civilizations like the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the Persians. Today we're joined by Friend of the Podcast, the One, the Only, the legend, Dr Irving Finkel, Senior Assistant Keeper at the British Museum, and one of the world's leading experts on Cuneerform. Irving, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. Delighted to be here.

Let me tell you. Yes, it's been much too long. And the first time having you in our... Luxurious studio environment, I think they would call it. Yes. A bookcase. You've got plants. Carpet, the whole works.

A cup of coffee for you as well. And we wanted to make you feel right at home for this topic today. Absolutely relaxed and happy to talk to you. And to talk about Cunairform, which is, and forgive me if I'm incorrect, but this is the oldest script, writing script, known to archaeology. That is exactly what it is. This kaneiform writing system, when you look what comes to us from the ancient world and the very ancient world, the keneiform script, which the earliest things are probably at the end of about 4,000 BC, 3,000,

maybe even older than that, they're the earliest pieces that we can say are writing, they're part of the history of writing, but they are, as you put. the earliest that we know of. And it's very easy and very common in books and in conversation for people to say, oh, this is the oldest language in the world, but this is an erroneous conclusion because when you have the earliest evidence,

that is all it means. It's the earliest evidence. And we actually have no idea, at least I don't, of what plausibly or even implausibly, it might have existed before Cuneiform came on the scene. It's perfectly possible there was a long history behind it or prehistory behind it because the very word history and prehistory,

the distinction between them is predicated on the invention of writing. So before Cuneiform, you can say it's prehistory. But I often wonder, and we can talk about it, but I think the intrinsic evidence from the earliest signs and the way they functioned suggests to me that they were derivative from something which already existed. And to say the scene of, I mean, Which languages, which cultures, which civilizations are we talking about that used Kunir form as their writing system?

Well, chronologically, the oldest is Sumerian. So the Sumerian language, which is more or less without parallel in the world. It's a kind of unique language because it doesn't have what you might call brothers and sisters like languages generally do. So, for example, if you know Spanish, Italian, French and Latin, you know their kind of relatives in one way or another, and if you know one or two of them, it's not so hard to learn, another one, because they're a family of languages. And this principle, that individual languages within a group are related, sometimes closely and sometimes not so closely, is probably true of languages as a whole, even if we can't always demonstrate it. So when Sumerian comes into the

world, maybe in 3,900, we first know that sort of date, 4,000 b.m. Some, something like that, the first evidence, we have the first glimpse of what must have been, in my opinion, a whole family of languages, older languages, which simply never got recorded or we don't know anything about. Because you're never going to get a language, a complete functioning, literary spoken language in a balloon of its own creation. It must be an amalgamation, a descendant, all that sort of thing. So when you think about the beginning of writing with the Sumerian, business, you have a horizon and Sumerian is rescued by the invention of script or the use of script just in time before it vanished. So the Cuneoform writing system, which was used to write Sumerian,

was quite early on, and this is a strange thing in the history of the world, the writing system, which was well used to express Sumerian, was also used for another language at the same time, which was unrelated to Sumerian. So this is what we call Acadian, or sometimes Babylonian or Assyrian. They're the dialects of the Acadian language. And the Acadian language, spoken like by King Sargon the first, for example, is a Semitic tongue, a dead and ancient Semitic tongue, but strongly related to other ancient Semitic tongues

and modern surviving Semitic tongue. So if you ever look into a text written in Babylonian or Syrian dialect in Knaifo, and you have a look at it written out in a typescript or something, and you know a bit of Semitic like Arabic or Hebrew or Ethiopic or Aramaic or any of those languages, you know a bit of them. You will see in this ancient script put into English writing familiar things that you can see that must be a verb, that must be a preposition, that must be the feminine. You can tell something.

So even though it's dead and buried, the Akkadian language, if we call it the Akkadian language, is a language which is accessible to us intellectually and in a comforting sort of way. It's a language that we know what it's like. And the Sumerian one is really strongly in contrast. And after this big step when the two of them were written, as history progressed, the writing system, which was a proper writing system, was pressed into use to write other, even more unrelated languages around the Middle Eastern world. So, for example, old Persian and let me think, Canaanite kind of languages,

Elamite language, Eucharitic language, some Semitic, some not, and the old script with its kind of system was pressed into use to write these other languages. and once in a while, many of the nations adopted the funny writing system with the people who had to do it because it was the only thing available to them. So it spread in a way that you think would be impossible, because it was so complicated, why didn't they make up their own writing? But they didn't.

So you have the sort of lingua franca situation where people in different countries use the one writing system for their own language. And you get its survival on so many different things. I mean, predominantly the clay tablets, isn't it? but also you mentioned the Persians there, the time of, let's say the Echimid Persian Empire, and you have great stone inscriptions carved into mountainsides and what is one of the languages they use at that time.

It's Cuneiform. So you see it surviving on several different, very durable materials. Yes, actually, that old Persian situation is rather remarkable because of what happened as a result of it. Because in Mesopotamia, as you say, most bits of kineoform were written on bits of clay. This is the standard thing of over 3,000 years of clay. time we have these clay things. But at the same time, the kings of Babylonia and Assyria,

if they wanted to make a big proclamation or a statement like a law code, or they wanted to decorate their palaces with statements about how marvelous they were, they adapted the signs which are usually pressed into clay, that they could be carved into stone. So there was a long tradition of stone inscriptions running side by side with clay inscriptions in the heyday of Mesopotamian culture. Now the old Persian kings, Darias and co, they decided they wanted to have proclamations of their own kind to write their old Persian language. And in the mountain situation that you describe, they did it rather splendidly because they had a flattened face of rock where they wrote the same triumphant boastful description in their old Persian kaneiform and in Babylonian kaneiform and in

Elamite kuneiform. So this was a tour de force. What's intriguing is that the Persian kuneiform was not like Babylonian or Sumerian kuneiform at all, because to write proper kuneiform, you need about a thousand different signs. But when they wrote old Persian, they more or less had an alphabet made up of signs, made out of wedges, cuneiform wedges, like the normal Babylonian or Sumerian signs, but very simplified, and they took the idea of the wedge shape in different combinations to make 26 or 28 characters like an alphabet to write their language.

So this great thing up on the mountain, it looked at first like, oh no, another horrible cuneiform inscription we can't read. But because people knew the Persian language and they knew Persian literature, there were phenomena about the Old Persian inscription, which opened up the decipherment of the Old Persian Cuneiform script. And what turned out what was so marvellous is that the next column, the Babylonian one, and the one after that, the Elamite one from Iran, were translations of the text written in the Old Persian rather simple script,

into mainstream cuneiform in Babylonian or elamite. So because they could read the first one, which was really a bit of a lollipop once they got the hang of it, once they'd done that, and they found that the name Darias was written Dariah Wu-Ush, and it was king of kings, king of the mighty king or something, and they saw in the old Persian that these things were repeated, and it must be the king and his father with all his epithets,

and the grandfather with all his epithets. And they read the old person, eventually because the language was still alive. So once they done that, what was miraculous in a sense was looking at the Babylonian where they didn't know which way up it went before, just staring at it, it became apparent that there were certain passages in the great run of text which were repeated verbatim three times in the text like in the old Persian. So they said, well, in that case, this must be the bit that said,

the king and his dad and his dad with all their epithets. And so they assumed that the first name, which was King Dariahus, as we call him, or Dariahush, in the Babylonian and in the Elamite, the beginning it ought to be something like Dariahwush. So they took these syllables and they started thinking and then they tried to find them wherever they were. And then they suddenly found like that a word or two in the Babylonian, which was a Semitic word. For example, just by piecing things together, they got the word for river in Babylonian, Nauru, which is like Nakhru, and this word showed them instantly that this wall of unintelligible stuff with perhaps a glimmer here or a glimmer there was writing a language which was Semitic.

And once they knew that, they had the Hebrew and Arabic dictionaries, they had the grammars of all the Semitic languages. so every time they got a new idea they could test it against the old Persian to find the words that matches and that's how it all opened up. So that mountain you talked about is the key

which unlocked the whole of the Cuneiform world rather like the Rosetta Stone. Is this the Rosetta Stone of Cunea It is all, yes, exactly exactly so. It's so interesting and with that case with the Persian and the Behistan

inscription is it. Exactly. So that's the 1st millennium BC. Yes. And that's several thousand years after the creation of Cuneer form. But I think it's testament to that example alone, to the endurance of that writing script over all of those millennia. I must ask, before we delve into the origins of Cunair form, the majority of Cunair form inscriptions that survive are on clay.

Yes. Why clay? Of all materials, why do they use clay? Well, the thing about the script is that the beginning signs were drawn, as we will talk about in a minute, but after a while they simplified the drawings in order to make diagrammatic representations of signs, not by a continuous line like you do with a pencil, but by individual strikes of a stylist which impressed the clay. And why they took clay as their medium is an interesting question. But the thing is, if they hadn't used clay which was

abundant and in fact clay underpinned the whole of Samirian culture because everything was made of clay. I don't know if they wore clay but in the underworld people munched on it for lunch. I mean clay was the underpinning of the whole of the culture and it was used for everything possible and of course the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris have many outcrops of excellent quality clay without stuff in them, you know bits and pieces and stones but really high quality clay which will take a very sharp impression. So I suppose when they started out, they might have used skins, they might have used leather or something like they might have done, they might have written on wood if they could, but wood was always in short supply in Mesopotamia, and clay was abundant. And so somehow it just

went hand in glove with the first recording that you could make a bit of clay into a kind of tablet, make marks on it. And when it dried, they would survive, somebody else could come along and they would read the signs and they would understand what you meant. So it was the natural thing. And of course, the other thing is that the clay in the modern Western world, you associate it with either being a potter who has clay all over their clothes and all over the carpet and gets into trouble or messy stuff at school when children are supposed to make something and actually spend the afternoon throwing bits at one another is all to do with mess. But the thing is, in Mesopotamia, it was nothing like that. It was their natural resource. And the Sumerians and the Babylonians are

of them, they were masters of clay in the control and use of clay. On the highest level, it was their thing. Their hands were a kind of naturally adjusted to it. So I think that's, it was just free, it was endless, and it would dry in the hot sun or out of the hot sun and be perfectly usable forever and ever. So it seems the right natural thing. And of course, they were perfectly right, because everything that we have is going to rot, fall to pieces, everything on computers is going to go down the toilet for certain. So in the end, it'll only be the clay tablets which survive, mark my words. So hundreds of thousands of years from now, people will learn about humans from the clay tablets.

From that. And they'll say, didn't they realize how stupid it was to invent the internet? And must have also mentioned the stylists as well, they made from reeds, local reeds? Yes. They certainly are. I mean, the thing is, the very earliest pictures, which we all to talk about first, because they come first. Should we do that? Yeah. Should we do that? The thing about them is they use this clay like the later proper

kinaeiform used that as their support system. And that's, it's really always been that. So when they did their first signs, the first conception that you can do a mark on a surface, that another person can come along and see it and understand what it meant. When this idea came into the world, it was an important thing and it led to the creation of this script. and its ancestral form, the earliest of which we know, as a whole fruit bowl full of signs, which are drawn in the surface of a piece of clay with a point.

For example, you can imagine having a nice piece of clay and having a pencil with a respectable point and dragging it in the clay, you can draw in the clay as you would on a piece of paper. And the first, I don't know, centuries, we don't know how long really, But the first stage, so to speak, when they wrote the earliest signs, they were drawn in the clay. And this is, just so we get our times right, for the earliest signs, do we think at the moment about early 4th millennium BC?

I think so. I mean, the problem, among other problems, which always comes up in archaeology when it's really important, is that there's no archaeological stratified evidence for anything to do with the earliest inscriptions. Lots of them are found, for example, reuse. to fill up holes in the ground and that kind of thing, which is the worst diagnostic source you could ever have. So actually outside dating for this, you know, around 4,000 thing is hopeless. So what we've got is tablets in early script of slightly evolving form. We can say this looks like the earliest, this looks like the next, this looks like the next,

that kind of thing. And when we have stuff that we can date, when we extrapolate backwards, the source of of interval must have gone before we get to the bit we can date, I would think that the first efforts to do writing on clay, the first experimental things, would be before 4,000 BC. Let's say for the sake of argument, 4,200. There's no evidence, but it's a good, comfortable working figure. And so why do we think that around that time, this early writing script, I can see something's called like protocoon airform, why we think it's a emerges? Well, the received law when I was a student was this, that Sumerian in its early form

manifested itself in the world in a cultural and political environment in which the country which ancient Iraq, of course we're talking about the ancient landscape of Iraq, was not under a single ruler, but consisted of more or less independent conglomerations which we call city states where quite a lot of people lived together under somebody who was in charge. They'd be a temple, they'd be a local N, or not, not rule is not quite the word, but somebody in charge of it with a kind of structure overseeing everybody and taking responsibility for security on the one hand and food and drink for everybody and the tilling of the soil and the production of stuff, some kind of early structure like this, where these city

sates functioned independently of one another, quite extensive in reach and duration, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not, but underneath, I think, they had a kind of agreed sense of unity, because there's a very early feel attested on some clay surfaces, where the symbols, which represent these cities are all put in a row like that, like on the head of notepaper, and they had these symbols, sometimes we can understand

them, sometimes they're what people would call mythological birds or something like that, but they're something like that, Avine forms or symbols, one for each city, all in a row, meaning that underpinning them was some unity.

And I think it would manifest, for example, if there was an invasion from outside, then they would all pour together. When there's peace and quiet, then there's rivalry, and maybe there's sometimes struggle or dynastic, this and that. But in principle, that's how it worked, as far as I understand. And when you have such an institution with a central authority, which is crucial, where in going and outgoing stuff needs to be controlled and monitored, the theory is that bookkeeping, accountability, and control for a large number, an ungainly number of persons, and perhaps in an ungainly number of areas,

required a recording system to keep track of everything and ultimately to make people accountable for what they were responsible for. It's the emergence in the world of the inland revenue argument. Well, we can all have something to say about that. But in principle, this was the received law when I was a student, And one of the reasons which makes it compelling is you have there massive architecture, which requires a great deal of organisation and dedication and clarity with people in charge and people doing what they were told and all that.

So it was in that milieu of small urban conglomerations united by the name of the place, the local deity, festivals and so forth that ran through the year, all those things for sure were in place, that set these up as more or less independent users. And the same situation prevailed in many of them, and there's a horizon whereby, not that somebody rang everybody else and said,

listen, guys, we've got to invent writing because we can't cope with everything here, we're going to do that. But somehow, and this also shows that there was some level of contact of a harmonious type, you get the emergence of the first idea of recording on clay using these drawn characters on this material, which once finished, once

completed, will be put in the shadow of the sun by a wall, and half an hour later the surface would be you could pick it up, it wouldn't smudge or smear, it was ideal in a way, you just wrote the thing, dried it, and there you were. So this got off the ground gradually and gradually. And so you have, as we have led to understand it by the great sages who run the seriology, that you have this panoply of drawn shapes with curvy lines if necessary to represent what they're talking about, like you'd have a drawing of a foot which looked like a foot with a heel and a bit curving round above the toes, with curvy lines and everything that you draw, and it's your robot, when you draw things, there are curves in all of them.

And what actually happened is there was a shift at some point from the drawings on clay into a system whereby you could do the same images with a straight edge, like the edge of a chopstick or something, where you'd analyse, say, the ankle and foot, which is a curvy picture like a child would draw or a foot, to make two long ones and one at the bottom and another bit on top, to make the shape of the foot out of small straight lines. And when that border is crossed from realistic drawings

or what people would like to call curvy linear into cuneiform, where they're reduced to straight edges within the whole of the individual sign picture, then you get the appearance of cuneiform. And that took place probably at the beginning of the third millennium. So originally the drawings were what you would do. do very simply, if you want to do a river, you draw two parallel lines, if you want to do a woman, you do a triangle with a hole in the middle, if you wanted to do an animal, you do the animal

head, all those sorts of things, very simple. And in fact, if you look at a list of early pictographs and compare it with the sort of drawings that children do when they're about two and a half or three, when they first try to reduce the universe around them to recognisable symbols. There's something common. So if a child draws a teapot, it would be a bit like a pictographic sign to represent a vessel that you might have on an early tablet. I'll tell you what, we're going to see if I can use the iPad here and get some images up for you. We could talk through it. You're up for it, Irving. I am. It's a bit trifle and acronistic, we can let that go.

Hey, look, we're trying new things here. But I have one particular tablet up here. Yes. Now, do you recognise this? I do recognise that tablet. So it's made of, firstly, we can see very high-quality clay, right? And it's the kind of clay that the pictures which are in it are sharp and well-defined. And it's been ruled into boxes, horizontal. So it's some kind of administrative document where items are listed together with quantities of them.

And each message, so to speak, which is part of the whole, is put in a ruled box so that it could be read in sequence, and it's a very orderly bookkeeping matter. I mean, there's nothing chaotic about it, there's nothing improvised about it, it's probably about 2,800, something of that kind, I'm not sure exactly when, but it is part of a long tradition of impeccable bookkeeping in terms of the design, the form, the characters that are drawn there, the numbers, and the accuracy of it, because as time goes by, many of these tablets where people are forced to write down the quantities on the back, they have the total.

So there's none of this winging it and saying about 56 or something, they have to add up because in the structure of the organisation, whoever wrote that tablet knew that somebody higher up the pecking order was going to look at this tablet and make sure it was right. So accountability is definitely intrinsic to. the whole structure. And what I also love, though, we have this image. This feels like a pictogram what it's showing here. It looks like a jar.

It is a jar. In fact, there's a whole series of jars. And this is what happened. The primary one was used for beer, because beer is a very important thing in the history of the world, appears on stage at the very earliest moment and never goes away. So the sign for beer, which in Sumerian is pronounced cash, This is the word for beer.

If you go into a pub now, well, I was going to say you have to give the cash to get the beer because they don't take cash anymore anyway. So the whole thing is redundant. But in principle, this tells you a lot about the script. So for example, everybody, I think, will agree with this matter. That when the script was in its nascent phases, in its early phases, and somebody had this idea and a couple of other people said,

this is brilliant. And then someone said, okay, let's do it. And then they say, well, we've got to have a sign for this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and then they gradually do, and there are pictographic recognisable things. As they do that, you have the situation that you have to have a sign for beer. So they do a jug of a type which has a pointed bottom, which I think you can, if the ground is, floor, ring is soft, can be made to stand up right. Kind of like amphra, the idea, right. That's all the thing, but stick in the ground. So the basic vessel is used for the word cash, which is beer.

If a Sumerian is sitting here, he will be very pleased to see that you've highlighted cash, the word for beer, and think you were a right-thinking chap. But the thing is this. This illustrates two things, that there were lots of different vessels, and there were lots of different things that can go in vessels. So when it started out, you could have the vessel, and then you could have the drawing of the same vessel with something inside it. Or you could have a drawing of something else inside that picture.

And so you have pictographic framework of a sign like vessel. And as the script developed, they realized by bonging in a small thing, you extend the range of a given sign into other things which naturally, semantically or intellectually or obviously connected. So that was a very remarkable matter, very fruitful. So that looks to me like a straight sign for beer standing on end. But there's something else because cash, we agree, is an essential part of the human world. But when the script moved from doing a picture of something that everybody would understand,

like, for example, a milk bottle on a piece of paper for the milkman, no problem about it, That tradition of signs that looked like what they meant, or signs that looking like what they meant had an extra component to show what they really meant is one big sweep of the evolution of the writing system. But there's another thing, because they didn't only want to record pictures of ideas. They wanted to record language. So, in Sumerian, you have animate and inanimate. So Annie means his and B means it's. So somebody in ancient sumer, since you say it's all the time, like you say his or hers in English all the time, they found themselves in a position that they had to have a sign for it's.

And you can't draw an it or a muchness or any of those complicated things. And there are many things that you can't draw. So they made a decision. And this, in my opinion, is how it works. They decided to use a simple sign with only four wedges, which is what it turned into, for its. So when you have that sign in a kuneiform sentence where the words are not divided up, they're all written a continuous line, when you reach that sign in its form like that or in a later form, it can either mean beer

and you have to know this, or it can mean it's, which means it's linked to the word that came before. Or this symbol here. That very simple. In this case, there's no question that it means beer, because this is an accounting text with lots of numbers. You see, there are lots of circles and half circles. Oh, yes.

They are all numbers. So the half ones are 10. Right. And the others are one or 60, but there are more subtle ones as well. And as the script developed, and this script is developed to a long way, it's written not with a point, but with a stylist. Once you get to this stage, the writing of numbers and the concomitant numerical system kept pace with it. So that literacy and numeracy, as you would say, if you were running a primary school, at the beginning of history evolved together.

And many things about that are remarkable because, for example, it's shown and established from the beginning of the study of this material. that the Mesopotamians, the Sumerians, first and then the Assyrians and Babylonians, they had a mathematical system which was sex-sgestimal. That's just to say their convenient starting point on which everything was plastered was the number 60. And mathematicians tell me that 60 is more flexible and more useful than 10. But of course, 10 is the natural thing because, barring actually, accidents, people have 10 digits. And everybody in the world counts on their fingers. So one that

might assume, although anthropologists or mathematicians will probably throw up their hands in horror as such a simplistic argument, but you might say that the counting's intent was intrinsic to the human brain, and in fact you can burn me at the stake and I'll never give up that argument. But the decimal system, at the very earliest level chronologically in this long evolving story, was limited to certain materials. So there were things like barley, which are measured in 60s, and other things measured in 10.

So what happened was that at a certain level, they reserved counting in 60 for things in a score and this, this, this, this, and all those things are 60s, and those things over there, we have to count in tens. And what happened was that the decimal system, practically speaking, vanished. So you have a, what turned into a grown-up cuneiform when we look at a later thing, you have a single upright wedge, which is the number one, and also the number 60,

so that you have combinations of wedges from 1 to 60, which explain everything very beautifully. The reason why this is so important is that when people say, like, we don't need universities to study, The seriology is no use to anybody. It's a waste of time. There's nothing to do with us today and all those sort of well-known arguments. The fact is that the division of our time into 60 seconds and then 60 minutes

and 360 degrees of the circle are a direct inheritance of the numerical system which has already expressed in that tablet that 60 is the basic counting system. And it went from, of course, Samirian to Babylonian all the way down to the end of the Cuneoform epoch, and was scooped up by the Greeks when they went to Babylon to find out what they knew about everything and found they knew rather a lot. And they exported data, sexagestimally stored within their own astronomy and mathematical system.

So that's why eventually we have 60 seconds in a minute. It's amazing, though, that kind of idea of 60 can originate. with like, since I'm the earliest cuneer form tablets that survive, in these commerce transactions, you know, for the trade routes of Mesopotamia at that time? Well, the information in them is usually involved produce within the periphery of the estate, the surrounding fields, and the organised work, labour and so forth, but also with trade, both within ancient Iraq and beyond the borders,

because I think trade goes back to the very beginning of time long before this tablet was written in, what did we say, 2,800? 100 BC. Yes, early 3rd millennium BC. And so, well, Irving, should we move on then from this? So we kind of covered that early story of Cuneriform with pictograms. So, like, from there, the evolution of Cunea Form, it's not like at one moment it goes from pictures to what we're more associated with today.

It's quite a long evolution of Cuner form into perhaps the most detailed creation of it in the first millennium BC. Well, if we look at a list of early pictographs drawn with a point where it all begins, you have signs where anybody, when they see them, know what they stand for. So that is a crucial point. That's a crucial point. So we have a writing system which when we first encounter it serves to communicate ideas without any language. So you can write numbers and you can write picture signs to create a message without

any grammar or syntax involved in it, just a simple kind of accounting system. And it must be that the very earliest signs worked this way and very gradually it occurred to them that signs could be pressed into different kinds of function. One of them would be to express grammar, the particles of grammar, the elements of grammar, and like using the word for beer to write it's, which otherwise is a difficult problem. So this is an ongoing system that you have a very stark and simple pictographic level, which in one way or another evolves into the situation where the individual signs are drawn with straight edges, and the straight edges themselves at the beginning are very pictograph-like. So when you look at early kuneiform, you can see what they come from, you can see

it's the head of a bore with a horn or something like that. You can tell that they are pictographic, but what happens over a long period of time is that the drawing of the signs stylises and stylizes to the point that the innate pictographic quality disappears from view, that the signs become, in a sense,

abstracted from their origin. This is an important matter because when you start to learn kuneiform, you never start with the pictures, you only start with the developed cuneiform signs, of which there are about 900 or a thousand, something like that, and as time goes by, abandoning their artistic, curvy forms into straight-edge and straight-edge and rigour and system, then they become further and further divorced from their origins, so that, for example, if you have a tablet written 500 years after the beginning of cuneiform, nobody could tell

you what it was about by looking at the signs and saying, oh, this is a chap, this is a that, this is that, oh, it must be this, like people used to do with Egyptian hieroglyphs before they knew how they functioned. So this is an ongoing process from curvy, pictographic signs drawn with a point into mature cuneiform. And if you look through the millennia, because we have proper cuneiform by 2008, all the way down to the first century AD, this is a very, very long process, gradually.

Over this process, two things happened. One is that the way people wrote their signs in Babylonia in the south was slightly different from the way they wrote them in the north. and this is interesting because the Akkadian language, which we know at the beginning of this writing nearly, the Akkadian tongue sharpens out into an Assyrian dialect, as we said, and a Babylonian dialect. So the language, the two languages divulge, but so do the signs in a matching way. So that, for example, if you know about Keneiform, if you see a tablet without even reading any of the words, you know it's a Babylonian hand or an Assyrian hand.

So the two functions run in parallel. That's one thing. And the other thing is, and this is the most important insight into the whole matter, in my opinion, is this. It's the stylization and the acceptance by all concerned of what the form of a sign is. So if you have a situation with fertile imaginations of lively and competitive individuals in a position of authority, with a bit of power, and this new writing system comes along, and they get the hang of it. So they all do it, and they all think about it, and then they all have these signs, and they all have their own signs for this, and then someone says, oh, we've got to have a sign for chariot

wheel, and we've got to have a sign for telephone box and all this kind of thing. So before you know where you are, you have a proliferation of pictograms, which are only really understandable to the people who invented the particular ones. This never happens. So when we have a horizon with early dynastic signs and pre-early dynastic signs on clay tablets from places in Mesopotamia, there are not seven or eight systems running, it's one system. And maybe the odd thing people say, oh, this looks like the way lagash people do the sign for, maybe. But in principle, it's one system. And this is, in my opinion, immensely diagnostic because the natural function here would be for things to proliferate and people to compete and people to set up their own thing.

And we're doing it this way if you don't like it. But that's what human beings do. And these Sumerians, they may look stiffish on their monuments and in their chariots with big noses and funny flowered skirts. But they were exactly the same as people are today. This is a very important principle. and you can attribute to these people the same kind of psychological tricks, characteristics and behaviour, in my opinion, as you would witness in any number of persons surrounding us in London.

So this is serious matter. So what happens here is we have to assume that the amphiturny, which is implied by this seal with all these cities in conjunction, must have had political consequence, and it must have been that somebody called a summit at some point to say we all know, ladies and gentlemen, about this new writing nonsense. Well, it's going to be very useful to us all, but the first thing we have to do is to standardise it, otherwise it will be self-defeating.

This is the sort of thing they should have done when they invented the internet. But of course man never learned from his own history, otherwise we wouldn't have any more wars, for example, just an aside there. But the thing is, it seems to me compellingly certain that the direction of the script was controlled from the beginning. And the only way that can happen is by one human brain, not by a committee. There must have been a person who exercised sufficient, compelling power and authority and charisma, who saw what would happen if this was left to run naturally, who took over and supervised it. And the thing is this, despite the two languages and the evolution of the languages themselves, because all languages evolved, and the evolution of the way the signs were written,

the repertoire was never allowed to grow wild, all the way down to the end of time. This seems to me immensely significant. So that scribes in the second millennium, they knew what all the signs were. They had their lexical text with all the lists of words, the words for colours, for lands, for different kinds of wood, different kinds of stone.

And they were copied and copied and copied and copied. And the writing evolved. It got more casual, it got more disowned. stylistic changes in the writing and the language, as I said, changes like Chaucer in modern English. The language evolves, the language evolves. But the geneal form conception ran clear and free like a river without any real deviation. And in my opinion, that is not a natural matter. So especially, for example, you could say this.

In the first millennium BC, we jump ahead a long way to when there were like universities, so to speak, Babylonia. So in the city of Uruk, in the city of Babylon, in the city of Borsipa, probably a few other places, there were libraries originally, temporal libraries, which blossomed out into some kind of establishment where scholarly matters and astronomical matters and mathematical things and medicine were studied and developed in conjunction people working together. They had kind of schools of stuff, very important matter. And sometimes we have a very significant document, medicine or something, and it says the bottom's ruled off tablet of Mr. So-and-so from Babylon. Do not show this to anybody from Uruk, not allowed. So, you know, when you read the Keneoform,

it just looks like Keneoform, but when you suddenly hear the voice and someone wagging a finger, don't let those bastards get hold of this, this is our stuff, they're not allowed to. So it's not copyright for money, but nevertheless there is a sort of guild or some such conception, keeping a rivalry among them free. But even given that, you don't get sign forms going off at a mad tangent. So if they don't like us, we'll have our own, we'll invent a sign for this. It never happens. And it's easy to overlook this point, but I don't think it's easy to over-emphasise it because it seems to me beyond doubt that this must be a central truth about this script, that there was a control from day one and it was a self-regulating system.

And I guess kind of going back to what we were talking back on an overarching point, with those evolution of those signs, looking at a pictogram or one from the Samirian times and then one from, let's say, Ashabana Power's Library in the first down in BC. You wouldn't be able to realize. Except in some cases. once in a while you might you might have an inkling of it or even identify it but in general that's true

so there are other things about this kanei-form lighting system which are important because just as you have a sign for beer and it's being one sign the principle runs that a given sign can sometimes have multiple uses and this is what bewildered as people

who throw up their career as computer programmers and shopkeepers and decide to do a seriology at university when they discover this series of unfortunate events that lies ahead of them because a given kuneiform sign can have multiple uses that's to say it can function with more than one meaning when you look at it more than one semantic significance it can have more than one phonetic value so it can have different pronunciations and then it can be used in a different way. So, for example, they have things called determinatives.

If you ever looked at anything about ancient Egyptian, you know that when they did the picture writing, they had special signs like for weapon or for person or something like that, which they draw in front of the hieroglyphs for the word that follows. So these are called determinatives, and they are not pronounced, but they are written with signs which have their other means,

both in terms of sound and meaning. It's ridiculous. Let me explain. There's a simple sign with two horizontals and then one vertical. So that can be pronounced like this. Gish. So in Sumerian, the word Gish means wood. So if we are writing a Sumerian text

and we're going to talk about a table made of a certain kind of wood, you write the sign Gish as a determinative, so the scribe reading out to the king about the new furniture, he would read the name of the table, but not the determinative, because that's for the reader only. So this sign gish can be used in one particular instance to mean wood determinative silently. Next thing is, it can mean wood, wood. So you go into the forest and you cut down wood, here's your sign where it's the sign would. Then there's another side, as I explain, about the sound. For example, because Sumerian and Akkadian use the same writing system,

the two languages are embed with one another in the most intimate fashion. They are interwoven. You have a bilingual intellectual culture, and the two things are interwoven. So when we are writing, we have the sign Gish, which can mean the next word is wood. It can mean wood. Now, Sumerian Gish, wood in Babylonian is Itzu. S with a dot. So the word for wood in Babylonian is Yitzu. So you can write your sign Smyrian Gish in a sentence which when you read it and you're reading Babylonian you have to have

the Babylonian word so you have to know that the sign Gish also is Yitsu in Babylonian and supply that in the Babylonian text. Ah so almost like kind of a translation of the word in the canair form, right? Yes. This is a mad principle. The only The only commonplace example that people encounter in the world is this, that if you write the dollar sign in a sentence, $100 million, when you put the S with two lines in it, no one says 100 million ses with two lines through it, they supply the word dollar immediately, largely because people are more interested in money than anything else. But this is not an obstacle in reading when you have such a thing in English, you just do it.

Well, in the Cuneiform world, you do it all the time. So these are the consequences that the sign for wood, which is Gish and Samirian, can be used to write Itzu in Acadian, but it can also be used to write as a syllable in Acadian, not in it meaningful in its own way, but as a component writing something else where the sound is or it's occurs

within a longer word, which is nothing to do with wood. So for example, let's say you wanted to write the word miss when you were at school, miss, miss, like that. So you have to have the sign me, m I, and the sign is, I, S. And the sign Itzu can also be Isu and Etsu and Etzu. All the related sounds can be used with the sign which in Sumerian means wood, in Akkadian can mean wood, but also can be used just as syllables in a bigger word. So you would write me, is, and when you saw this as a Sumerian, there are different ways you

could interpret it. I don't know if we're going to get into hot water here, but let's imagine that you're a Samir and you see the sign me and the sign is. Well, me can mean night or it can mean black, depending on how you pronounce it. But if you had black wood in Samir, and you'd have to have wood with black after it. So it can't be me is, it would have to be gish me, so it's not that. So me has to be a phonetic thing spelling a sound. So write me and then if the next sign has the value beginning with I, well, if it's me, very likely to link, so you write me, is, which means me, s, and then you put your hand up. So this simple illustration of the multiple uses of signs is quite bewildering when you first

encounter it, but if you lie down in a darkened room and drink cold water regularly, it'll all come to you in a flash. But the point is this, that the signs are multivalent. So when you have a sign which has one set of phonetic values and one set of meaning, Sometimes there are many of them. It's a process of elimination, is it? It's a process of elimination. And reading as much many texts as possible, because what happens is that you get into the way of thinking of the Babylonian scribe.

You know what usages are common, what are uncommon, you know. You become so familiar with the matter that is no difficulty. And after about 25 years, you can read fluently. I think, I must admit, especially for like audio, So it's a complex topic, isn't it, Kunaeform? I'm trying to explain the many different pieces of this writing system. And as you said, it takes a long, long time to master. So I'm very grateful for you to still delve into the weeds about it.

But let's bring us back up from the detail now. How long does Kuneiore for as a writing system? And if we started more than 5,000 years ago, how long does it continue for these various Mesopotamian societies? Well, I think the latest dated Kinoform tablet is from the first century AD. It's an almanac, an astronomical almanac. And so at that period, you have probably the remnants of these, as it were, universities in inverted commas, from earlier centuries,

where things were still studied, there were still people looking at the skies, making calculations, thinking things, making records, and reading older things, and the number of people who did it must have gradually reduced because at that period, Aramaic had supplanted the Babylonian language as a spoken language at the end of the first millennium, probably increasingly through the first millennium, and then Greek and then Arabic and into the modern world. And so you have to imagine that in these places in Babylonia, there were old men and less old men, and then not many old men,

and then the last guy who could read the stuff expired. And that was that. And at that moment, Cuneiform writing became extinct, and that must have happened. But the language, of course, not. And there are outpockets of spoken Aramaic, even in northern Iraq, where people today speak a form of Aramaic, which is a linear direct descendant of the Aramaic spoken when the Assyrians and Babylonians were running the country

in the first millennium. We just survived among those people, and they speak that language. But the Babylonian tongue probably reduced massively in comparison with Aramaic as time went by, not least for the fact you could write Aramaic with an alphabet. you could write it with 26 letters in ink, and gradually, gradually, you'd have the movement that recording on clay, with all its complexity and all its training, gradually became redundant in the commercial world or in the business world or in the administrative world, and it was reduced to these old crusty blokes looking from their ivory towers at the moon and predicting things for the future. So I think it's not over-fantle to think of that romantic, rather

inspiring kind of thing. So probably sometime in the first century AD, the day came that if you'd gone with your microphone and tape recorder to Babylon looking for someone who could tell you about the old stories, there might be people who remember them by heart, but not who could read the inscriptions. I think one of my favourite artefacts of the kind of the colliding of the Greek world, but also Mesopotamian Babylon,

is one of the cuneerform tablets. one of the astronomical diary entries that you have on display at the British Museum which has that very pithy line the king died. Yeah and that's all they say. That's what they say. And Alexander the Great is the king in question. Excuse me I mean, what a king!

But you know that is written in the Cuneiform in the 4th century BC? It makes you jump, isn't it? So the scholars are still using Cunairform for like... Oh yes. Yes. I think that that was one of the very institutions where the diaries were kept which soldiered on and soldiered on

until the first century AD. It's quite exciting when you see the name Alexander written in Cuneiform for the first time. That also makes you jump like anything. My only other one, before we completely wrap up, is that I see on many of these Cuneaform tablets,

especially from the time that I know you've done lots of work around, like the arc tablets, the Babylonian map of the world, which have the Cuneiform on top. All of these symbols are jam-packed together. And for someone who doesn't know it, it's very difficult to distinguish

symbol from symbol, and I guess also kind of sound from sound. And word from word. Or did they ever leave spaces or anything, though? No, they don't. They weren't allowed to. They were talked to write in a continuum. And in the best literary tablets, we can see that in addition to that, they had right justification.

So on the Gilgamesh tablets of Ashabana Pal, which are the highest kind of quality scribal achievements, all the lines end at the same point. and if the line is empty and there's extra space, they leave the space in the middle and they move the others up to the right-hand side. So they had right justification that by and large, it is a bewildering thing when you start off that there's no gap between the words.

But as you jump in, eventually you never think about it because somehow your mind adjust to it. I mean, a good analogy here is if you study languages like Arabic or Hebrew, people who write Arabic and Hebrew don't write the vowels in. So when you start out, you think, how on earth can they do this? Without any vowels, they've just got the skeletons.

But people whose languages, they just read it and there's never any doubt. And it's something comparable to that. I think, yeah, we'll have to say going into some of those exemplar canair form texts from the Library of Ashabanapelle for another day, won't me? And you see, because those are the pinnacle of... They are. There's lots and lots to say.

Well, but, I think, until that point, It just goes to me to say, as always, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and being an absolute beacon of knowledge, a fountain of knowledge. Well, it's a great privilege for me and a great pleasure at the same time. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was the one and only the legend, Dr. Irving Finkel in fine form, talking all things how to write Kunea form. I hope you enjoyed the episode just as much as we did recording it. It was wonderful to get Irving to the studio and to film this as well. So if you want to see the visual version of this podcast, well, you can. You can head over to the Ancents YouTube channel now.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor. If you'd also leave us a rating as well, well we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours. of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.