Cuneiform translator

Writing was born in accounting. In the cities of southern Mesopotamia, around 3200 before the common era, the administrators of the temples of Uruk began recording sacks of grain and head of cattle with marks in clay, and the marks became signs, and the signs, which at first drew the thing counted, became groups of wedges pressed with the tip of a reed stylus. It is from that wedge, cuneus in Latin, that the name comes. Dried clay lasts for millennia, so hundreds of thousands of tablets are known, from receipts to poems.

The system served Sumerian first and then Akkadian, the language of Babylon and Assyria, and was adapted to Hittite, Elamite and other languages, each choosing the signs and readings it needed. A sign could stand for a whole word, the sign for sky, for king, for water, or for a syllable, and the same sign had both functions and several readings. A trained scribe read and wrote with a few hundred signs in current use; the school lists run past a thousand.

Cuneiform died in the first century of the common era, replaced by Aramaic and Greek, and stayed unreadable for eighteen hundred years. Decipherment came in the nineteenth century, starting from the trilingual inscription of Darius on the rock of Behistun, and within a few decades gave the world back the code of Hammurabi, the epic of Gilgamesh and the library of Ashurbanipal.

A foreign name, to an Akkadian scribe, was a sound to be broken into syllables, each written with the sign that had it among its readings. Hammurabi, the king of the law code, appears on the tablets as ha, am, mu, ra, bi, five signs, two of which this table does not carry. That is the shape of what the box above does with a modern name: it cuts the name into syllables of consonant and vowel and writes each with the sign from the table, so that Sama becomes 𒊓𒈠.

The table on this page carries the four vowels and the open syllables of consonant plus vowel that an introductory syllabary teaches, forty signs in all. That is a beginner's subset, not the syllabary: it has no H and no E syllables, so ha is missing along with the rest. Akkadian also had closed syllables, such as am, ur and ik, with signs of their own, and it is with those that a scribe would write most English names; when a name needs a syllable the table lacks, the box says which was left out instead of inventing. The result is an approximation, in the way a transcription of Hammurabi in Latin letters is an approximation, and the caveat block repeats that where it matters.

The vowels and the open syllables. The third column is the sign's name in the standard lists, which for these signs is the syllable itself, written in capitals by convention.

Flashcards for recognising each sign by its syllable, and reading series of three to five signs. It starts with a handful of signs and adds the next sign when the active ones are firm. Progress stays in your browser.