Cuneiform

Tablet with proto-cuneiform pictographic characters (end of 4th millennium BC), Uruk III. This is thought to be a list of slaves' names, the hand in the upper left corner representing the owner.[21]

The cuneiform script was developed from pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th millennium BC, stemming from the near eastern token system used for accounting. The meaning and usage of these tokens is still a matter of debate.[22] These tokens were in use from the 9th millennium BC and remained in occasional use even late in the 2nd millennium BC.[23] Early tokens with pictographic shapes of animals, associated with numbers, were discovered in Tell Brak, and date to the mid-4th millennium BC.[24] It has been suggested that the token shapes were the original basis for some of the Sumerian pictographs.[25]

The Kish tablet, a limestone tablet from Kish with pictographic, early cuneiform, writing, 3500 BC. Possibly the earliest known example of writing. Ashmolean Museum.

Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans roughly the 35th to 32nd centuries BC. The first unequivocal written documents start with the Uruk IV period, from circa 3,300 BC, followed by tablets found in Uruk III, Jemdet Nasr, Early Dynastic I Ur and Susa (in Proto-Elamite) dating to the period until circa 2,900 BC.[26] Originally, pictographs were either drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with a sharpened reed stylus or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge shape of the strokes.[27] Most Proto-Cuneiform records from this period were of an accounting nature. [28] The proto-cuneiform sign list has grown, as new texts are discovered, and shrunk, as variant signs are combined. The current sign list is 705 elements long with 42 being numeric and four considered pre-proto-Elamite.[29][30][31]

Certain signs to indicate names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are known as determinatives and were the Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a guide for the reader. Proper names continued to be usually written in purely "logographic" fashion.

Early pictographic signs in archaic cuneiform (used vertically before c.2300 BC).[32]

The first inscribed tablets were purely pictographic, which makes it technically difficult to know in which language they were written. Different languages have been proposed though usually Sumerian is assumed.[33] Later tablets after circa 2,900 BC start to use syllabic elements, which clearly show a language structure typical of the non-Indo-European agglutinative Sumerian language.[34] The first tablets using syllabic elements date to the Early Dynastic I-II, circa 2,800 BC, and they are agreed to be clearly in Sumerian.[35] This is the time when some pictographic element started to be used for their phonetical value, permitting the recording of abstract ideas or personal names.[35] Many pictographs began to lose their original function, and a given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological. Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. Cuneiform writing proper thus arises from the more primitive system of pictographs at about that time (Early Bronze Age II).

The earliest known Sumerian king, whose name appears on contemporary cuneiform tablets, is Enmebaragesi of Kish (fl. c. 2600 BC).[36] Surviving records became less fragmentary for following reigns and by the end of the pre-Sargonic period it had become standard practice for each major city-state to date documents by year-names, commemorating the exploits of its lugal (king).

• 
  Pre-cuneiform tablet, end of the 4th millennium BC.
• 
  Proto-cuneiform tablet, Jemdet Nasr period, c. 3100–2900 BC.
• 
  Proto-cuneiform tablet, Jemdet Nasr period, c. 3100–2900 BC. A dog on a leash is visible in the background of the lower panel.[37]
• 
  The Blau Monuments combine proto-cuneiform characters and illustrations, 3100–2700 BC. British Museum.

Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script, and, probably, [were] invented under the influence of the latter",[38] and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia".[39][40] There are many instances of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations at the time of the invention of writing, and standard reconstructions of the development of writing generally place the development of the Sumerian proto-cuneiform script before the development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the suggestion the former influenced the latter.[41]

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Alphabetical list of all Unicode cuneiform signs

Sumerian inscription in monumental archaic style, c. 26th century BC

Early cuneiform inscription were made by using a pointed stylus, sometimes called "linear cuneiform".[42] Many of the early dynastic inscriptions, particularly those made on stone, continued to use the linear style as late as circa 2000 BC.[42]

In the mid-3rd millennium BC, a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped cuneiform. This development made writing quicker and easier, especially when writing on soft clay.[42] By adjusting the relative position of the stylus to the tablet, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions.[42] For numbers, a round-tipped stylus was initially used, until the wedge-tipped stylus was generalized.[42] The direction of writing remained to be from top-to-bottom and right-to-left, until the mid-2nd millennium BC.[42] Cuneiform clay tablets could be fired in kilns to bake them hard, and so provide a permanent record, or they could be left moist and recycled if permanence was not needed, so surviving cuneiform tablets have largely been preserved by accident.[42] The clay tablets were intended to be reused again and again.

From linear to angular

Wedge-tipped stylus for clay tablets

The regnal name "Lugal-dalu" in archaic linear script circa 2500 BC, and the same name stylized with standard Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform (𒈗𒁕𒇻).

The script was also widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected. The spoken language included many homophones and near-homophones, and in the beginning, similar-sounding words such as "life" [til] and "arrow" [ti] were written with the same symbol. After the Semites conquered Southern Mesopotamia, some signs gradually changed from being pictograms to syllabograms, most likely to make things clearer in writing. In that way, the sign for the word "arrow" would become the sign for the sound "ti".

Contract for the sale of a field and a house in the wedge-shaped cuneiform adapted for clay tablets, Shuruppak, circa 2600 BC.

Words that sounded alike would have different signs; for instance, the syllable [ɡu] had fourteen different symbols. When the words had a similar meaning but very different sounds they were written with the same symbol. For instance 'tooth' [zu], 'mouth' [ka] and 'voice' [gu] were all written with the symbol for "voice". To be more accurate, scribes started adding to signs or combining two signs to define the meaning. They used either geometrical patterns or another cuneiform sign.

As time went by, the cuneiform got very complex and the distinction between a pictogram and syllabogram became vague. Several symbols had too many meanings to permit clarity. Therefore, symbols were put together to indicate both the sound and the meaning of a compound. The word 'raven' [UGA] had the same logogram as the word 'soap' [NAGA], the name of a city [EREŠ], and the patron goddess of Eresh [NISABA]. Two phonetic complements were used to define the word [u] in front of the symbol and [gu] behind. Finally, the symbol for 'bird' [MUŠEN] was added to ensure proper interpretation.

For unknown reasons, cuneiform pictographs, until then written vertically, were rotated 90° counterclockwise, in effect putting them on their side. This change first occurred slightly before the Akkadian period, at the time of the Uruk ruler Lugalzagesi (r. c. 2294–2270 BC).[43][42] The vertical style remained for monumental purposes on stone stelas until the middle of the 2nd millennium.[42]

Written Sumerian was used as a scribal language until the first century AD. The spoken language died out between about 2100 and 1700 BC.

Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform syllabary
(circa 2200 BC)

Left: Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform syllabary, used by early Akkadian rulers.[44] Right:Seal of Akkadian Empire ruler Naram-Sin (reversed for readability), c. 2250 BC. The name of Naram-Sin (Akkadian: 𒀭𒈾𒊏𒄠𒀭𒂗𒍪: ^DNa-ra-am ^DSîn, Sîn being written 𒂗𒍪 EN.ZU), appears vertically in the right column.[45] British Museum. These are some of the more important signs: the complete Sumero-Akkadian list of characters actually numbers about 600, with many more "values", or pronunciation possibilities.[46]

The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadian Empire from the 23rd century BC (short chronology). The Akkadian language being Semitic, its structure was completely different from Sumerian.[47] There was no way to use the Sumerian writing system as such, and the Akkadians found a practical solution in writing their language phonetically, using the corresponding Sumerian phonetic signs.[47] Still, some of the Sumerian characters were retained for their pictorial value as well: for example the character for "sheep" was retained, but was now pronounced immerū, rather than the Sumerian "udu-meš".[47]

The Semitic languages employed equivalents for many signs that were distorted or abbreviated to represent new values because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by the Sumerians was not intuitive to Semitic speakers.[47] From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (20th century BC), the script evolved to accommodate the various dialects of Akkadian: Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian.[47] At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and the Winkelhaken impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are:

• AŠ (B001, U+12038) 𒀸: horizontal;
• DIŠ (B748, U+12079) 𒁹: vertical;
• GE₂₃, DIŠ tenû (B575, U+12039) 𒀹: downward diagonal;
• GE₂₂ (B647, U+1203A) 𒀺: upward diagonal;
• U (B661, U+1230B) 𒌋: the Winkelhaken.

2nd millennium BC cuneiforms

The Babylonian king Hammurabi still used vertical cuneiform circa 1750 BC.

Babylonian tablets of the time of Hammurabi (circa 1750 BC).

Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, either in inscriptions or on clay tablets, continued to be in use, mainly as a phonetical syllabary, throughout the 2nd millennium BC.

Except for the Winkelhaken, which has no tail, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition.

Signs tilted by about 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. If a sign is modified with additional wedges, this is called gunû or "gunification"; if signs are cross-hatched with additional Winkelhaken, they are called šešig; if signs are modified by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they are called nutillu.

"Typical" signs have about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated, but distinct signs); the ligature KAxGUR₇ consists of 31 strokes.

Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary, together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears a resemblance to Old Japanese, written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters.

Elamite cuneiform was a simplified form of the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, used to write the Elamite language in the area that corresponds to modern Iran. Elamite cuneiform at times competed with other local scripts, Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite. The earliest known Elamite cuneiform text is a treaty between Akkadians and the Elamites that dates back to 2200 BC.[48] However, some believe it might have been in use since 2500 BC.[49] The tablets are poorly preserved, so only limited parts can be read, but it is understood that the text is a treaty between the Akkad king Nāramsîn and Elamite ruler Hita, as indicated by frequent references like "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy is my enemy".[48]

The most famous Elamite scriptures and the ones that ultimately led to its decipherment are the ones found in the trilingual Behistun inscriptions, commissioned by the Achaemenid kings.[50] The inscriptions, similar to that of the Rosetta Stone's, were written in three different writing systems. The first was Old Persian, which was deciphered in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend. The second, Babylonian cuneiform, was deciphered shortly after the Old Persian text. Because Elamite is unlike its neighboring Semitic languages, the script's decipherment was delayed until the 1840s. Even today, lack of sources and comparative materials hinder further research of Elamite.[51]

Neo-Assyrian cuneiform syllabary
(circa 650 BC)

Left: Simplified cuneiform syllabary, in use during the Neo-Assyrian period.[44] The "C" before and after vowels stands for "Consonant". Right: Mesopotamian palace paving slab, c. 600 BC

This "mixed" method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when "purism" was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with a phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of logographic and phonemic writing.

Hittite cuneiform is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of c. 1800 BC to the Hittite language. When the cuneiform script was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings was added to the script, thus the pronunciations of many Hittite words which were conventionally written by logograms are now unknown.

In the Iron Age (c. 10th to 6th centuries BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. The characters remained the same as those of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiforms, but the graphic design of each character relied more heavily on wedges and square angles, making them significantly more abstract. The pronunciation of the characters was replaced by that of the Assyrian dialect of the Akkadian language:

• 
  "Assurbanipal King of Assyria"
  Aššur-bani-habal šar mat Aššur ^KI
  Same characters, in the classical Sumero-Akkadian script of circa 2000 BC (top), and in the Neo-Assyrian script of the Rassam cylinder, 643 BC (bottom).[52]
• 
  The Rassam cylinder with translation of a segment about the Assyrian conquest of Egypt by Ashurbanipal against "Black Pharaoh" Taharqa, 643 BC

From the 6th century, the Akkadian language was marginalized by Aramaic, written in the Aramaean alphabet, but Neo-Assyrian cuneiform remained in use in the literary tradition well into the times of the Parthian Empire (250 BC–226 AD).[53] The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD.[54] The ability to read cuneiform may have persisted until the third century AD.[55][56]

Old Persian cuneiform syllabary
(circa 500 BC)

Old Persian cuneiform syllabary, and the DNa inscription (part II) of Darius the Great (circa 490 BC), in the newly created Old Persian cuneiform.

The complexity of cuneiforms prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian cuneiform was developed with an independent and unrelated set of simple cuneiform characters, by Darius the Great in the 5th century BC. Most scholars consider this writing system to be an independent invention because it has no obvious connections with other writing systems at the time, such as Elamite, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Hittite cuneiforms.[57]

It formed a semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" (𐏎), "king" (𐏋) or "country" (𐏌). This almost purely alphabetical form of the cuneiform script (36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms), was specially designed and used by the early Achaemenid rulers from the 6th century BC down to the 4th century BC.[58]

Because of its simplicity and logical structure, the Old Persian cuneiform script was the first to be deciphered by modern scholars, starting with the accomplishments of Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Various ancient bilingual or trilingual inscriptions then permitted to decipher the other, much more complicated and more ancient scripts, as far back as to the 3rd millennium Sumerian script.

Ugaritic was written using the Ugaritic alphabet, a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad) written using the cuneiform method.

Cuneiform inscriptions recorded by Jean Chardin in Persepolis in 1674 (1711 edition)

Proper attempts at deciphering Old Persian cuneiform started with faithful copies of cuneiform inscriptions, which first became available in 1711 when duplicates of Darius's inscriptions were published by Jean Chardin.[71][72]

Carsten Niebuhr brought very complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to Europe, published in 1767 in Reisebeschreibungen nach Arabien ("Account of travels to Arabia and other surrounding lands").[73][60]^: 9 The set of characters that would later be known as Old Persian cuneiform, was soon perceived as being the simplest of the three types of cuneiform scripts that had been encountered, and because of this was understood as a prime candidate for decipherment (the two other, older and more complicated scripts were Elamite and Babylonian). Niebuhr identified that there were only 42 characters in the simpler category of inscriptions, which he named "Class I", and affirmed that this must therefore be an alphabetic script.[71][74]

At about the same time, Anquetil-Duperron came back from India, where he had learnt Pahlavi and Persian under the Parsis, and published in 1771 a translation of the Zend Avesta, thereby making known Avestan, one of the ancient Iranian languages.[74] With this basis, Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy was able to start the study of Middle Persian in 1792–93, during the French Revolution, and he realized that the inscriptions of Naqsh-e Rostam had a rather stereotyped structure on the model: "Name of the King, the Great King, the King of Iran and Aniran, son of N., the Great King, etc...".[74] He published his results in 1793 in Mémoire sur diverses antiquités de la Perse.[74]

In 1798, Oluf Gerhard Tychsen made the first study of the inscriptions of Persepolis copied by Niebuhr.[74] He discovered that series of characters in the Persian inscriptions were divided from one another by an oblique wedge (𐏐) and that these must be individual words. He also found that a specific group of seven letters (𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹) was recurring in the inscriptions, and that they had a few recurring terminations of three to four letters.[74] However, Tychsen mistakenly attributed the texts to Arsacid kings, and therefore was unable to make further progress.[74]

Friedrich Münter Bishop of Copenhagen improved over the work of Tychsen, and proved that the inscriptions must belong to the age of Cyrus and his successors, which led to the suggestion that the inscriptions were in the Old Persian language and probably mentioned Achaemenid kings.[75][71] He suggested that the long word appearing with high frequency and without any variation towards the beginning of each inscription (𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹) must correspond to the word "King", and that repetitions of this sequence must mean "King of Kings". He correctly guessed that the sequence must be pronounced kh-sha-a-ya-th-i-ya, a word of the same root as the Avestan xšaΘra- and the Sanskrit kṣatra- meaning "power" and "command", and now known to be pronounced xšāyaθiya in Old Persian.[75][76][60]^: 10

• 
  Niebuhr inscription 1, with the suggested words for "King" (𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹) highlighted. Inscription now known to mean "Darius the Great King, King of Kings, King of countries, son of Hystaspes, an Achaemenian, who built this Palace".[77]
• 
  Niebuhr inscription 2, with the suggested words for "King" (𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹) highlighted. Inscription now known to mean "Xerxes the Great King, King of Kings, son of Darius the King, an Achaemenian".[77]

Hypothesis for the sentence structure of Persepolitan inscriptions, by Grotefend (1815).

Relying on deductions only, and without knowing the actual script or language, Grotefend obtained a near-perfect translation of the Xerxes inscription (Niebuhr inscription 2): "Xerxes the strong King, King of Kings, son of Darius the King, ruler of the world" ("Xerxes Rex fortis, Rex regum, Darii Regis Filius, orbis rector", right column). The modern translation is: "Xerxes the Great King, King of Kings, son of Darius the King, an Achaemenian".[77]

By 1802 Georg Friedrich Grotefend conjectured that, based on the known inscriptions of much later rulers (the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings), a king's name is often followed by "great king, king of kings" and the name of the king's father.[78][79] This understanding of the structure of monumental inscriptions in Old Persian was based on the work of Anquetil-Duperron, who had studied Old Persian through the Zoroastrian Avestas in India, and Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, who had decrypted the monumental Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings.[80][81]

Looking at the length of the character sequences in the Niebuhr inscriptions 1 & 2, and comparing with the names and genealogy of the Achaemenid kings as known from the Greeks, also taking into account the fact that the father of one of the rulers in the inscriptions didn't have the attribute "king", he made the correct guess that this could be no other than Darius the Great, his father Hystaspes who was not a king, and his son the famous Xerxes. In Persian history around the time period the inscriptions were expected to be made, there were only two instances where a ruler came to power without being a previous king's son. They were Darius the Great and Cyrus the Great, both of whom became emperor by revolt. The deciding factors between these two choices were the names of their fathers and sons. Darius's father was Hystaspes and his son was Xerxes, while Cyrus' father was Cambyses I and his son was Cambyses II. Within the text, the father and son of the king had different groups of symbols for names so Grotefend assumed that the king must have been Darius.[79]

These connections allowed Grotefend to figure out the cuneiform characters that are part of Darius, Darius's father Hystaspes, and Darius's son Xerxes.[79] He equated the letters 𐎭𐎠𐎼𐎹𐎺𐎢𐏁 with the name d-a-r-h-e-u-sh for Darius, as known from the Greeks.[77][82] This identification was correct, although the actual Persian spelling was da-a-ra-ya-va-u-sha, but this was unknown at the time.[77] Grotefend similarly equated the sequence 𐎧𐏁𐎹𐎠𐎼𐏁𐎠 with kh-sh-h-e-r-sh-e for Xerxes, which again was right, but the actual Old Persian transcription was wsa-sha-ya-a-ra-sha-a.[77] Finally, he matched the sequence of the father who was not a king 𐎻𐎡𐏁𐎫𐎠𐎿𐎱 with Hystaspes, but again with the supposed Persian reading of g-o-sh-t-a-s-p,[82] rather than the actual Old Persian vi-i-sha-ta-a-sa-pa.[77]

By this method, Grotefend had correctly identified each king in the inscriptions, but his identification of the value of individual letters was still quite defective, for want of a better understanding of the Old Persian language itself.[77] Grotefend only identified correctly eight letters among the thirty signs he had collated.[83] However groundbreaking, this inductive method failed to convince academics, and the official recognition of his work was denied for nearly a generation.[79] Although Grotefend's Memoir was presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities on September 4, 1802, the academy refused to publish it; it was subsequently published in Heeren's work in 1815, but was overlooked by most researchers at the time.[84][85]

The quadrilingual hieroglyph-cuneiform "Caylus vase" in the name of Xerxes I confirmed the decipherment of Grotefend once Champollion was able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs.[86]

It was only in 1823 that Grotefend's discovery was confirmed, when the French philologist Champollion, who had just deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, was able to read the Egyptian dedication of a quadrilingual hieroglyph-cuneiform inscription on an alabaster vase in the Cabinet des Médailles, the Caylus vase.[86][87] The Egyptian inscription on the vase was in the name of King Xerxes I, and the orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin, who accompanied Champollion, was able to confirm that the corresponding words in the cuneiform script were indeed the words which Grotefend had identified as meaning "king" and "Xerxes" through guesswork.[86][87] In effect the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs was thus decisive in confirming the first steps of the decipherment of the cuneiform script.[87]

In 1836, the eminent French scholar Eugène Burnouf discovered that the first of the inscriptions published by Niebuhr contained a list of the satrapies of Darius. With this clue in his hand, he identified and published an alphabet of thirty letters, most of which he had correctly deciphered.[60]^: 14[88][89]

A month earlier, a friend and pupil of Burnouf's, Professor Christian Lassen of Bonn, had also published his own work on The Old Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of Persepolis.[89][90] He and Burnouf had been in frequent correspondence, and his claim to have independently detected the names of the satrapies, and thereby to have fixed the values of the Persian characters, was consequently fiercely attacked. According to Sayce, whatever his obligations to Burnouf may have been, Lassen's

...contributions to the decipherment of the inscriptions were numerous and important. He succeeded in fixing the true values of nearly all the letters in the Persian alphabet, in translating the texts, and in proving that the language of them was not Zend, but stood to both Zend and Sanskrit in the relation of a sister.

— Sayce[60]^: 15

Once Old Persian had been fully deciphered, the trilingual Behistun Inscription permitted the decipherment of two other cuneiform scripts: Elamite and Babylonian.

Meanwhile, in 1835 Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company army officer, visited the Behistun Inscriptions in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522–486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone (discovered in 1799) was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822.[91]

Rawlinson successfully completed the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform. In 1837, he finished his copy of the Behistun inscription, and sent a translation of its opening paragraphs to the Royal Asiatic Society. Before his article could be published, however, the works of Lassen and Burnouf reached him, necessitating a revision of his article and the postponement of its publication. Then came other causes of delay. In 1847, the first part of the Rawlinson's Memoir was published; the second part did not appear until 1849.[92][note 2] The task of deciphering Old Persian cuneiform texts was virtually accomplished.[60]^: 17

After translating Old Persian, Rawlinson and, working independently of him, the Irish Assyriologist Edward Hincks, began to decipher the other cuneiform scripts. The decipherment of Old Persian was thus notably instrumental to the decipherment of Elamite and Babylonian, thanks to the trilingual Behistun inscription.

The first known Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual tablet dates from the reign of Rimush. Louvre Museum AO 5477. The top column is in Sumerian, the bottom column is its translation in Akkadian.[93][94]

The decipherment of Babylonian ultimately led to the decipherment of Akkadian, which was a close predecessor of Babylonian. The actual techniques used to decipher the Akkadian language have never been fully published; Hincks described how he sought the proper names already legible in the deciphered Persian while Rawlinson never said anything at all, leading some to speculate that he was secretly copying Hincks.[95][96][97] They were greatly helped by the excavations of the French naturalist Paul Émile Botta and English traveler and diplomat Austen Henry Layard of the city of Nineveh from 1842. Among the treasures uncovered by Layard and his successor Hormuzd Rassam were, in 1849 and 1851, the remains of two libraries, now mixed up, usually called the Library of Ashurbanipal, a royal archive containing tens of thousands of baked clay tablets covered with cuneiform inscriptions.

By 1851, Hincks and Rawlinson could read 200 Akkadian signs. They were soon joined by two other decipherers: young German-born scholar Julius Oppert, and versatile British Orientalist William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1857, the four men met in London and took part in a famous experiment to test the accuracy of their decipherments. Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, gave each of them a copy of a recently discovered inscription from the reign of the Assyrian emperor Tiglath-Pileser I. A jury of experts was impaneled to examine the resulting translations and assess their accuracy. In all essential points, the translations produced by the four scholars were found to be in close agreement with one another. There were, of course, some slight discrepancies. The inexperienced Talbot had made a number of mistakes, and Oppert's translation contained a few doubtful passages which the jury politely ascribed to his unfamiliarity with the English language. But Hincks' and Rawlinson's versions corresponded remarkably closely in many respects. The jury declared itself satisfied, and the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform was adjudged a fait accompli.[98]

Finally, Sumerian, the oldest language with a script, was also deciphered through the analysis of ancient Akkadian-Sumerian dictionaries and bilingual tablets, as Sumerian long remained a literary language in Mesopotamia, which was often re-copied, translated and commented in numerous Babylonian tablets.[99]

In the early days of cuneiform decipherment, the reading of proper names presented the greatest difficulties. However, there is now a better understanding of the principles behind the formation and the pronunciation of the thousands of names found in historical records, business documents, votive inscriptions, literary productions, and legal documents. The primary challenge was posed by the characteristic use of old Sumerian non-phonetic logograms in other languages that had different pronunciations for the same symbols. Until the exact phonetic reading of many names was determined through parallel passages or explanatory lists, scholars remained in doubt or had recourse to conjectural or provisional readings. However, in many cases, there are variant readings, the same name being written phonetically (in whole or in part) in one instance and logographically in another.

Computer-based methods are being developed to digitise tablets and help decipher texts.[100]

The Sumerians used a numerical system based on 1, 10, and 60. The way of writing a number like 70 would be the sign for 60 and the sign for 10 right after.

Cuneiform is occasionally used nowadays as inspiration for logos.

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  Cuneiform ama-gi, literally "return to the mother", loosely translated as "liberty", is the logo of Liberty Fund.[116]
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  The central element of the GigaMesh Software Framework logo is the sign 𒆜 (kaskal) meaning "street" or "road junction", which symbolizes the intersection of the humanities and computer science. The name GigaMesh is an intentional reference to the legendary Gilgamesh from Mesopotamian folklore.